Cyberpunk 2077 Boss Laughs After Being Asked About Sales on Google Stadia

Earlier this year, Google announced that it would be closing the first-party studio division of Stadia and would instead look to focus on supporting third-party projects well into the future. Unfortunately, if a new response from one of the creators of Cyberpunk 2077 is any indication, it sounds as though even third-party titles might not be boding quite well on the game streaming platform at this point in time.

During an earnings call today involving members of CD Projekt’s executive team (Adam Kicinski, Piotr Nielubowicz, and Michal Nowakowski) that went over sales information from 2020, the board was specifically asked about how Cyberpunk 2077 did in terms of sales on Stadia. The executive who answered the question had an initial response that resulted in laughter, seeming to indicate that sales on the platform were quite low. “We are not disclosing but obviously, most of the sales accounted to PC and Stadia are coming from PCs and from such important platforms as, first of all, Steam,” one of the bosses explained. “The Stadia sales are not to be compared with such a big portal like Steam is. That’s all I can say for now.”

The reason this question seems to have come about in the first place is because of how CD Projekt Red conveyed its sales for Cyberpunk 2077. During the course of the presentation, it was revealed that the game sold over 13 million copies in the month of December 2020 alone. Of this amount, CD Projekt confirmed that 56% of those total sales came from PC and Stadia platforms combined. When asked how much of that percentage belonged to Stadia, however, it resulted in the aforementioned chuckle.

While it’s hard to infer specific sales numbers based on a laugh of all things, it sounds like Stadia could still be in trouble when it comes to sales of major third-party titles as well. What makes this even worse for Stadia is that, when Cyberpunk 2077 officially launched last year, Stadia was potentially the single best place to play the game since it didn’t have as many performance issues compared to other versions. In light of that, for sales to still be so low (even though it is a substantially smaller platform) is surely not a positive sign.

It remains to be seen if the Stadia will catch on in a major way moving forward, but when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, I would have to imagine that CD Projekt is more than happy with how it has sold so far on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.