CD Projekt Announced its financial results for the first half of 2023, on top of information about Cyberpunk 2077, its expansion Phantom Liberty, and the upcoming The Witcher game.
Speaking of Cyberpunk 2077, We hear that CD Projekt is very happy about the current pre-orders for the Phantom Liberty expansion in the two months since the campaign was launched. Yet, they expect most pre-orders to come during the final pre-release days.
On top of that, the base game has now passed a milestone of 80% positive reviews on Steam, reaching the "Very Positive" threshold. On top of that, among recent reviews, almost 90% are positive.
Speaking of The Witcher franchise and workforce allocation, the team working on the next mainline Witcher game (code-named Polaris) has grown to almost 250 developers by the end of July (up from 220 in May). The team working on Phantom Liberty was about 300 people, still the biggest among the developer's teams.
Moving on to financials, sales for the first half of the year were 325.214 million PLN, down from 377.916 million year-on-year, as there was no comparable big release in the past six months.
Net profit was 91.271 million PLN, down from 113.746 million last year.
If you want to compare, you can take a look at the previous financial announcement from March.
During the Q&A session of the conference call CEO Adam Kiciński mentioned that more and more developers are going to be shifted to Polaris going forward. A big part of the Phantom Liberty team will move over after the expansion launches.
Some developers will move to other projects, while some will keep supporting Phantom Liberty even after it launches.
The studio is also happy about the change to Unreal Engine 5, which is proving to be a good choice.
We also hear that version 2.0 of Cyberpunk 2077, which will launch alongside Phantom Liberty will add to the lifetime value of the Cyberpunk franchise, albeit the effect is intangible and can't easily be quantified.
The QA process on the expansion hasn't been completed just yet, but it's almost completed, while we learn that the decision of not making another expansion is already made and confirmed, regardless of how much Phantom Liberty will sell.
According to the company's executives, this is a technology-driven decision as it's the last time that CD Projekt will work with the RED Engine.
Phantom Liberty releases on September 26 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
