Cyberpunk 2077 Has Already Recouped Its Development Costs

Cyberpunk 2077 certainly might not in the state everyone wanted, but the game has already made the last 8 years of development costs back regardless.

CD Projekt announced last last week that preorders for Cyberpunk 2077 were already at ecstatic levels — 8 million copies, with 76 percent of those digitally and more than half of those copies preordered for PC. That figure could still change wildly when refunds are factored in, but nonetheless it adds some tangible data towards the level of excitement behind the sci-fi dystopian RPG.

And over the weekend, CD Projekt provided investors with a little more assurance. After a week that saw the company’s stock price fall by almost 25 percent, it makes sense for management to put out some good news about the game — and there’s nothing shareholders like hearing more than the news that eight years of development costs were recouped in a single day:

The Management Board of CD PROJEKT S.A. with a registered office in Warsaw (hereinafter referred to as “the Company”) hereby announces that the estimated licensing royalties receivable by the Company in association with pre-order sales of Cyberpunk 2077 across all of its digital distribution channels have exceeded the sum of the following:

– total development expenditures related to the game, and

– the game’s marketing and promotional costs borne by the Company – either already incurred or anticipated for the remainder of 2020.

The Management Board has decided to disclose the above information in the form of a current report due to its potential impact on investment-related decisions.

To help you parse the jargon a little, what CD Projekt are saying is that the amount of preorders alone were enough to pay back all development and marketing costs. Not what has been spent already, but what CD Projekt has “anticipated for the remainder of 2020”.

And that doesn’t include the amount of people who held off on preordering, and then bought from day 1 onwards.

CD Projekt Red’s last quarterly statement was in late November, so there won’t be a full breakdown of Cyberpunk 2077‘s financial success — or expected expenditure going forward — until sometime in February.

Very few games dream of spending the amount of money that Cyberpunk 2077 cost in development, let alone remaking it all back so inordinately quickly. But it’s also a highlight of just how crucial the game is to CD Projekt as a studio — and a reminder of how much the studio still has to gain when it comes to the upcoming multiplayer mode, which we’re not likely to see for at least a couple of years. Although after last week’s launch, maybe a couple of years is a generous estimate.