CD Projekt RED is still feeling the effects of the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077. Just before the game’s release, the company’s stock was worth around zł400 ($85) a share on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Since then, it’s dropped to zł93.81 ($19.92). So while the financial market worldwide has been hit hard, CD Projekt RED is an outlier with its precipitous fall in value.
CD Projekt RED is worth a quarter of its value before the launch of Cyberpunk 2077
According to Business Insider Poland, CD Projekt RED’s value has dropped by 75% since the launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
This is no big surprise since the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 is in the running for the most disastrous event in the history of video gaming. After building a maddening amount of hype, CD Projekt RED released a game that was nigh unplayable on last-gen consoles. Even on platforms with decent performance, it was full of bugs and evidence of a rushed development process.
The PS4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 was so bad that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store for six months. Despite selling over 18 million copies of the game, CD Projekt RED has lost the sterling reputation it earned from developing The Witcher 3. That number also falls short of the 25-30 million sales analysts predicted for the game in its first year.
Financially, CD Projekt RED is now at the same point that it was after the launch of The Witcher 3. So, where does it go next? DLC for Cyberpunk 2077 is on the table, but the game still has its issues. For example, there’s still not a functional police system. The studio has The Witcher 4 in pre-production, but with its reputation shot, it will take something special to get gamers back on board.
In other news, God of War Ragnarok will feature all nine realms, and Sony continues its esports expansion with Repeat.gg acquisition.
