It’s hard to imagine now, but Cyberpunk 2077 was an unmitigated disaster when it launched back in 2020. The PC version wasn’t too bad, relatively speaking, but the console version was so wretched that Sony literally kicked it off the PlayStation Store. It was so far gone that several months after launch, with CD Projekt just beginning to start the work of cleaning up the mess it made, we recommended that it just fix the bugs and move on. Whoops.
I mention all this because that was then and this is now, and now Cyberpunk 2077—which these days sits comfortably with a “very positive” user rating on Steam—has surpassed 40 million copies sold.
“40 million copies sold shows the incredible, lasting strength of Cyberpunk 2077 and is a testament to what CD Projekt does best—creating high-quality, immersive stories that keep players returning for years,” co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said. “It’s a great foundation for our upcoming projects in this universe, including the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 anime arriving this fall,”
It’s a fairly typical corpo rah-rah statement, but you gotta hand it to him: It’s also true. In an industry where companies typically opt to cut their losses when a new game faceplants off the starting line, CD Projekt kept hammering on it, ultimately turning Cyberpunk 2077 into a genuinely outstanding game and then capping it off with a brilliantly devastating expansion. More than once we declared the game’s redemption arc complete, but CD Projekt kept going—maybe in part because studio leadership still doesn’t entirely believe it.