It’s no mystery that the launch of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 has kind of been a disaster, and the bugs had gotten so bad that PlayStation was forced to remove the game from their digital store. While a lot of people have been ranting and poking fun at Cyberpunk, the CDPR board of directors are facing backlash from another branch of people—its own developers.
As per Bloomberg, an ‘internal video meeting’ was held at CDPR after the PlayStation announcement, with management apologizing for how the launch went down. During the conference, it was said that several angry staff members had made clear at their disappointment with the directors, with one employee asking why the board would announce to the public that the game was ‘complete and playable’ last January.
For context, Cyberpunk 2077 was expected to come out in the middle of the year, and after three delays, it finally launched this month, but the game was still so buggy and was virtually unplayable on last-gen consoles like the PS4. While on the surface it sounds like a few patches could deal with the problems, we have to take note that the studio had forced the developers to crunch the last legs of the game, with some allegedly forced to take 6-day work weeks.
Ultimately, the complaints were saying that the board was completely unrealistic with their deadlines, and that’s why the game came out as such a buggy mess, even with all the crunch that the devs had done.
Conversations about crunch have been going around a lot recently—not just with CDPR—and it has been revealed that several developers have been forced to work in incredibly terrible conditions, all in the name of releasing a game on time. While I do think that Cyberpunk can still be fixed by 2021, this should serve as a cautionary tale for the industry, and hopefully open up rules to avoid these kinds of work conditions in the future.
For now, Cyberpunk 2077 is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.