The Cyberpunk 2077 video game had more than 8 million pre-orders before its December 10 debut.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg
Classifies CD Projekt SA fell Wednesday after the Polish gaming studio reported sales for its troubled Cyberpunk 2077 game, which disappointed analysts and raised concerns about the timing of future releases.
The studio said it had sold 13 million copies of the game on December 20, a figure that takes into account the number of refund requests the company has received. The update does not provide information about the size of the refunds themselves, but only specifies the net sales figure. Cyberpunk was like that plagued by glitches that Sony Corp. took the title from the PlayStation Store while Microsoft Corp. offered full refunds for Xbox users.
Morgan Stanley lowered the share of overweight to equal weight after the sales update. “It’s hard to believe that CD Projekt has the capacity to deliver as much new content as we previously expected,” analysts Omar Sheikh and Patrick Wellington wrote in a note to clients.
The main problem in the short term is not Cyberpunk’s initial unit sales, but the timeline for fixing the bugs, the analysts said.
The stock fell 3.7% early in trading on Wednesday, falling about 42% since its recent high in early December. The game was released on December 10th.
The figure of 13 million represents the estimated volume of retail sales across all hardware platforms, taking into account returns filed by retail customers in brick and mortar stores and digital storefronts, CD Projekt said in a legal filing Tuesday.
The sales figure is about half of the 12-month sales forecast in a Bloomberg survey of nine analysts conducted before Sony removed the game from the store. The game had more than 8 million pre-orders before its December 10 debut, sparking an online outcry from players frustrated by its poor performance and a dip in CD Projekt’s stock price.
The sales update is negative, indicating that the size of the refunds was “massive,” Trigon analyst Kacper Kopron said in a note to customers.
– With the help of Piotr Bujnicki and Phil Serafino
(Updates with analyst comments.)