Cyberpunk’s buggy launch has already cost its founders a staggering sum

The Cyberpunk 2077 launch has caused chaos among gamers, and now the founders of CD Projekt Red are feeling the pinch because of the backlash.

After serious technical glitches marred the first week of Cyberpunk 2077, the share prices in its company have plunged, along with revised sales estimates for the coming weeks, costing the founders of CD Projekt an estimated $1 billion of wealth. It’s a regrettable reversal in fortunes for a company that was surely looking to make a mint from the year’s most highly-anticipated RPG.

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The graphical issues came as a nasty surprise to gamers, especially those playing on the previous generation of consoles. Many textures were not properly rendered, and in some instances the physics went completely haywire. All the more shocking was that this game had been delayed by eight months in order to iron out such problems before release.

In response, CD Projekt Red announced that refunds would be offered to people who bought the game on consoles, while the developers aimed to patch the game completely of its flaws by February 2021. However, even these measures have not solved the problem – gamers looking for refunds have been met with an inconsistent response, as not all retailers were satisfied that the product was defective.

Read more: Cyberpunk 2077 might just kill off this console generation for good

After such a mess of a launch process, it’s hardly a surprise to see the company responsible take a hit, but with $1 billion of wealth lost it will still be a bitter pill to swallow for the same studio behind the beloved Witcher series. Whether it can fully recover will likely be dependent on the quality of the software repairs made to the game in the coming months, and whether it will ever be fully playable on previous generation consoles. But as they say, first impressions last and right now it looks as though CD Projekt Red has fumbled a golden opportunity, at great cost to their brand and the enjoyment of many gamers over the holiday season.