From flop to franchise: ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is getting a sequel

A video game once synonymous with one of the most disastrous launches in history has not only redeemed itself, but will be getting a proper second act.

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red announced in an earnings call Wednesday that the company is at work on a follow-up to the futuristic role-playing title, which was released in late 2020 and universally criticized for being unfinished, glitchy, and at times unplayable.

CD Projekt Red said that the conceptual phase is complete and preproduction has begun on the “next big game set in the Cyberpunk universe,” which it is calling Cyberpunk 2 for now. The company expects the game’s development to take four to five years, but that number could shift as the project gets underway.

The redemption story is a striking change of fate for Cyberpunk 2077, which not long ago was doomed to languish in video game lore as one of the greatest failures of all time.

Cyberpunk’s skyscraper-high launch expectations

For a time, Cyberpunk 2077 appeared destined to become gamer shorthand for a much-hyped game that overpromises and underdelivers to the extreme. The backlash over Cyberpunk 2077’s likely premature launch was so severe that many platforms hosting the game’s download began issuing refunds to appease unhappy players, with Sony even going as far as taking the game out of the PlayStation store. 

At the time of its initial release, hype for Cyberpunk 2077 was sky-high. Developer CD Projekt Red was widely lauded for its hit The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a sprawling open-world role-playing game (RPG) famous for rich narrative storytelling. It didn’t help that Cyberpunk 2077’s development budget topped $300 million, making it one of the most expensive games ever made.

A very expensive makeover

Instead of calling Cyberpunk 2077 a flop and moving on, CD Projekt Red kept chipping away at the game, issuing improvements to stabilize its performance, deepen combat, and paint richer stories in its glowing Tokyo-esque fictional metropolis of Night City. 

Cyberpunk 2077 joins only a handful of games, including Final Fantasy XIV and No Man’s Sky, that have completely rewritten their own histories after failing spectacularly. For Cyberpunk 2077 and those games alike, the modern model of live-service games—games that evolve and get updates over time, sometimes through paid content—made the comeback stories possible. After their initial missteps, the teams behind all of these games spent years winning back players and rebuilding their communities, earning a lot of respect in the process.

Cyberpunk 2077’s turnaround wasn’t cheap. The company poured north of $100 million in additional resources into the game after its launch, putting out a major “large-scale” expansion called Phantom Liberty, starring actor Idris Elba, who joined Keanu Reeves on the game’s A-list voice-acting cast. In its earnings call, CD Projekt Red announced that the expansion has now sold more than 10 million copies.

Fast-forward four years, and the team behind the former failure clawed their reputation back so successfully that Steam’s user reviews now rate Cyberpunk 2077 as “overwhelmingly positive”—an outcome that would have been impossible to imagine back in the game’s dark days.