Looking at the recently announced financial data CD Projekt REDThe very impressive fact that the team revealed spent more than $120 million For rehabilitating the game and reputation The entire company in an overall relaunch, including the launch of the new Phantom Liberty expansion.
As previously reported, the expansion alone required $63 million to develop, plus another $21 million for marketing; this meant a total of $84 million for expansion alone; which had already sold 3 million copies at launch, but it was an operation gone too far. beyond the simple release of a DLC.
After that catastrophic launch In the wake of Cyberpunk 2077, not only one of the most exciting projects in the history of video games, but CD Projekt RED’s entire reputation was at stake. The disastrous state of the versions for previous generation consoles and the numerous technical problems and shortcomings that characterized the game in general, compared to what was promised, led to a controversial launch.
In as little as a few days, you will face both the chaos of refund requests and the lifting The entire game was downloaded from the PlayStation Store, and Sony was a bit surprised by the refund policy that the Polish team immediately implemented.
A costly salvation
From then on it was a matter of rebuilding, starting from the rubble. update after the update. It has not been determined exactly how much this operation cost, but it exceeded $120 million, including Phantom Liberty, in the final stage alone.
In fact, approximately 40 million dollars spent should be added to the 84 million dollars in question. just to fund the 2.0 update served as a general reboot of the game. If you consider that the development of Cyberpunk 2077 cost about $ 174 million and another $ 142 million spent on marketing, it is easy to understand that even sales of more than 25 million copies does not mean that it managed to make huge profits.
If nothing else, the relaunch operation was definitely a success, which was also good for the reputation of the entire CD Projekt RED.