The games industry appears not to have learned anything from Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, as CD Projekt paints itself as the victim.
In December of 2020, and after many delays, , perhaps the most anticipated game of that year, finally launched. However, what should’ve been a cause for celebration from fans and developer CD Projekt, quickly turned into one of the biggest controversies the games industry has ever seen.
To put things bluntly, Cyberpunk 2077 was a mess. While it still sold well, it was riddled with bugs and performance issues across every version, with verging on unplayable.
Thanks to a string of updates, the launch of the and Series X/S versions, and the tie-in Netflix series, CD Projekt has managed to salvage both it and the game’s reputations. Yet the company now wants you to think all the bad press wasn’t actually warranted.
Speaking in a new interview, CD Projekt’s vice president of PR and communication Michał Platkow-Gilewski discussed the challenges of dealing with so much negative feedback and working to earn fans’ trust again.
While we don’t doubt that a lot of work went into fixing things, and it’s better to see the game thrive now than remain an embarrassing mess, Platkow-Gilewski acts as if the initial negativity was somehow unfair.
‘I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive,’ he tells . ‘Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn’t know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff.’
This is doubly-disingenuous on the part of Platkow-Gilewski, because the early reviews, including ours, were only for the PC version, which was less problematic than the console editions. CD Projekt refused to send early review copies of the console versions, implying they already knew exactly how bad they were.
Elsewhere, Platkow-Gilewski insists that CD Projekt has learned its lessons from the whole furore, but his petulant comments suggest otherwise.
The interview doesn’t read like someone regretting that the company let Cyberpunk 2077 launch in the state it did. Instead, it presents CD Projekt as a victim and a target of unfair hate, while labelling its critics as playground bullies only picking on it because everyone else was.
Obviously, any harassment or abuse CD Projekt staff received over the game was uncalled for, but that doesn’t seem to be what Platkow-Gilewski is talking about anyway. The game simply did not work. A fact the company was clearly aware of since it refused to show it running on consoles before launch.
It’s not as if this was a situation contained to social media. Cyberpunk 2077’s launch was so disastrous that it was making headlines everywhere. CD Projekt had to . Sony, in an unprecedented move, from its digital storefronts. Even the company’s own investors were .
This wasn’t a video game being unduly picked on by armchair critics; this was a major company forcing an unfinished product out the door, hoping no one would notice and then suffering the ramifications.
The saddest part is that what should’ve been an industry-wide warning fell on deaf ears. While there’s yet to be a video game launch quite as bad as Cyberpunk 2077’s, there has still been many publishers making the exact same mistake.
Microsoft’s quickly earned a poor reputation for , Konami’s was an absolute joke that’s only saving grace was that it was free, and the PC port of was simply embarrassing, especially as it came hot on the heels of a very successful TV show adaptation.
PC ports in general have been awful for at least a year now. It’s got to the point where PC players expect them to be bad, with many already preparing themselves for .
Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption story may have had a happy ending for CD Projekt, but the opportunity for the whole games industry to learn a valuable lesson has been lost. As such, it falls to the public to keep the memory of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch alive, while CD Projekt tries to sweep it under the carpet.
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