CD Projekt Red revealed that its Q1 2021 net profits fell well below expectations. The studio says that net profits fell 65% to just $32.5M (PLN; $8.84M USD) due to costs associated with fixing Cyberpunk 2077. This was shared as part of CD Projekt Red's Q1 2021 earning's presentation.
Despite this reduction in net profits, the company says that they saw "record-breaking positive cash flow." The company's balance of cash, bank deposits, and treasure bonds went up about $272M (USD) to a total of $517M. A portion of that, roughly $136M will be paid out to shareholders starting June 8.
CD Projekt's CFO Piotr Nielubowicz says that Q1 saw lower than expected profits because they've been working on fixing the issues with Cyberpunk 2077.
"Lower than usual net profitability is mainly due to continuing depreciation of Cyberpunk 2077 development expenditures, work on updating the game, and R&D activities related to future projects. These expenses are recognized as current-period costs and are not subject to capitalization."
Speaking of Cyberpunk 2077 fixes, the studio also revealed that they have made significant strides in reducing the number of crashes encountered in the game since its release. Of course, the graph they provided in the presentation has no labels or scale on the Y-axis, meaning that the overall number of crashes could still be considered "too damn high."
Speaking of which, those of you on the PlayStation ecosystem are still probably wondering when Cyberpunk 2077 will return to the PlayStation Store. Though unstated publicly by CD Projekt Red themselves, industry veteran Stephen Totilo says that Sony still has metrics that CDPR needs to hit before that will happen.
At present, CD Projekt Red also stays committed to releasing free DLC for Cyberpunk 2077 at some point in the future. These will be released in addition to multiple additional patches. CD Projekt Red is also working on a next-gen release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
