Cyberpunk 2077 delayed again, now to December 10, 2020

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Anyone following the Cyberpunk 2077 saga already knew patience was part of the package, and on October 27, 2020 came another chapter. CD Projekt Red announced that the game, scheduled for November 19, would move to December 10, 2020. That was 21 more days, which the studio said it needed to polish and test the game across all its versions, from PC to consoles of two generations.

It was the third delay. At E3 2019, the announced date had been April 16, 2020. Then the release moved to September 17, then to November 19 and, finally, to December 10. The final decision was made in a hurry, with talks starting a day before the announcement, and most of the team only found out at the last minute. The developers even received death threats over the new delay, which shows the scale of the expectation and, unfortunately, its worst side.

In the video rental days, a delayed game was just a box that took longer to reach the shelf. In 2020, with the pandemic and the console generation switch in the middle, the scenario was much more complicated. The expectation was also huge: the game had 8 million pre-orders across all platforms, 74% of them digital, more than The Witcher 3 had received.

What came next

Cyberpunk 2077 came out on December 10, 2020 and set a Steam record, with more than 1 million concurrent players. The story, setting and graphics were praised, but the PS4 and Xbox One versions arrived full of problems. Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store from December 2020 to June 2021, and CD Projekt apologized and offered refunds. The PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions only arrived on February 15, 2022. With update 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty expansion, in September 2023, the game recovered and passed 40 million copies sold.