The apparently surprising unsurprising profitability of CYBERPUNK 2077.

I say ‘surprising’ because sites like Den of Geek and PC Gamer seem to be having trouble reconciling ‘CYBERPUNK 2077 is a total failure’ with ‘the game in 2020 sold 13.7 million units and only 30 thousand buyers asked for refunds.’ There’s a lot of speculation on just why this happened, and it’s entirely possible that CD Projekt Red is spinning the results somehow*. But here’s another possibility: maybe the remarkably good sale/refund ratio is because most people bought this game for the PC.

And on the PC it worked fine. Well, as fine as any other new game does before its first patch. Don’t get me wrong: I understand that consoles cost money**, and that people like to be able to play games on them. But just because it sucked on the PS…5?***… that doesn’t mean that it sucked everywhere else. Personally, I wish they hadn’t done consoles at all and just gotten the game optimized on PC: I’d be getting the DLC faster if they had.

So I’m not surprised that CDPR is doing all right, after all. For all its flaws, CYBERPUNK 2077 is a fun game.

Moe Lane

*Because that’s what video game companies do.

**Why, one of them can cost up to half what I routinely pay for my gaming rigs. That’s a significant amount of change for a stripped-down, deliberately stunted computer.

***Okay, now I’m just being a jackwagon.