Highlights
- At the end of Q1 2021, CD Projekt held PLN 1.9B ($488.7M) in cash, bank deposits and treasury bonds, with more than PLN 500M of it earmarked for a dividend.
- CD Projekt's disclosed budget for Phantom Liberty was PLN 370M ($94.7M) across production and marketing, covering the expansion but not the full cost of repairing the base game.
- Revenue from CD Projekt's own Cyberpunk projects was PLN 268.6M ($68.76M) in H1 2026, down only 4% compared with the first half of 2025, which included the Switch 2 launch.
On Dec 11, 2020, a day after Cyberpunk 2077 launched, CD Projekt told investors that the royalties it estimated from digital preorders already exceeded the game’s total development costs and its marketing costs incurred or anticipated for 2020. Six days later, Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store and began refunding buyers.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 premieres on Oct 20, nearly six years later, as the latest attempt to pull players back to Night City. A game that covered its costs on paper and failed its buyers within a week is still being updated and sold. What let this company keep investing when other rebuilding efforts stopped?
The Launch Already Covered its Costs
Launch day was the first chance to see the finished game on a seven-year-old PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, and the 91 Metascore it launched with came from PC reviews. After three hours on a base PS4, Eurogamer's Digital Foundry found the game dropping to 15 frames per second in places and running at roughly 720p, with far fewer pedestrians and cars than the PC version. Players on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One said the game often froze, blurred character faces, and took too long to load.
CD Projekt apologized on Dec 14 for not showing the game on base last-generation consoles before launch, which it said had left buyers unable to make a more informed decision about their purchase. It also admitted it should have paid more attention to how the game played on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It promised another round of fixes within a week and two large patches, in January and February of 2021, to bring those versions closer to the PC experience. Players who did not want wish to wait could ask for a refund.
On Dec 17, Sony said it would refund in full anyone who had bought the game through the PlayStation Store, and it took the game off the store "until further notice." The game stayed on sale on Xbox, but on Dec 18 Microsoft widened the refund policy to anyone who had bought the game digitally from the Microsoft Store "until further notice." That day CD Projekt's shares fell as much as 20%, and the company lost nearly $7B in market value over the week.
The Dec 11 figure was an estimate. Royalties receivable are what digital platforms still owe a publisher, so it is money owed that CD Projekt had not yet collected. By the end of the first quarter of 2021, the company held PLN 1.9B ($486M) in cash, bank deposits and treasury bonds, with more than PLN 500M of it earmarked for a dividend.
CD Projekt had also offered refunds of its own and promised fixes over the following weeks and months. The commitments were its own to make: it developed and published Cyberpunk 2077 itself, so no outside publisher had to approve more money. Its March 2021 strategy named two major franchises, Cyberpunk and The Witcher, as the base for what came next. Treating one of them as a write-off would have meant rewriting that plan, a cost on top of the lost sales of a single release.
Anthem's Rebuild Lost its Place
CD Projekt published its commitment to improve Cyberpunk 2077 on Jan 13, 2021. Six weeks later, on Feb 24, BioWare announced the cancellation of Anthem Next, its effort to rebuild its online game.
In a May 2020 update, Christian Dailey, then studio director of BioWare Austin, described an "incubation" team of about 30 people prototyping fixes for the areas where Anthem had fallen short. The February 2021 cancellation post said work on a more fundamental restructure of the game began toward the end of 2019.
In the cancellation post, Dailey pointed to the pandemic. Working from home had affected productivity and not everything the studio had planned before COVID-19 could be done without straining its teams unduly. BioWare needed to focus on the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect, he said, while continuing to update Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Anthem live service would keep running as it was.
The recovery for a released game has to compete for finite people and time with every other project at the studio. EA’s ability to spend more did not guarantee it would commit those resources to Anthem. By BioWare's own account, Anthem Next gave way to the studio's other games. Anthem continued to run until servers closed on January 12, 2026.
Anthem was an online live-service game, which needs a healthy player population and continuing operations to be worth returning to years later. Cyberpunk 2077 is a single-player game that can be bought and played at any point with no one else online, which shapes the sales tail and how realistic it is to win players back after a long gap.
What the Repair Changed
The recovery involved fixing bugs in the game people had already bought, building versions for more hardware, and developing a paid expansion. CD Projekt disclosed the budget for that expansion, Phantom Liberty, as PLN 275M in direct production expenditure and PLN 95M ($24.4M) in marketing, PLN 370M ($94.7M) in all. That only covers the expansion, not what the company spent repairing the base game. Its H1 2026 report still recognizes enhancement and update costs associated primarily with Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty.
In a September reflection on the expansion's third anniversary, Phantom Liberty quest director Paweł Sasko described the base game's production as close to a waterfall model, with work passing between departments and decisions gathering around leads and directors, as GamingBolt reported. For the expansion, the studio moved to multidisciplinary "pods" that put designers, writers, cinematics, art, audio, and QA on the same piece of content together. It took a long time to learn, Sasko said, "but once it started clicking, I could feel the difference."
Players on current hardware saw the difference in Update 2.0, released on Sep 21, 2023. It rebuilt the police system so that officers patrol Night City and chase on foot or in vehicles, with the response depending on the player's wanted level. It overhauled the perk trees, cutting the number of perks so that each changes play more, and refunded the points players had already spent. It reworked cyberware, so that armor now comes mainly from implants and the new capacity limit governs how many a body can carry. CD Projekt recommended starting a new playthrough to get the full effect. The update went to the base game on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S at no charge. Phantom Liberty, the paid expansion, followed five days later.
Revenue from CD Projekt's own Cyberpunk projects was PLN 268.6M ($69M) in H1 2026, down only 4% compared with the first half of 2025, which included the Switch 2 launch. Licensing income is reported on a separate line, while revenue recognized for the game's place in Xbox Game Pass counts here. As of July 3, CD Projekt counted more than 40M copies of the base game, and as of Sep 2, more than 15M copies of Phantom Liberty, in each case counting copies sold separately and in the Ultimate Edition bundle.
Edgerunners Gave the Repaired Game an Audience
In September 2022, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners released on Netflix and CD Projekt shipped Update 1.6, which it called the Edgerunners Update. The game had been through nearly two years of repair by then, so the renewed attention landed on a better product than the one that launched.
On the H1 2026 earnings call, management credited the first series with a visible spike in game sales. VGC reported at the time that the September 2022 jump in player numbers coincided with Update 1.6, a half-price Steam discount and the series' release. Chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said on the third-quarter call that the series had reached Netflix's top 10 lists in 19 countries and that it and the update together had a visible effect on unit sales.
The anime was already in production before the game shipped. CD Projekt announced it in June 2020 with Studio Trigger and Netflix, and said the team had been working on it since 2018. Now Edgerunners 2 is meant to re-engage audiences and bring them back to Night City.
A Recovery Became Lifecycle Management
Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski used the phrase "deliberate lifecycle management" when he spoke to analysts on the H1 earnings call. He described it as platform expansion, broader player reach, and continuous support for the game itself, and cited one result: the peak concurrent player count on Steam topped 100K in the first week of July, the highest since October 2023. For Cyberpunk 2077, the broader distribution has included a Switch 2 version and an addition to Xbox Game Pass.
Nowakowski made a related point to The Game Business's Christopher Dring in a September interview: CD Projekt deliberately creates recurring moments around its older single-player games.
On Sep 14, 2026, CD Projekt announced plans to bring the base game, Phantom Liberty, and the Ultimate Edition to Battle.net later this year. An Overwatch collaboration built around the anime follows in 2027. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 on Oct 20 is another of those planned moments. Improving a damaged product and marketing a successful catalogue title can overlap for years.
The Successes Do Not Establish a Formula
Hello Games, the independent studio behind No Man’s Sky, kept expanding the game with free updates. Founder Sean Murray told Game Informer that owning its tech and engine let the studio keep changing the game. He would love to call the effort altruism, he said, but the studio would not be pouring so much into the game if nobody were playing it. Murray added that the sales of the game following the 2018 Next update had reached the kind of numbers a AAA game would be happy with at launch, two years after the game's release.
Independence is not a precondition either. Square Enix funded the rebuild of Final Fantasy XIV, which producer and director Naoki Yoshida described in a GDC talk, and the relaunched game succeeded in 2013.
The Launch Still Happened
The people hit hardest at launch were on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. CD Projekt's support page says the company believed the game was "in a good place" on those consoles and that it was time to look forward. After Patch 1.6, the Edgerunners Update, all new content and improvements would be made exclusively for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The company also said the scope of Phantom Liberty made a previous-generation version technologically challenging without compromising the experience. Update 2.0 and the expansion followed on PC and current-generation consoles only.
In the September interview with Dring, Nowakowski called the decision to release the game in Dec 2020 wrong and said investors had not forced it. The same control that let CD Projekt authorize years of repair left the decision to ship with its own management.
In his reflection on Phantom Liberty’s third anniversary, Sasko said that he does not think the expansion erases the launch of the base game and would not want the studio's story told that way.
