It’s hard to imagine now, but Cyberpunk 2077 was an unmitigated disaster when it launched back in 2020. The PC version wasn’t too bad, relatively speaking, but the console version was so wretched that Sony literally kicked it off the PlayStation Store. It was so far gone that several months after launch, with CD Projekt just beginning to start the work of cleaning up the mess it made, we recommended that it just fix the bugs and move on. Whoops.
I mention all this because that was then and this is now, and now Cyberpunk 2077—which these days sits comfortably with a “very positive” user rating on Steam—has surpassed 40 million copies sold.
Night City population: 40 million dreamers 🌃
Thank you all for helping us reach this amazing milestone! 💛— @cyberpunk.net (@cyberpunk.net.bsky.social) 2026-07-03T17:23:36.711Z
“40 million copies sold shows the incredible, lasting strength of Cyberpunk 2077 and is a testament to what CD Projekt does best—creating high-quality, immersive stories that keep players returning for years,” co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said. “It’s a great foundation for our upcoming projects in this universe, including the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 anime arriving this fall,”
It’s a fairly typical corpo rah-rah statement, but you gotta hand it to him: It’s also true. In an industry where companies typically opt to cut their losses when a new game faceplants off the starting line, CD Projekt kept hammering on it, ultimately turning Cyberpunk 2077 into a genuinely outstanding game and then capping it off with a brilliantly devastating expansion. More than once we declared the game’s redemption arc complete, but CD Projekt kept going—maybe in part because studio leadership still doesn’t entirely believe it.
“I’m not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc,” Nowakowski said in June. “I’m convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that’s a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back—if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next.”
A big chunk of Cyberpunk 2077’s sales came via the power of pre-release hype—despite its multitudinous troubles, Cyberpunk 2077 sold 13 million copies in just 10 days, and maybe there’s a lesson in that but probably not—and it’s still well off The Witcher 3, which recently sailed past 65 million copies sold.
Be that as it may, you can’t argue with numbers, and 40 million copies sold is a hell of an achievement, especially for a game that once looked doomed to end up like Mass Effect: Andromeda: A nice idea gone horribly wrong that we’d all just rather forget.
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