CD Projekt Red recently revealed precisely how much it spent on the development of both Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion. The downloadable content alone chalked up to $80 million when you factor in development costs and marketing, while millions more were spent on post launch updates and filling the cracks after the base game’s disastrous launch. The Polish studio has been playing the long game for years now, and only in recent months has it finally started to pay off.

The base game came in at $174 million with $142 million piled on top for global marketing expenditure. It was not a cheap game to make, and the level of promotion and development investment made it too big to fail. Except it did. It failed in a way that few games in recent memory have and probably ever will again, setting a new benchmark for corporate greed in an industry we know to be infamously unsustainable. Against all odds though, it has made a comeback.

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CDPR didn’t have a choice but to somehow save Cyberpunk, especially if the company wanted to have a fighting chance of ever being trusted by its fans again. Following the launch of The Witcher 3, CDPR was on top of the world and seemed untouchable. In a mainstream gaming industry marred by loads of greedy publishers, microtransactions, and unfinished games it appeared and showcased how it was done. Downloadable content was free, updates were frequent and plentiful, and even its paid expansions were a fraction of the price of its competition and seemed like full games in their own right in terms of both quality and quantity. A developer that happily stuck it to the man while simultaneously being the man. It was strange, but we all bought into it.

Years of goodwill were abused as millions were spent trying to market Cyberpunk 2077 as the greatest game we’ve ever seen, while behind the scenes a collection of developers were struggling to make an experience that worked, let alone one that reflected the spectacular trailers being paraded around. There is no way it wasn’t going to end in disaster, and I feel for the hundreds in the trenches present to see this unfold with no way of stopping it. It wasn’t their fault, and only after the executives saw sense were they given the freedom to not only fix Cyberpunk 2077, but shape it into something that reflected their creative vision.

We are never going to get the game shown to us all of those years ago, we were sold a lie and were foolish to believe it. But what has emerged in its wake is still a victory worth savouring. Then again, I’m not sure if it was possible to fail again. At least not at the same magnitude.

So much money and so many harsh truths were thrown at CD Projekt Red and Cyberpunk 2077 that to fail again would be its end. Even with the 2.0 Update and release of Phantom Liberty, I still don’t think enough has been done to make up for abandoning people who trusted, supported, and threw money at CDPR with little reason to doubt them. It sucks, but in the world we live in, it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore.

Either way, this comeback was always going to happen, whether we decided to buy into it or not is irrelevant. As we’ve seen from the release of Phantom Liberty, some of us are smitten with the edgy confines of Dogtown, while others are still hesitant to embrace a game that for several years was defined by a mountain of lies it couldn’t escape from. We’d be foolish to suddenly treat CDPR as a golden child once again, goodwill be damned. Even as it pleases its fans, it still needs to generate all that lost profit for its shareholders. Phantom Liberty is Cyberpunk 2077 breaking even, and now we can all move on.

Next: The Best Way To Play Cyberpunk 2077 Is Still To Rebel