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.
Nnamz on July 17th, 2022 at 19:29 UTC »
This is not a factor of them doing poorly. It's a factor of CP 2077 being MASSIVELY overhyped and overvalue-ing them as a result.
For context, prior to the release of CP 2077 they were valued higher than Ubisoft. Ubisofts annual revenue is in the BILLIONS, many many MANY times more than what CDPR's is.
They're worth exactly what they should be now. They're fine.
ludicrouscuriosity on July 17th, 2022 at 14:19 UTC »
Time to buy their stocks before they release the next Witcher?
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.