Rumor: Cyberpunk 2077 Might Launch Sooner than Expected

The folks over at GamignBolt did some digging and discovered a Polish report indicating that CD Projekt Red is intending to use a good chunk of their 2017 profits for an upcoming marketing campaign for Cyberpunk 2077. According to their findings, these funds were initially supposed to go towards stakeholder dividends and such re-allocation indicates a certain degree of urgency and confidence on CD Projekt’s part.

You pair this with the recent reports that the Polish studio intends to release another non-Cyberpunk AAA RPG by 2021 and the rumors that Cyberpunk will be playable at this year’s E3, and it becomes hard not to jump to the obvious conclusion that the highly anticipated action-RPG is closer to its release date than one might assume.

An excerpt from GamingBolt’s take on this:

In 2017, CDPR paid dividends of PLN 101 million, or PLN 1.05 per share (which approximately amounts to $30 million) to their stakeholders. However, they’ve now stated that they won’t be paying dividends to stakeholders this year. The reason they have cited for this, though, is quite interesting. CDPR claims it will be using the money in question for the purposes of a pre-release marketing campaign for Cyberpunk 2077.

To give you some idea of how this works, for the promotion of The Witcher 3, CDPR spent money that was borrowed by its distributors, which they later settled with through the revenues they made from the game’s subsequent sales. By choosing to spend their profits on promotion for Cyberpunk 2077, though, CDPR are taking a larger risk, which obviously means they’re expecting higher sales margins.