December 2020: Sony yanked it from the PlayStation Store after the last-gen console version ran like a slideshow. Investors filed a class-action lawsuit. CD Projekt Red’s share price cratered from $31 to $16 in a single month. The studio that could do no wrong after The Witcher 3 had just delivered one of the most infamous launches in gaming history.

April 2026: Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition sits firmly in “Overwhelmingly Positive” territory on Steam, with ratings having climbed from 78% at launch to 95% as of May 2024 according to Game Developer. The discount gets you in the door. The game keeps you there.

How do you get from disaster to one of gaming’s great second acts? The short answer: CD Projekt Red did the boring, unglamorous work that most publishers won’t.

The Long Grind Back

The timeline reads like a recovery plan executed with unusual discipline. January 2021 brought a public mea culpa from CD Projekt leadership. Patch 1.2 followed in March, addressing hundreds of bugs and stability issues. A hacking incident in February added chaos to an already reeling studio, but the team kept shipping fixes.

The first real inflection point came in September 2022, when Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime dropped on Netflix. The show was critical to reviving interest — by late September 2022, Cyberpunk had crossed 20 million copies sold, driven in part by renewed attention from the anime’s fanbase. It wasn’t just marketing. The anime reminded people why they’d been excited about Night City in the first place.

Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 Overhaul

September 2023 was the moment everything clicked. The free 2.0 patch rebuilt core systems from the ground up — overhauling police AI, cyberware mechanics, and RPG progression. This wasn’t a bug fix. It was a redesign of foundational systems that had shipped half-baked.

Alongside it came Phantom Liberty, the spy-thriller expansion set in a new district. Reviews were universally positive. PC Gamer called it “a thrilling capstone for Cyberpunk 2077’s 3-year redemption arc.” It won the Golden Joystick for Best Game Expansion. According to CD Projekt’s fiscal reports as reported by Allkeyshop, the DLC was a major financial success, with the game’s total cost estimated at approximately $400 million including development and marketing.

By July 2023, even before Phantom Liberty launched, the Steam review aggregate had ticked over to “Very Positive.” According to Game Developer, the rating had climbed from 78% at launch to 95% as of May 2024.

35 Million and Counting

The numbers tell the rest of the story. Cyberpunk 2077 has sold over 35 million copies worldwide — hitting that mark faster than The Witcher 3 reached 30 million, according to CBR. CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said the studio was “very happy and satisfied” with the game’s sustained performance, noting that surpassing 35 million copies “testifies to the franchise’s enduring power and enables us to be even more audacious about charting its future.”

In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Cyberpunk generated an estimated 146.2 million PLN (around $37.38 million), dwarfing The Witcher 3’s 28.23 million PLN in the same period, according to CD Projekt’s financial results. The Ultimate Edition — bundling the base game and Phantom Liberty — continues to move units, driven by deep discounts and strong word of mouth.

The game continues to attract new players. Strong reviews are pulling in players who sat out the disaster.

The Payoff

The redemption arc has already funded CD Projekt’s next chapter. According to Game Developer, 407 developers are now working on the next Witcher game (codenamed “Polaris”), while 56 employees build “Orion” — the Cyberpunk sequel — at CD Projekt’s North American studio. The studio that nearly broke itself shipping Cyberpunk is expanding on the back of it.

Player reviews for the Ultimate Edition carry no caveats about bugs, no asterisks about the launch. The kind of reviews you write when a game has earned its second chance.

Redemption arcs in gaming are rare because most studios move on to the next thing. CD Projekt Red didn’t. Three years of patches, a free systems overhaul, one excellent expansion, and a genuinely good anime later, Cyberpunk 2077 is the game people always hoped it would be. It just took a while to get there.

Sources