The sales milestone is a remarkable one, considering some physical and digital refunds resulting from the messy launch of Cyberpunk 2077. The metric is counting sales between the release of the game on December 10th through December 20th. It’s about half of the 12-month sales forecasts analysis projected for the game shortly after its launch but before digital markets said they would begin accepting refunds.

Cyberpunk’s Success

With its 13 million copies sold, Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best selling games in 2020. However, it still lags behind the top 50 best selling games of all time. Even the last big hit of CD Projekt Red The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt sold over 28 million copies across all platforms. Few games have managed to sell more than 10 million copies.

Cyberpunk 2077 sales could likely achieve better results once the studio fixes more of its bugs and the game is back on the PlayStation Store. As people may be aware, Sony pulled the game last week and began processing digital refunds for the unsatisfied gamers who got it through the platform.

The financial success of the game is in stark contrast with its public image as a great failure, a fact that has only intensified more criticism of CD Projekt Red and raised the possibility of a class-action lawsuit. This could be considered a deeply compromised product and a stunning indictment of the current video game industry and its preorder and marketing model.

Skepticism and Transparency

With the refund campaign in mind, CD Projekt Red stated it had not made formal refund agreements with its retail partners before advising clients to ask for their money back. If there is any silver lining here, it’s the fact that being a huge and ambitious project, Cyberpunk 2077 is now a teachable moment for developers and customers alike about treating major game releases with more skepticism and also requiring more transparency around the product quality before placing a preorder. As for CD Projekt Red, the message we can send to the otherwise genius developers is “Wake up, we have bugs to fix!”

The gradual penetration of the crypto-currency Bitcoin into the world’s economic system experienced a huge turnover in 2011. On the few numbers of already-existed exchanges, 1 bitcoin was valued at less than $0.1 during mid-2010. One fateful circumstance in the following year 2011 was responsible to entirely change the market value and popularity of bitcoin exchange system.

The Milestone Event

According to Dr. Klara Jaya Brekke of Durham University, the one phenomenon acting as a breakthrough factor in the history of bitcoin is WikiLeaks. In November 2010, this whistleblowing venture by Julian Assange faced a serious crisis, by being blacklisted and hence became unable to raise necessary funds through traditional payment platforms anymore. Then the forum of bitcoin users, named ‘Bitcointalk’, started discussions on advising Assange to accept donations in terms of bitcoins. Due to various opposing opinions, led by the mythical and still anonymous founder of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto, the forum restrained itself to contact WikiLeaks at the end. But this story was widely covered by journalists worldwide, making bitcoin a popular talk across the globe.

The Imitation Factor

Along with the after effect of the WikiLeaks affair, the arrival of various imitations also worked as a key factor behind 2011 being a pivotal year for bitcoin. Using bitcoin as a blueprint, various new forms of digital cash, sometimes dubbed as ‘altcoins’, started to appear in the market with added new features. Litecoin and Namecoin, both launched in 2011, were two such prominent examples. Another variety named Dogecoin, mainly used as speculation fodder on online markets, was a favorite of none other than entrepreneur Elon Musk who took it as his pet project. Though some of them were either outright scams or petty jokes, this factor of duplicating bitcoin escalated its popularity in the first place, along with raising the bar of competition.