CD Projekt’s shares drop 13% as company moves to parallel development under its new strategy
It seems that investors weren’t in awe of CD Projekt’s new strategy suddenly revealed yesterday. The company’s stock was down 9% yesterday and continued to fall after the presentation.
On March 30, CD Projekt made two major announcements. Both of them shed light on the company’s plans for the future.
First, it acquired Digital Scapes, which has been collaborating with CD Projekt RED since 2018 and helped develop and optimize Cyberpunk 2077. The Canadian studio will be renamed to CD Projekt RED Vancouver and join three development teams to work on the company’s upcoming titles.
Second, CD Projekt presented its new development strategy. The company will now move in three different directions:
- It will grow internal production and transform CD Projekt RED into RED 2.0 to develop multiple AAA games simultaneously;
- CD Projekt plans to expand its main franchises, The Witcher and Cyberpunk, by developing new games (including mobile titles) and partnering with other companies in creating TV series and merchandise;
- The company will integrate online functionality into its future projects (as opposed to making stand-alone multiplayer titles) and focus on genre-blending games with AAA RPG core.
Besides that, CD Projekt also pointed out that it will now make its marketing campaigns shorter and show its games running well on every platform before the release.
Some parts of this new strategy sound really ambitious. However, it didn’t stop CD Projekt stock from falling, as it closed at -9.09% yesterday even before the presentation.
“Today, the stock is currently down another -13.81% (!) in Warsaw — investors didn’t like management’s ideas at all,” Kantan Games CEO Serkan Toto wrote on March 31.
It all made the company’s stock sink to the 2019 levels. According to the latest reports from analysts, there might be a few reasons for this drop.
Polish website Bankier.pl published a breakdown of the situation shortly after the presentation. For example, Noble Securities analyst Maciej Kietliński thinks that CD Projekt decided to take a step back and not overpromise anymore to have a chance to surprise rather than disappoint.
Analysts pointed out that the company’s strategy and plans lack specifics. The only thing investors know for sure is that CD Projekt will start developing two projects in 2022. Michał Wojciechowski from Ipopema Securities suggested that one of these games might be a new game in The Witcher franchise, which might be released in 2026. He also thinks that the company may release another title between 2024 and 2025.
According to Polish investment company Rockbridge TFI, the only way CD Projekt could change investors’ opinion is by releasing the next-gen version of Cyberpunk 2077. As for now, the game still has plenty of issues, even after its massive new patch.
Investors also didn’t like the silence on the sales data, as they are afraid that the company has nothing to boast about. “This is especially important in the context of the recent M Science report, which said that 0.5 million copies of [Cyberpunk 2077] were sold digitally in March,” Paweł Sugalski from Rockbridge TFI said.
