The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a pillar of the RPG genre. In fact, many consider it to be one of the best games ever made. It's so popular that fans couldn't wait for CD Projekt Red's next title. Unfortunately, Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch left fans disappointed, until it was eventually fixed, along with the Phantom Liberty DLC.
If you ask anyone about it now, they will say that Cyberpunk 2077 is a great game with an outstanding open world, but will probably choose The Witcher 3 over it. However, the sales figures tell a completely different story. CDPR's dystopian future RPG sold far more copies than its dark fantasy RPG did in the same time frame.
Cyberpunk 2077 sold 35 million copies much faster than The Witcher 3 did
The studio announced yesterday that Cyberpunk 2077 sold 35 million copies after its launch in December 2020. While that's a huge achievement in itself, CFO Piotr Nielubowicz also revealed in a recent earnings call that “This is a better result than The Witcher 3 could achieve in the same time frame that our main source of revenue for Cyberpunk is currently.”
The latter part of the statement is not particularly surprising. Long with the DLC, Cyberpunk 2077 underwent a major overhaul in 2023 to fix all the issues the game was suffering from. This probably brought in a huge wave of players who were probably shying away from the game due to its broken nature. Alongside the launch of the Switch 2, these factors certainly helped bring in the latest revenue for the studio.
What's surprising though is that it reached the 35 million copies sold milestone faster than The Witcher 3, especially with the reputation it has.
Ten years later, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remains A Pillar Of Fantasy Games
I'm starting to feel as old as Geralt looks.
The earnings call has also revealed that development on the Cyberpunk sequel is in full swing, with 135 developers working on the project, and more coming soon. But the majority of developers are busy focusing on The Witcher 4, with 447 currently working on it. This breakdown suggests that the time difference between the two games may not be as long as that between their prequels.
- Released
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December 10, 2020
- ESRB
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M for mature: blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content, use of drugs and alcohol
