How much did Cyberpunk 2077 cost to develop and market?

How to get close to this number

Multiply team size by years by cost per person. A studio of several hundred people over the better part of a decade, at a fully loaded cost of a hundred thousand or more per person-year, gives a development budget in the low hundreds of millions — and marketing typically adds a comparable amount again.

That marketing share is the part people underestimate. For a major game release, promotion frequently costs as much as development, because a game that nobody hears about earns nothing regardless of quality. Published budget figures are meaningless unless they say whether marketing is included, and this one does.

The launch outcome in the explanation is the cautionary half: thirteen million copies in ten days, and then removal from a platform storefront over the state it shipped in. A budget of that size creates a release date that cannot move, and a release date that cannot move is how expensive games ship broken.