After CD Projekt RED (CDPR) released its first-person adventure game in a shoddy state in December, it didn’t seem that they wouldn’t get close to no refund requests…

CD Projekt (CDP) has held a post-earnings conference call, where they talked about the company’s Help Me Refund program. They spent 8.46 million PLN (about 2.22 million USD) on it, including the cost of processing refund payments. They then got a question about the number of refunded copies. An executive said around thirty thousand. Yes: 30000!

Then again, a CDP investor relations representative confirmed for Gamesindustry that this number only includes the copies they refunded directly. So the retail copies or the games refunded via the PlayStation Store or the Microsoft Store are not part of the 30K. However, Mike Futter, a financial analyst, wrote on Twitter that CDP has spent 51.2 million dollars on refunds! Ouch.

CDP also confirmed that by the end of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 has sold 13.7 million copies. The executives warned that the sales curve for the game may not be typical. For instance, the game is still not available on the PlayStation Store after Sony pulled it for not being in a good state when it launched. This could have influenced the players to get Cyberpunk 2077 from other platforms (Xbox, PC…). The game had a total budget of 1.2 billion PLN (316 million USD). 56% of the copies were sold on PC and Google Stadia, followed by PlayStation 4 (28%) and Xbox One (17%). On PC, nearly 10% of the sales happened via CDP’s DRM-free store, GOG, which posted revenues of 344 million PLN (90.6 million USD), with a net profit of 20.7 million PLN (5.45 million USD).

CDP’s executives also addressed February’s ransomware cyberattack, which didn’t happen through a compromise of the company’s network security but via a third-party application. The biggest impact of it was a loss of 2-3 weeks of work, while they tried to get various departments back online.

Source: Gamesindustry, JVL