Despite moves by other publishers to jack up the price of their Xbox Series X and PS5 versions, CD Projekt Red has announced that it won’t be doing the same with Cyberpunk 2077.
CD Projekt Red confirmed the pricing in a Q&A session following the release of their half-year 2020 financial results. The session also saw the announcement of The Witcher 3‘s PS5 and Xbox Series X version — which will be released to current owners as a free upgrade — and new AR game The Witcher: Monster Slayer, which has already been soft-launched in New Zealand.
Naturally, Cyberpunk 2077 was a key focus of the investor questions. The studio spoke positively about the sci-fi RPG’s optimisations, but rebuffed expectations that a PS5/Xbox Series X release of Cyberpunk 2077 would be sold at a premium:
“When it comes to USD, we launched our preorders at $US60 and of course we’re going to keep that price for the consumers,” Michał Nowakowski, CD Projekt’s SVP of business development, said. “We’re not going to change it at the last minute to $US70. So just to confirm – these prices are out in the market anyway; you can check them on various sites: $US59.99 and €69.99 is what we’re going for.”
It’s also fairly obvious, but the studio confirmed that PC users would also be getting a free patch updating the game’s visuals post-release. “On PC the situation is a little bit different because there’s no actual switch between platforms or anything of the kind, like with consoles, but there will be a patch adding visual quality and a few extra features and of course we’re not going to charge people for a patch – it’s something they’re going to download and it will upgrade their game; upgrade their experience – but we’re not going to ask them for extra money,” Nowakowski said.
“If you have your game on PC, you’ll just download an update – and the game will continue to cost what it currently does on the PC market. We consider it an upgrade of the currently existing game,” he added.
Cyberpunk 2077 is currently selling for around $69 to $79 in Australia, and CD Projekt Red’s comments mean we should expect the game to remain at that price throughout next year and whenever the Game of the Year/Complete Edition is released.
The company is betting on a huge marketing push — supposedly three times the size of the investment in The Witcher 3‘s marketing — to help drive sales, although they noted that the company’s marketing is “somewhat dynamic” and linked to expected revenue:
We do not reveal the marketing budget for [Cyberpunk 2077] yet but the scope of the campaign is supposed to be at least 3 times bigger than what we had for The Witcher 3. I would also like to underline that the marketing budget for[Cyberpunk 2077] is somewhat dynamic. We try to spend a certain percentage of expected revenues, so if the expected revenues increase, the marketing budget follows accordingly. Therefore, we try not to announce it beforehand as we know the final amount will depend on the final expectations from our distributors and market analysts, and may change prior to release of the game.
CD Projekt Red added that they were “in a better position than we were with The Witcher 3” in regards to pre-orders, but they refused to outline precisely what that meant.
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