The Central District Court for the District of California has granted a $1.85 million settlement deal in shareholder claims against CD Projects over the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
Judge Fernando Holguin of the Central District Court of California approved a settlement of $1.85 million (about 2.35 billion won) in relation to the lawsuit filed by investors through a ruling on the 3rd local time. The original agreement was made public through CD Project in December 2021, but Judge Holguin rejected the request for approval in April of last year and requested the submission of additional information.
Investors’ cows began with a number of bugs found since the game’s release in 2020, inability to run the game, and removal of the store. Initially, CD Project claimed that the game could be fully played on consoles of the time, but many errors occurred and it was removed from the PlayStation Store. A number of lawsuits were filed and the lawsuits were consolidated and dealt with in the Central District Court of California.
CD Projekt said in April 2021 that Cyberpunk 2077 helped the company to sell 13.7 million copies, the highest ever for the company. It was also reported that only 30,000 copies were refunded and that the record development cost of 1.2 billion zlotys (approximately 340 billion won) was recovered only with digital pre-orders.
However, the plaintiffs argued that despite seemingly decent sales figures, US analysts lowered their forecast sales figures by 65%, and the company’s stock fell more than 50% in one year. Attorneys for the CD project said that they would recover 16.7% of the investors’ maximum expected loss of $11.02 million with this settlement.
On the other hand, CDPR continued to improve the game play elements, optimization, and bugs that did not meet expectations. In particular, interest in games has increased again through the Netflix animation Cyberpunk Edge Runner, which shares the world view. As a result, both user evaluation and sales speed improved, and the company recently announced that it had surpassed 20 million copies in total game sales.
As the long-running lawsuit from 2020 has been settled after two years, CDPR is now able to focus more on game development. CD Project is currently planning to release Phantom Liberty, an expansion pack for Cyberpunk 2077, in 2023, and is developing a number of Witcher projects, including the recently released Witcher 3 next-generation version.