A new report that looks at what went wrong with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 points to the overconfidence of the CD Projekt Red management as a key problem and reveals that the game’s “complete development” – announced in 2012 – only started in 2016.
Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg interviewed more than 20 current and former CD Projekt employees and found that the game’s development was plagued by unrealistic deadlines and technical problems. The company “hit the reset button” in the game in 2016, but a demonstration of Cyberpunk 2077 shown at E3 in 2018 was “almost totally fake”, according to the report. Development also suffered from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with programmers on the PC version and testers on the console version working separately from each other.
In the months leading up to its launch on December 10, reports surfaced about the Projekt Red team working long and arduous hours to meet the launch deadlines. Almost immediately after the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, console players encountered widespread bugs, frame rate problems and other problems. A week after launch, Sony withdrew Cyberpunk on the PlayStation Store and offered refunds. An investor is suing CD Projekt Red for the unsuccessful launch, and earlier this week, the PC version of the game was available for purchase at almost half its original price.
Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwinski made a mea culpa for the confused launch, saying that despite the generally positive reception for the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077, the console version of the game “did not meet the quality standard we wanted”. The company is planning to release the first major game update next week.
According Bloomberg, CD Projekt Red was still focused on The Witcher 3 When Cyberpunk was announced in 2012. Company executives apparently believed they could repeat the success they had with that game in development Cyberpunk. And in a detail that did not make the final edition of Bloomberg story, Schreier tweeted that the game has changed significantly since it was first announced; until 2016, he says, it was a third-person game.