The Cyberpunk 2077 video game had more than 8 million pre-orders before the Dec. 10 debut.
Shares in CD Projekt SA fell on Wednesday after the Polish gaming studio reported sales for its troubled Cyberpunk 2077 game which disappointed analysts and prompted concern about the timing of future releases.
The studio said it sold 13 million copies of the game by Dec. 20, a figure which factors in the number of refund requests the company has received. The update doesn’t include information about the scale of refunds themselves, just providing the net sales number. Cyberpunk was so plagued by glitches that Sony Corp. pulled the title from its PlayStation store while Microsoft Corp. offered full refunds for Xbox users.
Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock to equal-weight from overweight following the sales update. “It’s difficult to believe CD Projekt has the capacity to deliver as heavy a slate of new content as we previously expected,” analysts Omar Sheikh and Patrick Wellington wrote in a note to clients.
The most important near-term issue is not initial unit sales of Cyberpunk, but the timeline to fixing its bugs, the analysts said.
The stock fell 3.7% in early trade on Wednesday and has slumped about 42% since its recent high in early December. The game was released on Dec. 10.
The 13 million figure represents the estimated volume of retail sales across all hardware platforms, factoring in returns submitted by retail clients in brick-and-mortar as well as digital storefronts, CD Projekt said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.
The sales number amounts to about half of the 12-month sales forecast in a Bloomberg survey of nine analysts, which was taken before Sony removed the game from its store. The game had more than 8 million pre-orders before the Dec. 10 debut, which triggered an online outcry from players frustrated with its poor performance and a plunge in CD Projekt’s share price.
The sales update is negative and indicates that the scale of refunds was “huge,” Trigon analyst Kacper Kopron said in a note to clients.
— With assistance by Piotr Bujnicki, and Phil Serafino
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