The Witcher 3 Made Up A Third Of CDPR's Game Revenue Last Year

thegamer.com:

You would think that unless a game is live service and massively popular, the money a studio makes from it would fall off a steep cliff after the initial hype has died down. That has not been the case for CD Projekt Red when it comes to The Witcher 3. The latest installment in the series made up a third of the studio's game revenue in 2022, presumably thanks to the launch of its new-gen update.

CDPR published a graph on Thursday showing roughly how much its Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 have generated since 2007. Despite celebrating its seventh birthday in 2022, The Witcher 3 still made somewhere in the region of $50 million for the studio. A slight drop compared to the three years prior, but more than the game made in 2018.

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The Witcher 3 continuing to make big money for CDPR at seven years old is impressive for a couple of reasons. Most notably, the update it rolled out for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S last year was free to all who already own the game on older platforms. That means the additional revenue it generated was purely through players buying a new copy of the game, whether that be on an older or newer platform.

The update, and new-gen version of the game, also didn't launch until December. That either means the majority of The Witcher 3's $50 million of revenue was generated during the final couple of weeks of the year, or it had already made most of its money before then through the original version of the game. Probably a little of both.

The other big win CDPR clearly wants to shout about via its new data is the uptick of revenue generated by Cyberpunk when comparing 2022 to 2021. Further evidence that the studio has truly managed to bring the game back from the dead.