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Cyberpunk 2077 had a spotty release, but it may not be a flop.
Courtesy of Cyberbunk
On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States should dedicate itself to putting a man on the moon. Eight years later, Neil Armstrong took his first walk on the lunar surface.
Polish video game publisher
CD project
(ticker: CDR.Poland) took roughly the same amount of time to make his last work Cyberpunk 2077, which was released in December. Unlike Armstrong, he failed to hold the landing.
Put charitably, the release of CD Projekt’s latest title was bumpy. After eight years of hype and a constant drip of company marketing materials, including ads mocking actor Keanu Reeves by lending his voice and likeness to a main character, the product that arrived seemed unfinished, especially on the console systems of the company. previous generation.
The game was so difficult to play in the
Sony
(SNE) PlayStation 4 and
Microsoft
(MSFT) Xbox One systems in which both companies offered refunds to angry consumers, and Sony went so far as to remove the game from its online store. While CD Projekt also offered refunds and issued an apology, investors appear to be just as frustrated as gamers. The stock has fallen nearly 30% since launch, and a New York law firm has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of shareholders.
CD Projekt declined to make executives available for this article and said in a statement that the company would vigorously defend itself against the litigation.
the Cyberpunk The launch makes one thing clear about the contemporary video game business: the biggest games are more complex than ever and much more difficult to make. Great games from publishers like
Take-Two interactive softwareis
(TTWO) great success Grand theft auto v they have to run on multiple platforms, push the most powerful graphics and processor chips to the limit, and deal with the unpredictable ways players interact with the game and with each other in online social settings. The risks and rewards of the industry have never been greater.
Unlike the world’s largest economy that decides to send a person to walk on the moon, CD Projekt does not have the vast resources of the US government at its disposal: it is a relatively small publisher, with around 1,000. employees and a market value of $ 7.6 billion. . But even if he had invested billions of dollars in developing Cyberpunk, it might not have made a huge difference.
“You can’t just throw away a billion dollars and you automatically get great games.”
Electronic arts
(EA) Study Director Laura Miele said Barron this week. “It is much more complicated and nuanced than that.”
Modern great games require several different disciplines of creative employees, such as software engineers, artists, designers, and composers, to come together and produce an entertainment product with a non-linear history, Miele says. Money can help recruit talent, but alone it will not make the game good. That talent needs to deeply understand not only video game players, but also the intersection between technology and entertainment. Those skills are not easy to come by.
“That [takes] great talent and time. It’s time to iterate, it’s time to get the game going on these multiple systems and then get feedback from the players, ”says Miele. “It takes great instincts and a great caliber of creative talent to end up with a great gaming experience.”
One of the dangers built into CD Projekt’s nearly decade-long bet on Cyberpunk is that the company doesn’t have a huge catalog of existing franchises, unlike many American publishers.
Cyberpunk It’s also a brand-new franchise, the launch of which is one of the biggest risks publishers can take and can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Barclays video game analyst Mario Lu. Even if the gameplay is good, if players have a negative view of a new title, for any number of reasons, that could destroy any chance of success.
Weeks after launch, CD Projekt does not appear to be in danger of failure. The company has sold 13 million copies, net of rebates, about five million units more than the eight million pre-launch orders it received.
The personal computer version of the game has been a critical success, despite glitches and bugs, although the same is not the case with the previous generation console versions, which have been called unplayable. Barron’s found that the best way to experience Cyberpunk 2077 is on a PC or Xbox Series X. But amid pandemic-related product shortages
Nvidiais
(NVDA) top-notch graphics cards and Xbox Series X, it may not be possible to get the correct system.
As an alternative, players can choose to play the game on Google’s cloud streaming service called Stadia. However, making the game for Stadia also has tradeoffs. Like most cloud streaming services, there may be a slight input lag, and it appears to be running the version of the game ported to consoles, rather than the PC version, which has support for ray tracing in real time, a technology that creates images. more realistic. It also costs the developer valuable resources to port the code.
If a new franchise like Cyberpunk it doesn’t work well, that can hurt stocks in the short term. But the stocks of the largest US developers have generally rebounded relatively quickly from such disappointments. EA is a good example. Although its launch in 2019 of Anthem“A new franchise” was not as successful as investors hoped, its stock still gained another 12% that year after it introduced the game. EA’s backbone franchises, like its line of FIFA Soccer games can offer relatively reliable returns, and franchises of years like The Sims, you can continue to generate income through additional content.
“This is entertainment, not everything is going to work,” says Miele. “But our odds and our evidence of success are pretty high relative to other entertainment media. You have to be introspective about what worked and what didn’t, and keep going and keep investing. You have to be fearless and you have to have the courage to listen to our players. “
Write to Max A. Cherney at [email protected]
