The pre-release hype cycle surrounding Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020) is the single most-cited cautionary tale in modern AAA games discourse, and it is the comparison most frequently invoked when discussing the anticipation surrounding Grand Theft Auto VI. Cyberpunk 2077 spent roughly eight years in marketing visibility, accumulated eight million pre-orders, and won two consecutive Golden Joystick "Most Wanted" awards before launching into what The New York Times described as one of the most conspicuous disasters in the industry's history (Wikipedia, 2025). This report analyses the structural parallels and key divergences between the two anticipation cycles, with emphasis on what GTA VI's marketing and reception trajectory can learn from CD Projekt Red's collapse from "fiercely pro-consumer reputation" to subject of class-action lawsuits within weeks of release (Wikipedia, 2025).
Cyberpunk 2077 was first teased in January 2013 with a CGI trailer that earned a Golden Trailer Awards nomination, beginning a hype cycle that spanned almost eight years before its 10 December 2020 release (Wikipedia, 2025). At E3 2018, the game's reveal demo garnered more than 100 awards, including Best Game, Best RPG, and People's Choice from IGN, plus Best of E3 from PC Gamer and GamesRadar+ (Wikipedia, 2025). The following year, it was named the most widely discussed game of E3 2019, where Keanu Reeves's appearance during Microsoft's press conference became one of the most-viewed gaming-marketing moments of the decade. By release, Cyberpunk 2077 had accumulated approximately eight million pre-orders, 74 per cent of which were digital, and it out-sold The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in pre-orders despite that earlier title's enormous commercial success (Wikipedia, 2025).
The comparison to GTA VI is structurally similar but inverted in intensity. Rockstar revealed GTA VI in December 2023 with a single trailer that became the most-viewed non-music YouTube video in 24 hours, and the publisher has deliberately kept marketing tightly controlled β the opposite of CD Projekt Red's nearly continuous drip-feed of demos, Night City Wire broadcasts, and influencer events (Wikipedia, 2025). Where CD Projekt Red showed 48 minutes of gameplay in 2018 and another extensive demonstration in 2019, Rockstar has shown no gameplay at all as of the most recent trailers, mirroring the restrained approach that preceded Red Dead Redemption 2.
The Wikipedia summary of Cyberpunk 2077's reception identifies three interacting failures (Wikipedia, 2025). First, CD Projekt Red issued review copies under strict NDA terms β reportedly costing $27,000 per violation according to Wired β and supplied only PC review code, ensuring that no embargoed review could describe the catastrophic PlayStation 4 or Xbox One performance (Wikipedia, 2025). Second, the game launched with bugs so severe that Sony removed it from the PlayStation Store on 17 December 2020 and did not restore it until June 2021, at which point the storefront warned that "users continue to experience performance issues with this game" (Wikipedia, 2025). Third, the company's three successive delays β from April to September to November to 10 December 2020 β were followed by death threats against developers and, per Game Informer, approximately ninety per cent of CD Projekt Red staff being informed of the final delay only on the day of its public announcement (Wikipedia, 2025).
Keith Stuart's Guardian review headline framed the entire question as "could it ever live up to the hype?" and answered, in essence, no β concluding that the world was "an extraordinary achievement that must have required as much time, effort and sheer will as the construction of a medieval cathedral" while simultaneously calling the console versions "a shameful mess" (Stuart, 2020). Stuart's review directly compares Cyberpunk 2077 to Grand Theft Auto V, asking whether it is "as good as Grand Theft Auto V" and answering no, because Night City offers no equivalent emergent sandbox: "You're always a tourist, never a citizen" (Stuart, 2020). This comparison is significant because it establishes GTA V's open world as the implicit benchmark against which hyped open-world games are measured β a benchmark GTA VI must itself now exceed.
Three lessons emerge from the Cyberpunk 2077 anticipation cycle that bear directly on GTA VI. First, the duration of visible hype matters less than the gap between demonstrated features and shipped features: CD Projekt Red showed wall-running, extensive AI behaviours, and a multiplayer mode that were either cut or postponed indefinitely (Wikipedia, 2025). Rockstar's historical reluctance to show pre-rendered or vertical-slice content insulates GTA VI from this specific failure mode. Second, hiding last-generation performance from reviewers backfired catastrophically and produced a $1.85 million class-action settlement (Wikipedia, 2025); GTA VI's confirmed PlayStation 5 / Xbox Series X/S exclusivity at launch sidesteps the cross-generation trap entirely. Third, the academic literature has begun classifying the Cyberpunk 2077 launch as a paradigmatic case of "Broken Promises Marketing" β Siuda et al. (2023) examine the ethics of the journalistβdeveloper relationship in this case and find a structural information asymmetry that GTA VI's marketing minimalism explicitly avoids.
The financial dimension is equally instructive. Cyberpunk 2077's total development and marketing cost reached an estimated $436β440 million, making it one of the most expensive games ever produced, yet pre-orders alone recouped production cost before the launch debacle eroded long-term sales β analyst estimates for 12-month sales fell from 30 million to 25.6 million units after launch (Wikipedia, 2025). The eventual recovery, driven by the Phantom Liberty expansion, the 2.0 patch, and the Edgerunners anime, took nearly three years and demonstrates that even unprecedented hype can be partially recoverable β but only at enormous reputational and financial cost. For GTA VI, with reported development costs already exceeding $1 billion in some industry estimates, the Cyberpunk 2077 template defines the downside scenario that Rockstar and Take-Two are demonstrably engineering against.
The Cyberpunk 2077 anticipation cycle is not merely a comparable hype event to GTA VI β it is the explicit negative case that Rockstar's marketing strategy appears designed to repudiate. Both games share astronomical pre-release attention, both occupy the open-world action-RPG/action-adventure space, and both will be judged against GTA V's emergent sandbox standard. The decisive variable is not hype magnitude but hype-to-product fidelity, and on that axis Rockstar's restraint contrasts sharply with CD Projekt Red's eight-year pattern of escalating, ultimately undeliverable promises.
Siuda, P., ReguΕa, D., Majewski, J. and Kwapiszewska, A. (2023) 'Broken Promises Marketing. Relations, Communication Strategies, and Ethics of Video Game Journalists and Developers: The Case of Cyberpunk 2077', Games and Culture, 19(5), pp. 650β669. doi: 10.1177/15554120231173479.
Stuart, K. (2020) 'Cyberpunk 2077 review β could it ever live up to the hype?', The Guardian, 16 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/16/cyberpunk-2077-review-cd-projekt (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025) Cyberpunk 2077. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2077 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).