After ransomware-induced delays, CD Projekt Red finally held their annual investor meeting. And while some of the details were naturally focused on the impact of Cyberpunk 2077‘s console aftermath, the studio also revealed figures showing that despite everything, Cyberpunk 2077 sold really, really well in Australia.
Australia doesn’t typically make up an enormous part of any foreign company’s revenue. So it’s always fascinating to see CD Projekt Red break Australia out separately from the rest of Asia, instead of a consolidated APAC/SEA group. And according to the Polish group, their sales in Australia more than tripled in 2020, generating 1.68 per cent of all of CD Projekt’s sales revenue.
CD Projekt report their figures in the millions, so their total 2,138,875 is actually 2,138 billion PLN, or about $730 million Australian. As for Australia, the report says the company made just under 36 million PLN, which is around $12.29 million in Australia. But what’s really interesting is just how much Cyberpunk 2077 sold in Australia alone. If you dig into their 150-page annual report, you’ll see a breakdown of all Cyberpunk purchases by platform and by region:
Given that the company reiterated that 13.7 million copies of Cyberpunk 2077 were sold throughout 2020 alone, that would mean around 424,700 copies of Cyberpunk were sold in Australia alone. And this is just factoring in the 2020 calendar year, so it wouldn’t count anyone who’s picked up the game since January. It’s also possible that the figure could be fractionally higher, if some people bought the game through a VPN or other means that would have masked their country of origin.
Now the first lot of revenue for Australia doesn’t just include Cyberpunk: it also incorporates sales of The Witcher 3, which is still doing well here. (Australia made up 2.4 per cent of all Witcher 3 sales last year, according to CD Projekt.) So with all of that combined, plus whatever Aussies spent on GOG, Gwent and older CD Projekt titles, it would mean the Polish studio made roughly the same amount of money in Australia as Detective Pikachu and a little bit less than Sonic The Hedgehog.
Which is astonishing given that, overwhelmingly, Australians bought more PS4’s than they did Xboxes, have bought more PS5’s than they have Xbox Series X and S consoles, and you still can’t buy Cyberpunk 2077 on the Sony platform.
The only breakdown here is that CD Projekt didn’t provide figures on the PC / Xbox / PlayStation breakdown for the region, although that would be super cool to see. Either way, it should give everyone complete clarity about the situation surrounding Cyberpunk 2077: the game was a massive success, debacles aside. And as it continues to inch closer and closer towards being fully “fixed”, there is tens millions of sales worth of untapped potential.
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