2077. Cyberpunk
Source: CD Projekt SA
Shares in CD Projekt SA fell on Wednesday after the Polish gaming studio reported sales for its troubled game Cyberpunk 2077, which disappointed analysts and raised concerns about the timing of future releases.
The studio said it had sold 13 million copies of the game by December 20, a figure that takes into account the number of refund requests received by the company. The update does not include information about the reimbursement scale itself, but only the provision of the number of net sales. Cyberpunk was like that tormented by errors that Sony Corp. took the title out of its PlayStation store while Microsoft Corp. offered full refunds for Xbox users.
Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock to an equal weight from overweight after the sales update. “It’s hard to believe that CD Projekt has the ability to provide a list of new content as difficult as we previously expected,” analysts Omar Sheikh and Patrick Wellington wrote in a note to clients.
The most important short-term issue is not the initial sales of Cyberpunk units, but the timing of fixing its bugs, analysts said.
The stock fell 3.7% at the start of trading on Wednesday and fell about 42% from its last high in early December. The game was released on December 10.
The figure of 13 million represents the estimated volume of retail sales on all hardware platforms, taking into account the returns presented by retail customers in brick and mortar, as well as digital showcases, CD Projekt said in a regulatory record on Tuesday.
The number of sales rises to about half of the 12-month sales forecast in a Bloomberg survey conducted by nine analysts, which was taken before Sony took the game out of its store. The game had over 8 million pre-orders before its December 10 debut, which triggered an online cry from players frustrated by its poor performance and a plummeting CD Projekt stock price.
The sales update is negative and indicates that the magnitude of the refunds was “huge”, said Trigon analyst Kacper Kopron in a note to customers.
– With the assistance of Piotr Bujnicki and Phil Serafino
(Updates with analyst comments.)