2024 has begun favorably for CD Projekt RED as the Polish game developer announced yesterday that Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty sold over five million units across all platforms, following the previous benchmark of 4.3 million units from late November.
The long-anticipated expansion finally landed almost three years after the release of the base game, but the wait was absolutely worth it. Phantom Liberty received plenty of recognition from critics, including the freshly announced five nominations from the New York Game Awards. In my review, I rated the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion 9.2 out of 10:
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty builds upon what was an already great game to deliver more fantastic storytelling (with a spy thriller theme, this time around), exciting combat, and very high-quality side content. The perk tree overhaul is a major improvement to progression, and additions like vehicle combat and the overhauled police system are very welcome, albeit not game-changing. If you’ve been holding out on Cyberpunk 2077 until now, you’ll find a huge game with over 120 hours of quality content and an incredibly immersive game world to literally lose yourself in. On top of that, it’s by far the most beautiful and technically advanced game available if you have the hardware for it (PC and RTX 40 GPU).
The success of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is great news for CD Projekt RED, which spent a considerable amount of resources (of which a sizable cut probably went to Idris Elba for his role as Solomon Reed) to make it. The Polish studio revealed the expansion cost them around $85 million, although this figure includes marketing. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is priced at $29.99, so its sales have already broken the $150 million milestone. Of course, CD Projekt RED has to surrender 30% of the cut to Valve (on Steam), Sony (on PlayStation), and Microsoft (on Xbox), though a good portion of its PC sales usually happen on GOG, which is owned by CDPR.
Between the expansion and Update 2.0, the user reception of Cyberpunk 2077 has considerably improved. The studio is already starting development on the sequel, currently codenamed Project Orion, which will be made in Unreal Engine 5 just like the new The Witcher trilogy. According to the director of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, CD Projekt RED aims to evolve the Cyberpunk franchise through its sequels in a similar way to The Witcher.
