By Alex Calvin, Tuesday, December 22, 2020, 12:10 GMT
Cyberpunk 2077 was labeled “defective” before being sent back to GameStop’s warehouses.
American retailer GameStop is telling the team to accept all returns for the newly launched product Cyberpunk 2077.
This is according to Kotaku and Patrick Klepek of Vice Games, who report that the company issued an internal memo to all employees saying that they should withdraw the game, even if it was opened. In addition, GameStop has been instructed to label returns as “defective” before returning them to the deposit.
Usually, the retailer only takes games back if they haven’t been opened, but GameStop is clearly prepared to make an exception in this rather strange case. Customers apparently still need to return Cyberpunk 2077 within 30 days of purchase.
This comes in the wake of the unsuccessful launch of Cyberpunk 2077. The game was released on December 10, but within four days the developer CD Projekt Red asked for patience with the poor quality of the title on PS4 and Xbox One, saying that customers could return the game. The studio also said that some important patches were on the way to fix the problems. In statements to investors, CD Projekt admitted that it did not spend enough time to make previous versions of the game work well.
Since then, Sony has removed the PS4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and is offering a full refund, while Microsoft is returning the money to customers. After removing Cyberpunk 2077 from PlayStation Store, CD Projekt’s stock fell 15%.
Meanwhile, the Polish developer team is reportedly furious at the way they were treated, having been too overwhelmed to launch the game, and have been asking management how CD Projekt’s reputation will recover with this release.
As if that were not enough, the company may be facing collective lawsuits from investors alleging that CD Projekt “misrepresented” the game.