The word “billion” is thrown so often in the entertainment industry that you’d believe every successful blockbuster film and best-selling video game can make that amount throughout their lifetime. But, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Case in point, Cyberpunk 2077.
CD Projekt RED‘s latest earnings report confirmed how much money it has made off of Cyberpunk 2077 in four years: $3 billion zloty (or roughly $752 million).
While it isn’t a paltry sum, you’d expect it to be higher for a game that spent roughly a decade in development and cost more than $130 million to rehabilitate following its failed launch.
— CD PROJEKT IR (@CDPROJEKTRED_IR) March 28, 2024
To put this into context, 2023’s best-selling video game, Hogwarts Legacy, made $850 million in two weeks and has likely already passed more than a billion in revenue now. A year before, 2022’s best-selling game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, had crossed the billion-dollar mark in ten days following a record-setting launch weekend. Finally, one of the fastest-selling video games of all time, Grand Theft Auto 5, made a billion in three days and its sequel, Grand Theft Auto 6, is expected to make as much just as fast if not less time.
Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden certainly had a point when he recently said that developers need to start thinking about downsizing the scale of their projects without compromising its ambition so that they can release more games in less time.
Nevertheless, CDPR’s success with turning Cyberpunk 2077 around, punctuated by the award-winning expansion, Phantom Liberty, has at least made it all worth the effort.
A sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 is currently in early development but it has ways to go. The Polish studio is currently all-in on The Witcher 4, where two-thirds of the company’s workforce is working on the game.
