Mistake? Biggest digital release of all times, people. Expect the next game star Reynolds, Wahlberg and Farrell. And literally every stat be fake, not just every second one.
Perhaps, but Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn't have been the same game only more polished had it been released solely as a PC and next gen title.
Old hardware accounted for something like 40% of all sales. If you're going to be tossing aside almost half of all potential sales, the development costs need to come way down as well to match.
Or, and here's a thought, that they wanted to give the many, many, many people with last gen machines, still half their audience, a chance to try the game. Note - glitchy though it may be, there are many reports of playable experiences on last gen.
where did you find the 40% info? does it include refunds? Is that download sales only or overall sales?
I was in error. 59% of sales were for the PC as of December of 2020, so the remainder would be split between older & newer consoles. That said it is a safe bet that the majority of console sales were for old hardware, because that is what the majority of console players would have likely had even before taking into account supply line issues, scalpers, and the difficulties in even getting a new console.
Whatever the actual sales numbers for old consoles, if the game hadn't been planned to release on them, the development budget would need to tighten up accordingly. At the end of the day CDPR is a business and the objective is to maximize profit, so if a development decision (such as not releasing for base consoles) is going to cause potential sales numbers to take a hit, the amount of money devoted to making the thing is going to scale back accordingly as well.
At the end of the day CDPR is a business and the objective is to maximize profit,
I think that's pretty simplistic. If that was the case, there would have been no free DLC for the Witcher series, there would have been monetization everywhere. CDPR makes good (very good) money, but they are nowhere near Electronic Arts or Take 2 or Microsoft, multi-billion dollar net sales companies.
The objective is not just to maximize profit, no, or GoG wouldn't have a 30-day return policy, for example. Why do that? They had it before 2077 release too. Why not wait and release 2077 when it's perfect? They had plenty of money and stock price before release, at 400 and change, was excellent. Sure it dropped with every delay, then came back. Witcher 3 provided steady revenue every quarter.
If it was so much about money, why not do the smart thing and just keep working? Cut out all the features that aren't copy/paste from GTA, while you're at it. Get some paid cosmetics in there.
The amount of naivete and monocolour viewpoints I see here about business is remarkable. Not targetting you specifically, but most people have no idea what it takes to start, run and grow a business. "Maximising profit" is easy to type, but that's about it.
Old consoles happened because CDPR said they do it, it was half or more of their audience and that's it. Maybe they thought it would be fine for base PS4, (can't see that) but releasing a severely buggy game that doesn't even work on your target platform is -not- what you do if you want to maximize profit.
A corporation pulled a highly anti-consumer corporate move. No one should have been surprised by this.
It's always about the money with corporations. Anything else is just PR to maximize goodwill with customers that translates into sales.
I wonder how much getting CP to run suitably on last gen hardware is not only a futile effort, but doubly causing real harm to the potential of CP truly becoming that masterpiece we all hope it will be. This patch will be telling.
Old hardware accounted for something like 40% of all sales. If you're going to be tossing aside almost half of all potential sales, the development costs need to come way down as well to match.
"It's always" tends to be, again, simplistic. It's rarely so black and white. You seem to have assigned greed ( stupid greed, since it cost them hugely) where lack of judgement was the probable cause.
Now you have CDPR as both malevolent and dumb. And yet smart enough to get there in the first place. Lot of contradictions here. All corporations are always about money - and there are no examples to the contrary ever. And never can be.
A corporation is a legal entity. I have three of them. These are just businesses run by people. Some are all about money - others use the money to do what they dream of.
If you form a corporation tomorrow to sell home-made doghouses, your dream job, does that make it all about the money suddenly? No.
The console screw up was a screw up, compounded by deception based, if I had to guess, on shame.
The console screw up was a screw up, compounded by deception based, if I had to guess, on shame.
I do would like to point out 2 things. Regardless of wether its nearly impossible to determine their impact/influence, they remain true:This.
I don't know what deal CD Projekt did with Sony and Microsoft about supporting last-gen consoles, but I really think that it's a decision which has seriously impacted the quality of the game on all platforms, and that the programming resources which have been diverted to try to get it to work on obsolete hardware is part of the reason that so much else is unfinished.
I'm kind of hoping that by the time they get around to releasing Cyberpunk's equivalent of Blood and Wine, they'll say, OK, this expansion isn't going to run on antiques, and we won't support it on them.
Post automatically merged:
We know for certain that PC sales were 80% of all sales¹, so last-gen consoles could only, at max, be 20%, and that assumes no sales at all on current-gen consoles, which is obviously nuts. So what I think you're saying is that last-gen was 40% of 20%, which is 8%. Which really was not worth doing since it ruined the launch and will have dragged sales on all platforms down.
¹ Well, strictly, of all online sales. But, seriously, no-one buys games on DVDs any more. Online sales will be the overwhelming preponderance of all sales.
We know for certain that PC sales were 80% of all sales¹, so last-gen consoles could only, at max, be 20%, and that assumes no sales at all on current-gen consoles, which is obviously nuts. So what I think you're saying is that last-gen was 40% of 20%, which is 8%. Which really was not worth doing since it ruined the launch and will have dragged sales on all platforms down.
¹ Well, strictly, of all online sales. But, seriously, no-one buys games on DVDs any more. Online sales will be the overwhelming preponderance of all sales.