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| Image: CD Projekt Red |
Despite the launch failure and refunds, Cyberpunk 2077 sold more than 13 million copies
- Tech Backbone
According to the developer's parent corporation, CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk 2077 has now sold over 13 million copies since its launch two weeks ago.
The sales milestone, as revealed in CD Projekt S.A.'s investor note. It's a remarkable one on Tuesday, given that it allows for some digital and physical refunds arising from the sloppy launch of the title. The metric counts sales from the release of the game on December 10th to December 20th, says the note. Bloomberg estimates that it's only half of the 12-month revenue prediction analysts expected for the game soon after launch, but before digital storefronts said they will start taking refunds.
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best-selling games of the year with 13 million units sold, but it also lags well behind the top 50 best-selling games of all time and the last major success of CD Projekt Red, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which has sold more than 28 million copies across all platforms. Nevertheless, few games have sold more than 10 million units and you only need to sell more than 19 million copies to get into the top 50 of all time (to beat out NES classic Super Mario Bros. 3).
Once the studio patches more of the glitches and the game is rereleased on the PlayStation Store, it is possible that Cyberpunk 2077 sales will skyrocket even higher. Last week, Sony pulled the game and started to process digital refunds for unsatisfied customers.
CD Projekt Red says that it has sold 13 million copies of Cyberpunk through digital and physical distribution channels as of December 20.
This number factors in refunds processed by this point at both retail / digital.
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) December 22, 2020
The game had 8m pre-orders prior to launch. pic.twitter.com/ZIg4j9nDeB
The commercial success of the role-playing game is in sharp contrast to its cultural image as a multi-faceted disaster, a fact that has only escalated CD Projekt Red criticism and has also increased the prospect of a class action lawsuit. It is also a shocking criticism of the modern video game industry and its promotion and preorder paradigm that anything can be that effective despite also being deemed a highly flawed commodity.
Since the company promised that the game would work well on consoles of the present generation, it was able to accumulate more than 8 million preorders for Cyberpunk 2077, essentially covering the expense of the game's almost decade-long production period in single-day sales. Meanwhile, according to a storey by The New York Times, the studio made attempts to reportedly conceal the game's success on certain systems from media outlets ahead of time.
