CD Projekt is now the second biggest developer in Europe when it comes to market valuation

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The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 developer, CD Projekt, has become Europe’s second-largest video game company, second only to megacorp Ubisoft in terms of market valuation.

As spotted by Reddit, just a month ago the company was valued at $6.8 billion (£5.2bn), but thanks to the phenomenal success of its accompanying Netflix show and the recent release of The Witcher 3 on Nintendo Switch – which sent sales soaring with a 500 per cent increase – the company’s now thought to be worth $8 billion (£6.1bn).

By comparison, Ubisoft is worth around $9.6 billion (£7.4bn).

High demand for its upcoming sci-fi RPG Cyberpunk 2077 is also likely to have impacted its value, even though parent company CD Projekt Red recently delayed its release to September 17th, 2020. In a statement shared via the studio’s social media channels, the developer said that while the game is “complete and playable […] there’s still work to be done”, so it was necessary to push the game back from its intended April release to Q3 2020.

“We are currently at a stage where the game is complete and playable, but there’s still work to be done,” wrote Marcin Iwinski and Adam Badowski in a joint statement. “Night City is massive – full of stories, content and places to visit, but due to the sheer scale and complexity of it all, we need more time to finish playtesting, fixing and polishing. We want Cyberpunk 2077 to be our crowning achievement for this generation and postponing launch will give us the precious months we need to make the game perfect.”

Yet despite the five-month extension, the developer admitted in an investor Q&A that the additional time will likely, and “unfortunately”, result in further “crunch”, the term given to developers required to work long days and substantial overtime in the run-up to release.

“To some degree, yes, to be honest,” Kiciński said when asked if staff would still be required to crunch. “We try to limit crunch as much as possible but it is the final stage. We try to be reasonable in this regard, but yes. Unfortunately.”