Shares in CD Projekt Red drop nearly 30 percent in Cyberpunk 2077's launch week

[Cal Jeffrey]

In context: Despite eight years of development and three last-minute delays, Cyberpunk 2077's launch has not been as smooth as CD Projekt Red might have hoped. Players have reported numerous bugs, which is not unusual for early versions of a game. However, some have called it "unplayable" on the standard PS4 and Xbox One.

Stock in CD Projekt Red has seen a dramatic decline in the week surrounding the successful launch of its highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077. Since December 4, shares in CDPR have plunged nearly 30 percent and almost 11 points since its release yesterday (as of this writing).

The plunge earlier this month was likely precipitated by early reviews. Most critics liked the game but did report encountering numerous bugs and technical issues. Since its launch on December 10, there have been multiple bug complaints from users on social media ranging from characters' penises sticking out of clothing to the game being "unplayable" because of texture issues and frame rate drops.

Today, trading in CDPR is up slightly—from $22.10 per share at open to $22.40 as of this writing—but has remained mostly flat throughout the day. However, a rebound is not out of the picture.

CD Projekt Red suffered a long decline starting in August shortly after it announced a second delay and accelerated with reports of employees being saddled with "forced" crunch time. Stock prices fell 32.5 percent, from $31.10 to $21 per share, but rebounded to previous levels by December 4. Chances are CDPR can make a similar recovery once it has most of Cyberpunk's major bugs patched.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/87934-shares-cd-projekt-red-drop-nearly-30-percent.html

 

[QuantumPhysics]

The biggest problems are on the Xbox One and PS4. The PS4 Pro and Xbox One X don't have big issues and the PC experience - for me at least - has been just fine. (Very minor bugs).

 

[SalaSSin]

Following the market, those shareholders with among them all those gamers and technical people who know how gaming goes these days, is truly worthwile /s

Bugs are there to be solved. And they will be. And the game will outsell whatever they were hoping for.

And the market will continue what it does. Panicking for nothing, and being excited like a kid before his Christmas presents for ... equally nothing.

Carry on.

 

[SirDigby]

Sounds like a good time to buy then! They'll fix CP and release Witcher 4 and continue to expand GoG and rock it.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Buy on rumor, sell on news.

 

[fps4ever]

Regardless of the CDPR butt kissing they released a beta and people lapped it up...whatever but lets call it like it is.

 

[noel24]

Their share price was overbloated 1000 % anyway, so no biggie there, just suckers who bought shares late pay the price. But technically, W3 was a very same mess at start, and turned out to be a gem.
I'm just sorry for the owners of the original PS4 and XBOXO, they pay the full $70 price for the experience of the owner of 7 year old PC potato, while They cannot upgrade Their PC ever. That's the CDPR's failure here. They should skip those and not make anyone any promises.

 

[yRaz]

So they start receiving death threats to not delay the game again and then they release a game that isn't finished yet....

They were very open about the fact that they needed more time to polish the game on last gen consoles. What, and everyone is surprised when they release a game that's buggy on last gen consoles?

THEY SAID THE GAME DIDN'T RUN RIGHT AND THEY NEEDED MORE TIME, BUT NOOOOOO.

Frankly, last gen consoles should consider themselves lucky to even get a next gen game.

 

[Eldritch]

As much as I think that Cyberpunk is a great game (I call it Deus Theft Auto), I hate that they have no font scaling for items and descriptions.

Try playing it on a large screen and see if you can read a darn thing except for subtitles who do support scaling.

 

[gamerk2]

The biggest problems are on the Xbox One and PS4. The PS4 Pro and Xbox One X don't have big issues and the PC experience - for me at least - has been just fine. (Very minor bugs).

Co-signed. A few one-off bugs, and the type of stuff you'd expect to see in early versions of open world games, but nothing game-breaking on PC thus far.

 

[Jyrkz]

Win7 doesnt have fullscreen option and game only uses 50% of cpu/gpu -.-

 

[Thanthan]

The thing is the game just shouldnt have launches on the base consoles. It's not like their pc minimum spec is a radeon 5950 either... And Even that card is slightly more powerful than the base ps4.

 

[Mike Gray]

Following the market, those shareholders with among them all those gamers and technical people who know how gaming goes these days, is truly worthwile /s

Bugs are there to be solved. And they will be. And the game will outsell whatever they were hoping for.

And the market will continue what it does. Panicking for nothing, and being excited like a kid before his Christmas presents for ... equally nothing.

Carry on.

Heh. I'm actually one of those investors. Back about 3 years ago - late 2017 -, I about had $1,500 to invest, so I decided to drop it on a company that was (a) profitable , (b) made a product I love, AND (c) had something interesting the pipeline that would probably generate some excitement down the road. Since then I've watched the stock triple.

The stock actually jumped up to record levels last week, maybe a couple days before the more negative reviews started showing up - and I seriously considered selling. It would certainly have been a good point to put in an automatic sell stop and take some profits.

In my case, I don't need the money right now, so I decided to just ride it out - but selling certainly would have been a reasonable call.

I have a hunch that there are quite a few investors out there with a similar outlook to mine: People who love games and were super impressed with the Witcher franchise, and figured it could be a good investment. I also wouldn't be surprised if a lot them have been in for a while and decided to take some profits.

 

[Cal Jeffrey]

As much as I think that Cyberpunk is a great game (I call it Deus Theft Auto), I hate that they have no font scaling for items and descriptions.

Try playing it on a large screen and see if you can read a darn thing except for subtitles who do support scaling.

Totally agree. I'm loving the game on PS4 Pro, but yeah, the font size sucks, especially if you are trying to get familiar with the game. Several times I have had to get up to and get closer to read a description.

 

[arrowflash]

Their share price was overbloated 1000 % anyway, so no biggie there, just suckers who bought shares late pay the price. But technically, W3 was a very same mess at start, and turned out to be a gem.
I'm just sorry for the owners of the original PS4 and XBOXO, they pay the full $70 price for the experience of the owner of 7 year old PC potato, while They cannot upgrade Their PC ever. That's the CDPR's failure here. They should skip those and not make anyone any promises.

TW3 had its problems at launch like all overambitious open world RPGs do, but I don't think it had even one third the issues of CP2077.

 

[Burty117]

The media lighting up to call this game buggy I find a bit puzzling.

Just played it for nearly 24 hours straight, no closing the game for food, just leaving it in the pause menu.

I'm using an old GPU as well (spare GTX 970) and apart from a graphical bug and an enemy that was flickering in and out of existence (fixed with filling them with bullets) it's actually pretty solid.

I could list MANY more games that were way more "in beta" than this is. Even this year, many more games have come out in a worse state than this and didn't make any headlines...

 

[Goat11]

Win7 doesnt have fullscreen option and game only uses 50% of cpu/gpu -.-

Try windows XP or even better - Windows Millennium! That might do the trick (don't forget to use old drivers too!)

 

[Eldritch]

The media lighting up to call this game buggy I find a bit puzzling.

Just played it for nearly 24 hours straight, no closing the game for food, just leaving it in the pause menu.

I'm using an old GPU as well (spare GTX 970) and apart from a graphical bug and an enemy that was flickering in and out of existence (fixed with filling them with bullets) it's actually pretty solid.

I could list MANY more games that were way more "in beta" than this is. Even this year, many more games have come out in a worse state than this and didn't make any headlines...

Most glitches are from console versions but as Metacritic links to PC version of game first, people simply put the console review there and media just reports based on that.

My take on this is, for PC version issues are mostly performance related as the game does not takes into account resolution as part of recommended quality settings causing all sorts of visual glitches like pop ins e.g. If your GPU supports 'Very High' preset at 1920*1080 but you have a 4k monitor then the game will put it in Very High preset with 4k resolution as resolution is handled separately...

 

[Cal Jeffrey]

The media lighting up to call this game buggy I find a bit puzzling.

Just played it for nearly 24 hours straight, no closing the game for food, just leaving it in the pause menu.

I'm using an old GPU as well (spare GTX 970) and apart from a graphical bug and an enemy that was flickering in and out of existence (fixed with filling them with bullets) it's actually pretty solid.

I could list MANY more games that were way more "in beta" than this is. Even this year, many more games have come out in a worse state than this and didn't make any headlines...

We have two (at least) staff members on this game. One (Cohen Coberly) is playing it on PC, and myself playing on PS4 Pro. From conversations in the newsroom, it is clear to me that the majority of the issues are on consoles. That is not to say that the PC has no problems. In fact, Cohen has said that when the game is running, his overclocked i7-8700 is running 100%.

"100% CPU usage at all times no matter the settings!" he said. "8700k overclocked, still 100%"

Obviously, a lot is going to depend on your rig. CP2077 is a very demanding game, but despite his CPU usage, the game plays more or less without too many issues (that he has mentioned so far).

I, on the other hand, have encountered some bugs and performance issues on the PS4 Pro. They are not as pronounced as what base unit users are reporting but there are definitely some performance and rendering bugs to be ironed out. Just a few examples, random crashing (about once every few hours), occasional gun textures not loading (workaround: switch to a different gun then back), vehicles occasionally hovering above the road when parked, the player character automatically moving in a random direction upon exiting certain cut scenes without player input, are just a few I have encountered.

That said, other than the crashing, I have not found anything game-breaking. Frame rates seem good. Most of the time textures and rendering are just fine. Everything I have encountered so far is easily fixable. The same cannot be said for first-gen PS4s and XB1s. Those systems are hardware limited and fixing the problems players have been encountering on them is not so easy. Optimizing for those units is likely going to result in a marked loss somewhere, whether it be in texture resolution or something else. Making that happen is a matter of revisiting the various features that are taxing the hardware, so there is no quick fix for those systems.

Keep in mind, most of the negativity has come from PS4/XB1 users, not from reviewers. Users, I might add as have others, who sent CDPR death threats when the game was delayed for the third time. There's a bit of a double standard that has to be entertained if you want to take those complaints seriously.

 

[Nargg]

Most overhyped game in years.