Despite its launch woes, Cyberpunk 2077 was a hugely successful game sales-wise. On Thursday, CD Projekt announced that it sold nearly 14 million copies of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. It also noted that despite offering broad refunds very few buyers took the option. There was one aspect of Cyberpunk 2077's sales that didn't quite match CD Projekt's hopes, however. In fact, bringing up the platform even made CEO Adam Kiciński laugh. The topic was Cyberpunk 2077's performance on Google Stadia.
Kiciński took questions as part of CD Projekt's fiscal year earnings call for 2020 and sales on Google Stadia was one of the questions that he took. When asked, Kiciński laughed nervously before providing a very semi-professional response. First, he said that all Stadia's sales were counted among Cyberpunk 2077's PC sales, which were overall very impressive. However, Stadia's sales are "not to be compared" with Steam. Kiciński closes with, "That's all I can say."
The insinuation that Kiciński is making is that Stadia's sales were not impressive. He tries to help the platform save some face by pointing toward how impressive the PC platform was in general, but acknowledged that Stadia was obviously not a very big part of those sales. It ultimately sounds like Kiciński doesn't have a very high opinion of Google Stadia and considered the sales Cyberpunk 2077 had on the platform as perhaps beneath mention.
Regardless of its ultimate success on Stadia, Cyberpunk 2077 was heavily advertised for the cloud streaming subscription service prior to launch. In early December, previews of Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia were shared in large numbers and variety. Extensive coverage of how Cyberpunk 2077 performed on Stadia showed that it was overall very impressive, especially for a game that ultimately had significant technical issues. If Cyberpunk 2077 underperformed on Stadia, then it wasn't for lack of trying.
There's even a good case for playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia over other platforms. The performance of Cyberpunk 2077 on last-gen consoles was disappointing, to say the least, but next-gen performance wasn't hugely better. With a stable internet connection, Stadia could outperform the consoles. That's even more true with the 1.2 Cyberpunk 2077 update, which improved stability on the platform and made several other key improvements.
For a game as big as Cyberpunk 2077, which likely had whole divisions dedicated to porting the game to other platforms, supporting Stadia likely wasn't a huge risk. It may not have paid off in significant sales, but it was probably worth it just for additional media coverage and reviews. Now to see if CD Projekt will continue supporting Stadia in the future.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available now on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X improvements coming in 2021.