Cyberpunk 2077's 40 Million Comeback and Its Soulless Night City

December 2020. I had sat through delay after delay, downloaded Cyberpunk 2077 the hour it unlocked, and inside of twenty minutes I was watching cars blink into existence like assets rendered on a PlayStation 1. Textures loaded late. NPCs froze mid stride on the sidewalk. Half the planet was on that hype train and so was I, preorder paid, expectations somewhere in orbit. What I actually got was a city that could barely keep itself standing.

Six years on, CD Projekt Red is throwing a party, and I keep getting invited by name. Cyberpunk 2077 has now sold more than 40 million copies, five million up from the 35 million the studio reported in November. Joint CEO Michal Nowakowski called it "another big milestone" and announced that "Night City welcomes all travelers." Pawel Sasko, lead quest designer and associate game director on Cyberpunk 2, added his own note: "Incredibly thankful for your amazing support, my chooms. You are the reason we can do all this work." I am, in fact, one of those reasons. I am also one of the people who paid full retail to run their public beta test in 2020.

A comeback built on our patience

The turnaround is real, and I am not going to pretend it isn't. The 2020 launch was bad enough that Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store, and CD Projekt spent the run-up to release accused of misleading buyers with marketing that promised a console version the hardware never delivered. Then came years of patches, a reworked police system, the whole thing rebuilt out in the open. Phantom Liberty landed as one of the best expansions the studio has ever shipped. Even Nowakowski won't call it finished. He recently said he still doesn't believe CD Projekt has completed a "full redemption arc."

My problem with the confetti is simpler than a grudge. The only new thing waiting for a returning 2020 buyer is Phantom Liberty, and it's a paid expansion I still have to purchase. So the deal on the table reads like this: pay full price to test a broken game in public, wait three years for it to become the product you were sold, then pay again for the one piece of content that might pull you back. Preorder loyalty bought a beta build and an invoice. Phantom Liberty should have been free for anyone who backed this thing on faith in 2020. At minimum.

Eye candy with no soul

I have opened the game a handful of times since the big updates, and almost never to actually play it. Cyberpunk 2077 turned into a benchmark. When I upgraded my PC, I loaded it up to watch the ray tracing bounce off wet neon and puddles, admired it for an evening, and closed it again. As a tech demo, it is stunning. I mean... only as a tech demo. The lighting is doing work no other open world on my drive can match, and then the moment you stop staring at reflections and start living in the place, the illusion thins out.

Look at the traffic. A city the size of Night City should be choked with cars, and it is, except none of it survives a second glance. There are no parking lots. No street sets aside a lane for a car that isn't moving. When you stop your own vehicle to run a mission, V either mounts the curb or abandons it in the road, and the traffic behind you collapses into a knot, because the city was never built to handle a car that stops. The vehicles around you are zombies. They came from nowhere and they are headed nowhere, spawned to fill the frame and deleted the second you look away. What's missing is environmental storytelling, the small logic that would tell you people genuinely park, work, and live here.

It's telling that the best version of this world isn't the game at all. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 arrives this fall, and the anime gave Night City the soul the game keeps promising and never quite renders.

What 40 million buys next

CD Projekt is treating the milestone as seed money. Nowakowski framed the 40 million as "a great foundation for our upcoming projects in this universe," and there are a few. Cyberpunk 2, still carrying the Project Orion codename, had 163 people on it at the end of April. Creator Mike Pondsmith, less hands-on this time, has been wandering the studio reviewing scripts and new cyberware, and he's talked up a second city beyond Night City. He describes it as "Chicago gone wrong" rather than another Blade Runner pastiche, which is at least a fresh flavor of dystopia. Night City, he says, is still there.

Keanu Reeves wants back in as Johnny Silverhand, and Pondsmith claims he has worked out how to make it make sense, telling the actor to "contact me." None of it is close. The studio is heads-down on The Witcher 4, and Nowakowski has floated 2030 as the earliest Cyberpunk 2 might ship. For perspective, The Witcher 3 has moved 65 million copies and is getting a fresh expansion next year, so the sequel has a long shadow to grow into.

So congratulations to CD Projekt on 40 million, sincerely. They engineered one of the great comebacks this industry has produced, and the ray tracing is worth the electricity bill. I am just not booking a return trip to Night City on the strength of a sales number. When Cyberpunk 2 lands, whenever that turns out to be, I'll be reading the patch notes before I hand over a cent. Some of us only fall for the preorder once.