There are slight differences between the bonuses bundled with Cyberpunk 2077's Steam, GOG, and Epic Store versions, but on each store, there's just one $60 digital edition to buy. Whichever store you choose, Cyberpunk 2077 always comes with wallpapers, the soundtrack, a digital sourcebook, a digital art booklet, and a digital comic. What a relief.
Things wouldn't have been so simple had Cyberpunk 2077 been released by just about any other big publisher. For example, Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs Legion from Ubisoft both have $60 Standard Editions, $100 Gold Editions, and $120 Ultimate Editions. The latter two editions include the season passes, which are also included if you play Valhalla and Legion by subscribing to Ubisoft+, although if you do that, you don't get their Ultimate Packs with extra skins and other in-game bonuses, like four weeks of "VIP Status" in Legion, which gives you "a soft currency booster for the campaign" and "a soft currency and experience booster for Online mode." But do you want those things? Do they make the game better? Who knows!
Ubisoft isn't even the worst offender when it comes to complex digital edition tier schemes. For a time, EA was changing the release date depending on the edition you bought and your club subscription tier. It had to release a chart to explain when everyone could play Anthem depending on their circumstances.
There is a physical Cyberpunk 2077 collector's edition, but physical editions with statues and books—objects made of matter that you can actually collect—aren't the thing that peeves anyone. It's the upselling, a term that anyone who's worked in retail or sales of any kind knows. When you're told to upsell, it means that when a customer asks for one thing, you're supposed to suggest that they're not going to get the most out of that thing unless they buy another thing—say, a bunch of overpriced phone accessories, or the 'Berserker Gear Pack' for Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which you need the Ultimate Edition to get.
It isn't surprising that Cyberpunk 2077 has gone the no nonsense route: CD Projekt's strategy for years has been to promote itself as the 'consumer friendly' developer and publisher. It bangs the anti-DRM drum with GOG, and has said that Cyberpunk 2077 will get free DLC, and that it isn't going to load it up with microtransactions (although there may be some in the future multiplayer component, whatever that ends up being).
Without declaring good guys and bad guys in the industry—EA, Ubisoft, and CD Projekt all have problems—the choice to sell a single digital edition is one I have zero complaints with. Multiple digital editions don't make the experience of shopping for or playing games better, as much as publishers try to present them as expressions of choice and preference. (Whether or not they make revenues better is another question, of course.)
If you're among the people who bought that one $60 digital edition of Cyberpunk 2077, here's when it'll unlock in your timzeone. And here's our Cyberpunk 2077 review—in short, it's pretty good, but if you're playing it at launch expect bugs.
CD Projekt rolls out a new Cyberpunk 2077 beta branch so people can keep playing while modders catch up to the 2.2 update
OG Fallout lead Tim Cain explains just how much thought went into the timeline, and why canned beans were key: 'Post-apocalypse, but not so far post- that everything's collapsed and everyone's dead'
