CD Projekt RED’s latest AAA outing fell flat on its face after launching, crushed by the weight of expectations after a decade of hype. But, time heals all things. While no one has forgotten about Cyberpunk 2077’s tumultuous earlier period, CDPR worked to earn back all of our trust.
Eventually, things started to change. Then, by the time Cyberpunk: Edgerunners premiered on Netflix, the game was finally ready to capitalize on its second wind. Since then, it has gone nowhere else but up. Now, CDPR’s efforts are finally paying off.
According to the company’s joint-CEO, Phantom Liberty’s “attach rate” was on par with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s two expansive DLCs: Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.
Although Michal Nowakowski didn’t reveal an exact figure, he did mention that its attach rate – the percentage of people who bought the base game and the DLC – was somewhere between 22% and 24%. This means nearly one out of four people who played Cyberpunk 2077 bought Phantom Liberty.
TBH, the decision to go through with the expansion so long after launch of the single player game was a bit counterintuitive. But what happened is a proof to us that solid content that people are happy with is the way to go. (2/2)
— Michał Nowakowski (@michalnowakow) January 8, 2024
Nowakowski ended his statement by saying that “solid content that people are happy with is the way to go,” which is a sentiment that CDPR wishes that it had followed a while back.
Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption arc has been nothing short of amazing and CDPR deserves kudos for all its efforts. Naysayers may claim that CDPR should’ve never launched the game in the state that it did in the first place, but there’s a lot more to be said about owning up to your mistakes and correcting them.
Video game history is full of examples of video game developers who went up and left their games mid-cycle, either by closing them down or just abandoning them entirely after it flopped immediately when it came out.
Of course, it certainly didn’t hurt that the core aspect of Cyberpunk 2077 – the promise of a bustling neon-lit futuristic cyberpunk setting will always get audiences hooked – wasn’t bad.
Between Edgerunner’s release on Netflix to the 1.5 update and eventually, the next-gen-exclusive improvements, which was capped off by Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk 2077 eventually overcame all the horror stories. The power of the word of mouth then took care of everything as the narrative went from “avoid Cyberpunk 2077 at all costs” to “Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best games of the current generation.”
To top it all off, the Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition came out to end 2023, with the perfect discount for the holiday season to boot.
While there are wrong lessons to be picked up from Cyberpunk 2077’s success story – like launching a game in a bad state on purpose only to fix it later – the rest of the industry will do well to remember what Nowakowski said, which, in a nutshell, is just a variation of the age-old saying, “a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
CDPR is currently neck deep on several projects at the moment, including the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, work on the follow-up isn’t expected to start until after it’s wrapped up The Witcher 4, which won’t be anytime soon.
