CD Projekt, the Polish company behind the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, has been forced to apologise to customers and seen its share price plummet after criticism that followed the game’s long-awaited premiere.
In the company’s first new release in five years, the game finally went on sale after three delays and amid much hype last Thursday. The premiere gathered over 1 million concurrent players on streaming platform Steam, a new record for a single-player game, but many users criticised glitches and problems with performance.
Gamers playing the last-generation console versions of Cyberpunk 2077 were particularly unhappy. For Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft XBox One the game is currently rated at 2.8 and 3.7 out of 10 respectively on Metacritic, a review aggregator, reports Reuters.
CD Projekt’s shares were hit hard by the disappointing reception, tanking by over 36% from the peak of 464.2 zloty (€105) ahead of the release last Monday to a minimum of 238.5 zloty (€53.80) this morning.
The company responded to the criticism on Monday with an apology, saying it will refund players disappointed with the game’s performance on older consoles and pledging to provide batches of fixes over the coming months.
— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) December 14, 2020
CD Projekt apologised to gamers for “not showing the game” on the problematic consoles before its premiere and thus “not allowing you to make a more informed decision”.
The company promised to “fix bugs and crashes, and improve the overall experience” with the first round of updates already released, and two more large patches of fixes in coming months. It also said that it will honour refunds for customers unwilling to wait for the updates.
Cyberpunk 2077, which features Hollywood star Keanu Reeves, allows players to enter a dystopian future metropolis, where they play a cyborg mercenary, modified by bionic implants and drugs.
The gaming world has been eagerly awaiting the game since its announcement in 2013. One single tweet (“*beep*”) posted in 2018 boosted CD Projekt’s market capitalisation by 0.5 billion zloty. Sales were expected to reach some 24 to 28 million, compared with a total of around 40 million copies of the company’s Witcher trilogy (2007, 2011 and 2015) up to June 2019.
The company said it earned back its development and in-house marketing costs with roughly 8 million preorders, in what was the biggest PC launch in history, reports pcgamer.com. PC preorders accounted for 59% of sales.
Earlier this year CD Projekt, best known for its Witcher games series, overtook Poland’s largest bank PKO BP to become the highest valued company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (GPW).
In October it dropped to second place following the stock market debut of Allegro, Poland’s e-commerce giant, and now has again fallen to fourth, below PKO BP and KGHM, Poland’s state-owned mining company.
Poland has become a leading video games exporter in past years thanks to its cash cows like CD Projekt. The company’s stocks have risen by 21,000% over the past decade, marking the highest increase of any European company in the Stoxx Europe 600 index.
Main image credit: Cyberpunk 2077/Twitter
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
