CDPR Stock goes down

 Yeah, this is an investment blog now apparently

They used to rule the world. Back before the Cyberpunk crash of 2020, CD Projekt Red were riding high as the single most profitable video company in all of Europe; and the community was largely proud to have them there. It was refreshing not to have to endure the most successful of our industry being another bottom-feeder conglomerate intent on magicking money out of the lifeblood of it's fans through some other exhaustive scheme. CDPR were the people's company! They were honest, made great games, earnt their success through genuine hard work and not the back door crap that 90% of other big studios do. Heck, they even accepted game piracy figuring that it was duty of the devs to provide enough incentives with a quality product to earn people's purchase. (Kind of- I'm colliding a couple of stories together because it's a bit of a confusing one. But the spirit is as I described it.) But that was before.

Just recently the headlines have been lighting up the sites. "CDPR stock fallen by 75% since the release of Cyberpunk." Obviously that's not exactly how situations like this are supposed to go down, dropping the single most hyped-up game in all time is by all rights a situation worthy of celebration because success raises prestige which raises stock which attracts more money. It's a cyclical meritocracy. (At least in theory. No need to get into the realities of capitalism in a blog like this.) But of course that never happened. And now we're seeing that despite selling obscenely well for a game which barely resembled the carefully sculpted dream that CDPR sold it as, the scars of the mess that was Cyberpunk has hobbled and marred the company's trajectory much more seriously than one would imagine. Not that CDPR is in trouble, I should add. Just that they're going to be smarting from the Cyberpunk debacle until they can conjure another mega-hit to recoup their lost momentum.

And as I look to what CDPR are doing with the game, and the extended universe plans that are slowly trotting out after two years in development, (that Anime looks alright) I can feel nothing but a deep emptiness about the futility of all this. Despite making their promises and spending a crazy amount of time desperately trying to make Cyberpunk into at least a pale shadow of the promise they originally sold, we know that they plan to essentially dump the game as soon as they have technically fulfilled their promises. The upcoming DLC, which is said to be something of a lean expansion not really on the scale of CDPR's long lauded 'Blood and Wine', is going to be the end of their support cycle as they abandon that game engine entirely and move onto newer horizons. (Again, unless they totally remake the game in Unreal 5 and then work on the next DLC from there. Which... they are absolutely not going to do. That would be utterly ridiculous.)

Then crunching the raw numbers it is apparently the fact that the company who was once valued at 40 Billion Zloty is now less than 10 Million, demonstrating that Stock loss in a much more palpable fashion. This means they had to relinquish their crown of 'biggest European developer' at around the same time they had their 'world's greatest Dev' mode forcibly seized by the angry mob of their fans. Those same outlets are reporting the new winner of that title is Techland, fresh off their successful launch of Dying Light 2, which is surprising to me because I always figured that CDPR took their title directly off of Ubisoft. But no, despite not being public apparently they've got it on good estimative authority that Techland is worth around 10 billion and Ubisoft is only- six? Really? Damn, Imma need to reassess my casual valuations. (All those games and all those years and CDPR, with their two major releases, is still more valuable than them even on the otherside of a 75% drop. Wild...)

So what's the obvious meaning behind all of this? Well for one it means that CDPR are probably in a lot of hot water from their investors on account of their rank failure to serve the value of their stock. Remember they ended up pulling them along for this grand farce based on either sheer incompetence or sly flasehoods, and it's cost their investments to a significant degree. Heck, there were even a handful of investors who tried to sue CDPR for misrepresenting the strength of their game before launch, which- appears to have gone nowhere but having suits filed against you ain't exactly a glowing endorsement to other prospective investors! Also, this reinforces for the industry that lying to make a quick profit today is not worth the downturn it might cause on the otherside; which I suppose is a positive in a way. And I'm sorry to be leaning on something as vapid as the broken trust between company response and investor knowledge, but I'm just trying to figure out how the company justified their lying to themselves.

No, I'm not talking about the lie of releasing a game that was in no way the one their marketing was producing; there was no way CDPR were ever going to be able to make that game; but releasing a game that was actually unplayable to all but their wealthiest customers... I mean that's a little screwed up. It really goes some length to make the hobbyist feel unloved by the industry because they couldn't find it in their pocket to drop several thousand on a competent gaming rig. It's... galling to think that CDPR managed to convince itself, maybe through merit of it's fiscal responsibility I don't know, believed that flogging a non-functional mess was better in the long run than delaying by another year. Yeah, that would have sucked a lot and probably given their stocks a hit, but I think the post-apocalypse right now is hardly any better, if not much worse.

 But, of course, CDPR are not a dead company. They just released a new Witcher game, although it's just a follow-up to their card game (which was said to be excellent if that's your thing) and they've announced The Witcher 4, which appears to be following a new protagonist altogether and not, as we all hoped, Cirilla. What I'm trying to say is there's hope in the future for a comeback to a little bit of the grace they once had and maybe, with enough elbow grace, they'll be able to fool a whole new generation into trusting them before they announce Cyberpunk 3333; and try to pull this whole backwards scheme once again to yet another colossal flop. (But seriously, if they did do this exact thing again with a new Cyberpunk game I would laugh so hard.)

All this makes for grim reading for the Cyberpunk 2077 fan out there, still desperately trying to tell everyone that this game is actually flawless because the sunk cost fallacy has hit them that hard. (Come back when the game has a semi functioning law system; how about that?) And though once I never would, today I have to ask what sort of effect this is going to have on CDPR's future big budget releases. Are we going to see cheap monetisation generating methods that old CDPR would never endorse in order to make up the difference. Something that starts as simple as some cosmetics, then evolves to 'time savers' and then finally morphs into Cyberpunk Immortal? I'm thinking of a worst case scenario again, I know; but it has a little weight, doesn't it?