CD Projekt Red stock falls 29% in run-up to Cyberpunk 2077 launch
Share price dropped as much as 7.8% after long-awaited game finally launched yesterday
Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has suffered a sharp decline in share price, despite the release of the highly anticipated sci-fi RPG.
The stock has dropped 29% from PLN 443 per share on December 4 to PLN 313.9 at the time of writing.
The decline can be partly attributed to complaints around bugs and glitches, which have been spreading via social media.
The share price also seems to have dropped since reviews emerged, suggesting expectations for this game were extremely high given that the first wave of ratings gave Cyberpunk a Metacritic score of 91.
Even the launch itself has failed to boost the company's stock, with the share price slipping 7.3% over the course of December 10 from PLN 390.6 to PLN 362. At one point, it fell as much as 7.8% to PLN 360.
That's despite CD Projekt's investor relations Twitter revealing the game had been pre-ordered eight million times. By comparison, The Witcher 3 only achieved 1.5 million before launch.
More than half of these pre-orders were for PC, making it the platform's biggest launch of all time. Cyberpunk also racked up one million concurrent users on Steam, breaking the record for single-player games.
Looking back further, CD Projekt Red has suffered a 31% decline from its all-time peak back in August, when its market cap was PLN 42.5 billion, with a share price of PLN 460.8. This followed the announcement of a Pokémon Go-style AR mobile game based on The Witcher.
At the time, this put CD Projekt Red ahead of Ubisoft, although our analysis explored how dependent the Polish developer is on Cyberpunk 2077.
The company already suffered a 25% decline in the two months that followed this peak, due in part to reports of mandatory crunch and yet another delay to the game, pushing Cyberpunk back to its eventual release date of December 10.
With the game also available on consoles old and new, plus streaming services like Stadia, Bloomberg forecasts the game could match Red Dead Redemption 2's sales of 17 million units in the first two weeks, which set a new record.
According to its analysis, Cyberpunk 2077 is likely to become the tenth biggest selling game of all time at a project 29.7 million units, replacing its forebear The Witcher 3 at 28 million.