After Tweet From Elon Musk, Cofounder Of Polish Firm Behind Cyberpunk 2077 Game Is A…

One of the founders of Polish game studio CD Projekt is a billionaire yet again. The steady improvement of its Cyberpunk 2077 game—and a Twitter post from stock-market svengali and world’s second richest person Elon Musk—sparked a recovery in the firm’s rollercoaster share price as markets closed this week.

Marcin Iwiński, who has guided the once small studio to global recognition through the Witcher series of games, has seen the value of his 13% stake in CD Projekt rise and fall above and below $1 billion before, during and after the game’s controversial release last December.

He became a billionaire during the runup to the game’s December 10 release, but lost his title after users complained about countless bugs and the game’s terrible performance on last-gen consoles like PS4.

Earlier this week, Iwiński once again became a billionaire as the share price climbed to a post-Cyberpunk 2077-release high. CD Projekt’s stock has bounced 40% from its January 8 low price, Forbes estimates Iwiński is now worth $1 billion.

Hotfix

The steady recovery, in both CD Projekt’s reputation and share price, has been boosted by a series of patches, or hotfixes–downloadable updates to the game’s many problems–released last weekend.

Cyberpunk 2077 also received a timely boost from Tesla’s Elon Musk, who has spent the last week endorsing bitcoin and Etsy, and later tweeted in support of retail investors buying GameStop stock. He gave a Musk boost to CD Projekt on Thursday, tweeting, “The esthetics of Cyberpunk are incredible btw” before later adding, “With Cyberpunk, even the hotfixes literally have hotfixes, but … great game.”

CD Projekt’s stock price rose 17% after the tweets. Shares have since fallen, down 16% Friday—but are still up enough over the past week to make Iwiński a billionaire. 

Real Recovery?

Throughout 2020, Iwiński and CD Projekt cofounder Michał Kiciński saw their wealth rise and fall alongside the sentiment around CD Projekt’s forthcoming game and the longevity of their previous game Witcher 3, released in 2015.

Between early January 2020 and December 4, excitement around Cyberpunk 2077, fronted by actor Keanu Reeves, pushed shares in Warsaw-listed CD Projekt up by more than 50%, making both founders billionaires.

However, by December 5, with the game not even yet released, the share price began to freefall. From December 5 through December 11, CD Projekt shares tumbled 28%, wiping a combined $700 million from the fortunes of the two cofounders. Once the game was released, it faced global ridicule, and video clips of Cyberpunk’s many amusing glitches began circulating online.

Despite the recent share rally, there could yet be more turbulence in the months ahead. On December 24, CD Projekt shareholders filed a class action lawsuit accusing its senior management of making materially false statements. They described the game in a press release as “virtually unplayable on the current-generation Xbox or Playstation systems due to an enormous number of bugs.”

Investors filed a second second civil class action lawsuit, described by CD Projekt as the same in “subject and scope,” in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, on January 15. In a regulatory filing CD Projekt stated it would “undertake vigorous action to defend itself against any such claims.”