Cyberpunk 2077’s extremely acclaimed and big growth, Phantom Liberty, nearly seems like its personal recreation. That’s most likely as a result of the builders behind the growth spent over $60 million on growing Phantom Liberty and $21 million on advertising it, bringing the whole price of manufacturing the DLC to about half of what it price to develop the complete Cyberpunk 2077 base recreation. And Cyberpunk’s prices rise much more if you issue within the fortune CD Projekt Crimson spent simply plugging up the unique launch’s worst issues after its disastrous launch.
After launching in a reasonably terrible state in 2020, CDProjeckt Crimson’s huge open-world RPG Cyberpunk 2077 has obtained quite a few updates, bug fixes, and even a preferred Netflix anime. All of this helped the futuristic RPG develop into extra standard than ever. And whereas some say the sport’s core issues can’t be mounted, CDPR hasn’t given up on Cyberpunk 2077. The RPG’s solely deliberate DLC, Phantom Liberty (and the free 2.0 replace) launched on September 26 to rave evaluations, and followers declaring the sport “saved.” However constructing one thing like Phantom Liberty isn’t low cost.
On October 5, throughout an investor’s presentation, CDPR revealed the whole funds for Phantom Liberty. Its prices have been cut up between zł275 million on “direct manufacturing expenditures” and one other zł95 million on “advertising marketing campaign prices.” If we do some changing, that equals out to only about $63 million and $21 million in USD, respectively, or roughly $84 million complete.
As some extent of comparability, it reportedly price $174 million to develop Cyberpunk 2077. That quantity will get ever bigger if you issue within the $142 million CDPR spent on advertising the dystopian RPG. these numbers, it’s nearly spectacular how little cash CDPR spent on advertising the brand new DLC in comparison with the primary recreation.
Regardless of the way you slice it, spending practically $85 million on growing and advertising a single growth is wild and an indication of simply how costly recreation improvement is as of late. It’s additionally an incredible instance of how huge, costly video games aren’t allowed to be flops.
Cyberpunk 2077 needed to be a beloved hit, irrespective of the associated fee
One other attention-grabbing quantity revealed in the course of the presentation is that CDPR spent zł178 million or about $40 million USD on bringing the sport to next-gen consoles and constructing the sweeping 2.0 replace. Add that quantity to the above Phantom Liberty figures and you may feasibly declare CDPR spent nearly $125 million on fixing Cyberpunk 2077’s picture and saving its fame.
Nevertheless, based mostly on how well Cyberpunk 2077 and its new expansion are selling after the replace—CDPR claims there was a “surge” of gross sales following replace 2.0—the corporate is probably going going to wind up making some huge cash off the sport. CDPR identified in the course of the investor presentation that it’s “assured” that the DLC and its foremost recreation will likely be “huge sellers” for a very long time, pointing towards the continued gross sales of The Witcher 3 and its DLC years after launch.
With the event of the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel beginning and information of a live-action spin-off within the works, it is smart that CDPR can be prepared to speculate a lot cash into ensuring Cyberpunk 2077’s legacy amounted to greater than a failed launch and dangerous console ports. It wanted the sport to be an enormous hit with tens of millions of followers. And it bought there, even when it price some huge cash in the long run.
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