Cyberpunk 2077 was originally announced by CD Projekt Red all the way back in 2012, a full three years before the game that helped propel the company even further into stardom — The Witcher 3 — was launched. That makes the timeline of development for Cyberpunk 2077 a little murky, given that it was finally released in 2020. So, how long was Cyberpunk 2077 in development?
Cyberpunk 2077’s long winded development
Despite Cyberpunk being announced in 2012, CD Projekt Red was focused on The Witcher 3 until after the production of its final expansion, Blood and Wine, was finished in 2016, a year after the base game was released.
Still, the company was in talks with Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith during this time, consulting with him to create CD Projekt’s version of the Cyberpunk universe.
Cyberpunk 2077 entered pre-production in earnest with a team of 50 developers in 2016, although this number expanded significantly as production continued. Eventually, it considerably surpassed the size of the team that worked on The Witcher 3.
The game was originally announced for release in April 2020 but was delayed three times over the course of the year. It finally launched on December 10, 2020, to an overwhelmingly negative reaction, particularly for its performance on the last gen PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.
Technically, development should have ended when the game launched at the end of 2020. But the game was so broken that CD Projekt Red essentially continued development in order to get the game into an acceptable state. The company apologized for the botched launch and promised to regain the trust of players.
CD Projekt Red made regular updates to the game over the next 18 months, but it wasn’t until the patch that launched alongside the next-gen version of the game in February 2022 that the game finally started to resemble what was initially promised.
Although, the effort was worth it. The release of the anime series Cyberpunk: Edgrunners and the major 1.6 update in September 2022 catapulted the game to over a million daily players and led to a massive surge in sales. It even helped to increase the game’s rating on Steam to “Very Positive.”
There are still tweaks and improvements being made to the game, and with the upcoming launch of Cyberpunk’s only expansion, Phantom Liberty, in September 2023, we can say that development on Cyberpunk 2077 is finally coming to a close. Nearly three years after the game was released, eight years after pre-production began, and eleven years after the game was announced.
