A new report from Business Insider Poland paints a grim picture for CD Projekt: the company's value has cratered by over 75% since just before the launch of Cyberpunk 2077. A business that once boasted a market capitalisation of over 40 billion Polish złoty—briefly becoming the most valuable games company in Europe —is now worth less than zł10 billion.
In the weeks leading up to Cyberpunk's launch, CDP shares were trading at around zł400 each, hitting zł443 a share only 6 days before the game's release. The story since then has been one of sharp falls and brief plateaus: with CDP shares and market cap halving in value in the first few months of 2021, then almost halving again since the end of March this year.
In simpler terms, this basically means that the reception of Cyberpunk 2077 and CDP's subsequent firefighting of the problems has shorn off 5 years' of the company's overall value. This is despite Cyberpunk 2077 selling almost 14 million copies in 2020 alone. Ever since launch the developer has been largely focused on fixing problems with the game (mainly on console, it has to be said): and the multiplayer mode that was once promised is now not happening. Perhaps the most humiliating moment, perception-wise, was that Sony removed the game from the PlayStation Store (it has subsequently returned).
The company's post-Cyberpunk plummet has left its market cap trending around a level equivalent to its value in 2017. While it's probably to be expected that a game company's value would drop a bit after their much-hyped game finally released, the dizzying scale of CDP's fall can hardly be interpreted as anything but a result of Cyberpunk's mismanagement.
Perhaps more galling for CDP is the possibility that they are no longer Poland's biggest game studio. Business Insider Poland draws on some maths done by Puls Biznesu, a Polish business daily, to suggest that Techland might now be Poland's biggest game company by market cap. The numbers on this one are pretty fuzzy, though: Techland aren't listed on a stock exchange, so Puls Biznesu had to guess at what their share price would be to arrive at its final estimate of a market cap of around zł10.6 billion.
workadaywordsmith on July 17th, 2022 at 17:21 UTC »
The Witcher 3 was amazing, but the amount of people who stumbled over themselves to defend CDPR over Cyberpunk’s launch was absolutely baffling. No AAA game had ever been pulled by the PS store shortly after launch before. The game literally gave a game journalist a seizure (CDPR fixed it almost immediately after, to be fair) and the fans sent her videos intended to induce seizures because she dared to report on it. The game ran like absolute garbage on the PS4 and XBone after CDPR refused to let journalists show footage of the game on the consoles in their reviews and people flocked to defend the launch by saying “it’s fine for me on PC!” No other company except maybe Nintendo could’ve gotten away with such a shit show of a launch with half of the people going to bat for them
I’m hoping they can pull another Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk is apparently at least a pretty good game now, but I’m happy I don’t see people acting like CDPR is the second coming of Christ as much as I used to
InfinteRebirth on July 17th, 2022 at 11:45 UTC »
Wow, that was a sobering read. That means their next game has to be a hit. I am sorry but I still think they should have focused on making a DLC that not only fixed problems but pulled a No man's sky and added to the game.
The game's premise is still in a league of its own. If they added on to it, things like 3rd person view, climbing walls, hover cars, and finishing Pacifica, I think fans would come back.
That stock worth could skyrocket just as fast as it fell. They just need to deliver what was promised.
vampatori on July 17th, 2022 at 11:32 UTC »
It's worth something like what it should be now then! It was massively overvalued before, to truly ridiculous levels.