This just in: good games become great and make a boatload of money when you invest in fixing and releasing them in a relatively complete state.
Around the same time it revealed how many copies Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty had sold a week after it became available, CD Projekt RED also confirmed that it sold over 100 million copies of its games. It’s amazing considering a huge chunk of these sales are from Cyberpunk 2077 (25 million) and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (50 million).
However, in a report presented to the company’s investors, CD Projekt Group Chief Financial Officer Piotr Nielubowicz was completely transparent about what it took to get to this point.
CD PROJEKT RED — Number of Games Sold pic.twitter.com/1GB7hBweV9
— CD PROJEKT IR (@CDPROJEKTRED_IR) October 5, 2023
According to Nielubowicz, the Polish company spent 50 million Polish zloty (roughly $103 million) to re-release it on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X and roll out its only premium expansion. Keep in mind that this only includes the 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty. This doesn’t include the base cost of Cyberpunk 2077, which was reportedly $174 million spread across a decade of development. Finally, when you factor in the amount it cost CDPR to fix the game for two years after it came out and rehabilitate its reputation, which saw its share prices tank, the true cost could range over half a billion.
This is a lot of money even in a day and age when AAA games could reportedly cost developers over a billion to make, market, and release. It’s also emblematic of a worrying trend as games become more and more expensive to develop, forcing the developers to stick titles that are guaranteed to sell well, resulting in fewer experimentations and the lack of opportunities to explore new properties.
It remains to be seen just how much more money CD Projekt RED will spend on the next Witcher game and the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. We can only guess that the figure will balloon as it will have to use Unreal Engine 5 over REDengine. Although the studio insists that this won’t require the company to relearn how to build games from the ground up, it’s still a monumental shift. Not to mention, both games will have to clear a relatively high bar after what its most recent predecessors just did.
Combined, both games could cost CD Projekt RED close to a billion to make, perhaps even more including marketing costs, which guarantees the company won’t leave anything to chance.
For now, CD Projekt RED can rest easy knowing that Cyberpunk 2077 and its new expansion will sell well. In the same report, CDPR claims that it saw a “surge” in sales after the release of update 2.0 and that it’s “confident” both the base game its DLC will be “big sellers” for the company, similar to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its DLCs.
Ultimately, CDPR proves you can salvage your game and your reputation as video game developers if you’re willing to spend enough money on it.
If nothing else, this should be good news for a company like Blizzard Entertainment as it tries to do what CDPR did with Cyberpunk 2077 with Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2, which are currently not doing well.
