CD Projekt Red is among the most successful video game developers to date, with titles franchises like The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077. Although the company dropped the ball on the latter's release, they have since redeemed themselves and earned hundreds of millions in the process.
Cyberpunk 2077's Success
The initial release of the dystopian sci-fi game was a disaster, to say the least. It was almost unplayable due to all the bugs, and some stores even pulled them from the shelves because of the issues within the game. CDPR tried their best to fix the game, and they have succeeded.
After the game's release in 2020, it has only gone down in sales up to 2021 but saw an increase from 2022 up to 2023, especially when the expansion, Phantom Liberty was announced and released. It was then announced that by 2023's third quarter, the game reached three billion PLN.
Converting that to USD, the cumulative revenue of the game reached around $751,555,500 to date, as reported by Kotaku. That's a lot of dollars for a game that was once regarded as the worst initial release ever made.
It's unknown how much the base game made by itself, seeing as the studio put the earnings for both Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty together. It makes sense, given that the latter was an expansion and not just a DLC.
The studio's earnings for 2022 and 2023 came mostly from the futuristic game, which is mostly because the last The Witcher game was released in 2015. That won't be the case for much longer since CDPR is already working on the next Witcher trilogy, codenamed Polaris.
The Witcher: Project Polaris
Since CD Projekt Red said that the studio is finally finished with Cyberpunk 2077, all its attention and resources are going into its latest project, which is codename Polaris. It is said to be "built on the legacy" of the latest The Witcher game.
The Witcher 4, or whatever CDPR will name it is regarded as the "first game." Furthermore, the studio also said that they "aim to release two more Witcher games after Polaris, creating a new AAA RPG trilogy," as per Games Radar. It does not get clearer than that.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released back in 2015, so fans of the franchise have been anticipating the new game for a while. It goes without saying that the news about an upcoming trilogy, with the first game already in development, is good news.
So far, there still isn't any news about what the fourth game and the first of the trilogy will be about. If we get the same quality that CDPR has provided with the latest Witcher title, then Project Polaris is something to look forward to.
As for Cyberpunk 2077's future, there is already a sequel in the works, although there's no official name for it yet except the codename, which is Project Orion. Since the studio is focusing on The Witcher franchise right now, it might be years before the sequel is released.
