CD Projekt pops the cork on Cyberpunk's big numbers as it revels in the post-expansion victory lap
Clearly, we need to put a big celebrity face in the next Witcher game. I nominate David Lynch.
CD Projekt is taking a victory lap in the release afterglow of Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty DLC, and the newest stage of it means showing off every big number the company can find. With the CDP Investor Day behind us, CDP has thrown together a bunch of different graphics to brag about the number of people that have bought Cyberpunk and its expansion, including a breakdown by platform and region.
The deliciously round headline number is 25 million, which CDP says is the sum total number of people that have bought Cyberpunk—the base game, that is—-since it careened onto consoles and PC in 2020. That's a big number (and yes, insightful journalism like that statement is why they pay me the big bucks), and means ol' Cyberpunk has sold exactly half the number of copies that The Witcher 3 has despite only having been out for less than half the time. In fact, it took The Witcher 3 four and a half years to sell as many copies as Cyberpunk has sold in two years and 10 months, CDP CEO Adam Kiciński told investors.
Welcome to Night City!Current population: over 25 millionsArasaka stands no chance.Thank you all for your support! 💛 pic.twitter.com/clg6QrnneDOctober 5, 2023
Phantom Liberty, meanwhile, has sold 3 million copies in the time it's been available for pre-order and purchase, which the company must be pretty chuffed with. While I want to attribute that to the three original Idris Elba tracks it features, I imagine it probably has more to do with the DLC's quality (it really is quite good) and the 'Cyberpunk is finally properly good now' narrative that's developed around it and the game's 2.0 patch. I mean, that's certainly why I was so keen to dive in.
Aside from those dizzying digits, CDP also provided a breakdown of who's buying Phantom Liberty and where they're doing it. There's a regional breakdown—unsurprisingly, the vast majority of sales have been concentrated in North America, Europe, and Asia—but also a breakdown by platform. 33% of DLC sales happened on console—13% on Xbox and 20% on PS5, despite Cyberpunk's rocky relationship with Sony's platform—but PC players are the most committed deckheads of all. 68% of Phantom Liberty buys happened round our ends (only 10% of those sales happened on CDP's own GOG platform, though, which evoked something of a twinge of sympathy from me).
Oh, also, there's another boggling number: CDP says it's sold 100,000,000 games—that's everything it's made, Witcher stuff included—across its lifetime.
So all in all, and you might not be shocked to hear this, people seem to be quite like Cyberpunk and its Idris-infused expansion in the year of our Lord 2023, or they're buying it at the very least. Three years after it plunged into the chasm between our expectations and the game's reality, it seems like Cyberpunk might finally have clambered out of that pit. Here's hoping the sequel manages to just be great from the start.
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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.
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