"Nearly half" of Cyberpunk 2077's development team still works on improvements

It has been seven months since the catastrophic release of Cyberpunk 2077, a game many believed would be a game of the year, turned into one of the biggest disappointments of the decade.

The state of the game was so abysmally poor that Sony was forced to do the unthinkable - they have completely removed the game from the PlayStation Store, and to this day, Cyberpunk 2077 is still unavailable for purchase on PlayStation consoles.

This move had a huge impact on Cyberpunk 2077's sales, and despite several patches and promises to fix the game, the company's first-quarter financial results are showing that CD Projekt's Q1 net profit is significantly below expectations.

Kiciński refused to directly answer how many copies of Cyberpunk 2077 were sold during this period but confirmed that about 60% of first-quarter product sales came from Cyberpunk sales. One of the investors made an educated guess that Cyberpunk 2077 sales were around 800,000 copies sold in the first 3 months of 2021, which is similar to what analytics company M Science predicted.

Despite the grimness of the situation, CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński says that they are still planning to deliver what they have promised and that patches and hotfixes from the first half of the year already significantly improved the game in terms of stability.

According to the graph shared with the investors, the game is crashing significantly less after hotfixes and patches (Picture: CD Projekt)

"We intend to live up to what we promised our gamers in January," Kiciński said during the call. "While we already see major improvements, a large part of the team continues to work on making sure that Cyberpunk provides even better entertainment to gamers."

Kiciński explained to investors that almost half of the original team is still working on Cyberpunk 2077, either on fixing and improving the current version or working on a promised next-gen upgrade, slated for release later this year.

Kiciński also mentioned that a portion of the team started working on preproduction for unannounced games, but didn't want to go into too many details, as they don't want to make the same mistake and start talking about projects too early, but confirmed that CD Projekt RED  will go through a transformation next year, where they will have two big teams working parallelly on two big AAA games.

• Read more: Cyberpunk 2077 lead designer says gamers "don't understand" how difficult the game was to make

If you are interested in listening to CD Projekt's full Q1 2021 earning conference call, check out the embedded video below.