As per a new financial report delivered by the management board of developer CD Projekt RED, the Polish studio will not be paying dividends to its stakeholders for for the current financial year, and there’s a very real possibility that this could mean that the reveal and the subsequent pre-release marketing campaign for the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 are very close.
As per a report on Polish site Strefainwestorow (via Reddit), ever since the release and subsequent critical and commercial success of The Witcher 3 in 2015, CD Projekt RED has been making yearly healthy profits, generating close to $200 million in 2017 itself. This has led them to developing a rather healthy business model, and has seen them becoming the only video game developer listed on the Warsaw Stock Exhange.
In 2017, CDPR paid dividends of PLN 101 million, or PLN 1.05 per share (which approximately amounts to $30 million) to their stakeholders. However, they’ve now stated that they won’t be paying dividends to stakeholders this year. The reason they have cited for this, though, is quite interesting. CDPR claims it will be using the money in question for the purposes of a pre-release marketing campaign for Cyberpunk 2077.
To give you some idea of how this works, for the promotion of The Witcher 3, CDPR spent money that was borrowed by its distributors, which they later settled with through the revenues they made from the game’s subsequent sales. By choosing to spend their profits on promotion for Cyberpunk 2077, though, CDPR are taking a larger risk, which obviously means they’re expecting higher sales margins.
More interestingly, though, this suggests that a major marketing campaign for the upcoming RPG might be closer than we think, which in turn means that its release, too, might be much more imminent than expected. With the studio gearing up to incur such costs for the game’s promotion, it’s logical to assume that said promotion is imminent. We’ve been hearing more and more about Cyberpunk 2077 lately, and there have been rumours going around that the game will have a major presence at this year’s E3.
This is, of course, more speculation and presumption rather than any sort of an official acknowledgement, but it bears discussion for sure. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for all the latest updates on Cyberpunk 2077.