It’s not a secret that Cyberpunk 2077’s expansion titled Phantom Liberty has been a huge success. However, how huge of a success it has been was recently made clear as CD Projekt Red called out the sales number. Phantom Liberty sold three million copies across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC in its debut week. Recent statistics show that the game has sold over 4.3 million copies in the first two months.
“We are very pleased with the launch of Phantom Liberty,” said CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński. “Successful release of the expansion, along with Update 2.0 which introduces a slew of additional improvements, elevates Night City gameplay to another level—in terms of quality. This is an important achievement given our plans to further develop the franchise.”
Last month Kiciński revealed that the base game has sold 25 million copies since its launch in December 2020. That means nearly 1 in 5 people who purchased the base game has also purchased the Phantom Liberty expansion.
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This also means that Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion are selling “far faster” than The Witcher 3 did. Since its release in 2015, The Witcher 3 has sold over 50 copies. Building on the success of the franchise, CD Projekt recently announced Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition.
That announcement generated controversy when it was revealed that PS5 and PC versions will not come with Phantom Liberty on CD, rather, a download code will be provided in the pack for customers to download the expansion.
Chief Commercial Officer Michal Nowakowski revealed that Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk sales were boosted by promotional activity linked to Black Friday.
“The weeks before it, without the promotion, we’re obviously quite happy with as well,” Nowakowski said. “In terms of the fourth quarter, we’re not really giving guidance.”
Phantom Liberty helped CD Projekt double its third-quarter profit
On Tuesday, November 28, CD Projekt revealed that its third-quarter net profit doubled compared to last year. They attributed it to a strong demand for Phantom Liberty. The company posted 202.9 million zlotys ($51.54 million) for the third quarter, beating the 162 million zlotys projected by analysts. Also, the current third-quarter profit was 105% higher than last year’s result.
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Nowakowski also provided an update on the company’s projects saying that they are going “according to plan”. The new Witcher saga codenamed Polaris was said to be at the most advanced stage. Also, the team working on Polaris has been growing steadily and reached nearly 330 developers by the end of October.
“It’s expected to grow to over 400 by mid-next year,” Kiciński said.
Cyberpunk 2077 senior writer talks about the future of the series
A senior writer at CD Projekt, Magda Zych, recently granted an interview with Gaming Bolt following the successful launch of Phantom Liberty. During the interview, the scriptwriter spoke about the Phantom Liberty expansion as well as update 2.0, the overhaul of the base game that turned out to be a game-changer.
Zych explained that the script of the Phantom Liberty expansion was already in progress even before the release of the base game and that the franchise’s dialogue graphs were more extensive compared to the graphs in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
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When asked about the new ending and the thought process behind the bleak conclusion to V’s story, Zych affirmed that some players were disappointed by the ending of Phantom Liberty when the expansion was released.
“The thing is Cyberpunk 2077 is a noir game and in this genre, there is no place for happy endings by definition,” Zych explained. “These are the genre rules. We have always strived for immersive and for our games to give the greatest possible illusions of reality, and as we know, not every real story always has a happy ending, we also know that every human life ends in death.”
Shubhankar Parijat of Gaming Bolt asked if Cyberpunk 2 was in line and imagined that the team working on the next installment would be fairly small considering the relocation of the project to CD Projekt Red North America.
“A smaller team always works on any given project in the pre-production phase, which is natural, so this has nothing to do with the fact that a new installment of Cyberpunk will now be developed in the US,” Zych explained. “In my opinion, with access to so many talents in that region, developing teams as needed shouldn’t be too difficult a challenge, especially since some of the most experienced people who worked on Cyberpunk 2077 will be part of the production”.
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