They have certainly not been easy months for Cyberpunk 2077 and especially CD Projekt Redwhich has had to contend with a fierce wave of controversy after launching its latest game in December.
After the initial crush, the Polish studio began to pick up the pieces, apologized to the users and set the timeline for the 2021 roadmap, which includes free DLC and versions for PS5 and Xbox Series X | S of the game. Unfortunately, the new updates have suffered further delays due to a hacker attack that hit CDPR, and to these inconveniences we must add an additional problem that has characterized the production for the past 3 months: Cyberpunk 2077 is not available for purchase from PlayStation Store, with Sony that decided to remove the game from sales in December due to the numerous inconveniences.
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Although CDPR is dedicating body and soul to improving and completing the game, sales of Cyberpunk 2077 have suffered a dangerous decline, a trend that could continue in the coming months and prove to be a bad side effect of the obviously premature launch.
M Science, a research and analysis company of the market, has published some interesting data on the digital sales of Cyberpunk 2077, highlighting how, following the classic trend of games, these are downward. The problem is that this trend, as far as CD Projekt Red’s game is concerned, is exaggeratedly negative against other titles, with digital sales plummeting.
The company compared the figures to sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, two other AAA productions released in the same period, and highlighted how the slump in Cyberpunk 2077 sales is far more important.
The removal of the game from the PS Store has certainly “helped” this downward trend, but M Science specifies that the decline in digital sales affects the game as a whole and on other platforms as well. In short, if the game were also available for purchase online on PS4, things would not be much more positive for CDPR.
“We found a significant deceleration in the pace of digital unit sales of Cyberpunk 2077 in our data”Corey Barrett, senior analyst at M Science, explained via email. “We believe the company could sell up to 500,000 digital units in the March quarter. This is based on the magnitude of the deceleration we observed, taking into consideration some of the comments the company provided on initial post-launch sales. Obviously, the deceleration is partly a function of the removal of the game from the PlayStation Store, although incremental sales appear depressed on other platforms where the title remains on sale ”.
Analyzing the sales of Black Ops Cold War and AC Valhalla, Barrett also confirms that Cyberpunk 2077 is experiencing a much more significant slowdown, and that the sales decline rate of the new digital units is much higher than the competitors released in the same period.
In other words, Cyberpunk 2077’s digital sales fell much faster than they should have for a game of this magnitude, and the fault is not solely attributable to the removal from the PS Store.
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