How did Cyberpunk 2077 turn out to be such a disaster and, if you bought it, what should you do now? We examine how self-publishing and the modern games industry’s lack of trust generated a hot mess.
In keeping, I suppose, with the rest of this benighted year, what was supposed to be the games industry’s most triumphant moment of 2020 – the arrival of the year’s most-anticipated game, Cyberpunk 2077 — turned out to be an apparently irredeemable mess. CD Projekt Red’s mega-hyped RPG was so buggy at launch as to be unplayable on the base versions of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which led the developer to offer refunds to consumers attempting to play it on those consoles.
Predictably enough (with scant precedent for such an exercise), a significant amount of those seeking refunds discovered that, in practice, CD Projekt Red’s undoubtedly genuine contrition didn’t immediately bear fruit. Thus, a major PR disaster escalated further, assuming catastrophic proportions.
Reacting with all the alacrity of supertankers, Sony and Microsoft eventually agree to furnish refunds for copies of Cyberpunk 2077 purchased on base Xbox Ones and PS4s via their own digital stores – having flirted with being dragged into CD Projekt Red’s PR nightmare, they extracted themselves in the most grudging and reluctant manner.
So, what should you do if you bought Cyberpunk 2077, but only have a standard PlayStation 4 or Xbox One on which to play it?
Not a surprise
It’s impossible to have any sympathy for CD Projekt Red, since it did all it could to hide the situation from a press whose help it could have enlisted to at least limit the damage. Despite being a Polish company it took a very American-style public relations approach to Cyberpunk 2077: desperately trying to hide the real story, as opposed to seeking to generate as much publicity as possible. The trouble was that the game’s relentless hype had generate a vast store of pre-orders, so the company’s PR efforts just exacerbated the problem.
For journalists, in the run-up to Cyberpunk 2077’s December 10 launch, the shriek of alarm bells built up to a crescendo. But there was no way we could act on our suspicions thanks to CD Projekt Red’s manoeuvrings: as journalists, we are trained to trust only the evidence of our own eyes and research, and speculation is anathema.
A modern industry problem: last-minute review code
CD Projekt Red was able to take advantage of an iniquitous modern trend which is now rife throughout the games industry. Back in the day, it would be routine for journalists to be given preview code of games months before launch, albeit under heavily proscriptive non disclosure agreements, followed later by review code. There was a level of trust between publishers and journalists, and it was useful for not just us and our readership, but also developers and publishers, because we would be able to ascertain the core nature and playability of games, while highlighting particular areas of bugginess for developers, giving them the chance to change elements of their games which weren’t quite right.
Since the advent of influencers and bloggers – mostly unacquainted with journalistic values – the games industry has apparently abandoned its previous trust in journalists (with some exceptions, notably Ubisoft, Microsoft, Capcom and Square Enix among the major players), presumably in favour of those who are more easily fooled and influenced. Small wonder, then, that more games are being released while resembling dogs’ breakfasts – especially when Covid-19 is rendering the QA testing process trickier than usual.
How CD Projekt Red compounded its woes
It’s worth examining the process by which CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077 code to reviewers – if nothing else as a cautionary tale which will hopefully deter other publishers from taking a similar approach (which, alas, they often do these days).
Having registered for review code on Xbox One weeks before Cyberpunk’s launch – a process which, in itself involved plenty of jumping through hoops while filling in online forms – we were met by a deafening silence. That in itself sounded an alarm – you usually get some sort of acknowledgment that you’ve signed your soul away to the devil in return for the prospect of review code.
Then, just before launch, a trickle of first-impression pieces appeared which, it turned out, were all gleaned from PC code which CD Projekt Red had distributed to those lucky enough to possess eye-wateringly expensive gaming rigs. With Cyberpunk shipping on Thursday 10 December, we finally received Xbox One review code on the evening of 8 December. Never mind the lengthy period required to download a 60Gb game via dodgy British broadband, that still didn’t leave enough time – even if we had foregone all thoughts of sleep – to get far enough into the game pre-launch to file anything more substantial than another set of first impressions.
Presuming, that is, that we could actually play it. We were lucky enough to possess an Xbox One X (and an Xbox Series X, but there was no option on CD Projekt Red’s review code form to order code for a Series X). Cyberpunk 2077 proved not to be completely unplayable on the One X – by far the best and most powerful of the previous-gen consoles – although it was still extremely buggy and crashed regularly. We’ve now downloaded it to the Series X, which improves it so immeasurably that it’s almost fun to play. But all thoughts of reviews went out the window – indeed, they remain irrelevant, since any discussion of the game’s merits will still be drowned out by its bugginess.
So what now?
One question should determine what you do next if you only have a base PlayStation 4 or Xbox One for which you have purchased Cyberpunk 2077: how much do you trust CD Projekt Red? In the company’s favour, it’s worth pointing out that The Witcher 3 was pretty buggy when it was first released, but CD Projekt Red worked tirelessly to hone it into the polished masterpiece which it is now. On the other hand, CD Projekt Red’s refusal to distribute anything other than PC review code until milliseconds before the game was unleashed on the public can only serve to undermine any public trust which CD Projekt Red had previously accrued.
Yes, it will patch the game – indeed, it has already; a huge patch went live on 27 December for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, which should at least eliminate the most egregious crash-bugs, and hopefully improve quality overall. Whether it will render Cyberpunk 2077 non-unplayable on those consoles remains to be seen. But it marks the first step on what will surely be a long drawn-out patching process.
If you’re impatient to start playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a base PS4 or Xbox One, but still don’t feel it has been sufficiently patched, one radical solution could be to get a refund, and spend that on playing the game via Google Stadia instead. It’s reputed to work pretty well on that already. You’ll need fast broadband, though: we’ve never been able to check out Stadia because (in London) our broadband is so slow that Google’s streaming service wouldn’t even be able to operate at 1080p.
What went wrong?
Cyberpunk 2077’s launch shoddiness highlighted another problem which is rife in today’s games industry: a massive shift in the power-balance towards marketing departments. When launch dates are dictated by marketing campaigns, that amounts to a recipe for a broken game. CD Projekt Red already pushed Cyberpunk 2077’s launch date back three times (it was originally due for an April launch, then a September one).
Having set that precedent, CD Projekt Red could and should have taken the painful but ultimately sensible decision to push Cyberpunk 2077’s release into 2021. But a company that has shareholders will find its value decimated if it promises to deliver a game in a specific year, then fails to do so. The irony is that there is now talk of a class-action lawsuit against CD Projekt Red, enacted by its shareholders as well as representatives of its customers, resulting from the damage the company’s share price sustained after Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch.
The vast number of pre-orders that Cyberpunk 2077 enjoyed would have added to CD Projekt Red’s reluctance to delay the game until it was at least playable on all platforms – refunds represent the most tangible of financial hits, but it turns out that the developer is going to have to suffer that particular medicine anyway.
Shooting too high, technically
It should be possible to have a certain amount of sympathy for CD Projekt Red when you consider that the game’s problems stem from a certain amount of overambition: it designed a game that is too high-tech to operate on the slowest consoles.
But that argument is a fallacy: any technical director worth their salt should lay down the law to a development team and insist that their game operate comfortably on the lowliest consoles for which it is designed. That’s especially true when those consoles have been on sale for seven years, are at the end of their cycle and whose hardware capabilities are among the better-known things on the entire planet. One would imagine that many heads have rolled in CD Projekt Red’s technical department; if not, you really would fear for the company.
Beware the temptation to self-publish
Another likely contributing factor which nobody else has yet brought up is CD Projekt Red’s lack of a publisher. It chose to self-publish the game – Bandai Namco’s involvement with the game in Europe is as a distributor, rather than a publisher, an arrangement which worked well with The Witcher 3, although when that game launched, Bandai Namco’s involvement appeared to be markedly greater than it was with Cyberpunk 2077.
One thing that external publishers indisputably bring is a layer of production professionals who will happily deliver home truths to developers – such as: “Your game doesn’t work on base PS4s and Xbox Ones: you can’t release it like that.” An extra layer of eyes from the outside will expose precisely the sort of problems that Cyberpunk 2077 suffers from, and at a sufficiently early stage of the development process to do something about them. And even if a nightmare of Cyberpunk 2077 proportions somehow slips through the net, publishers’ much more advanced and established PR departments will have a much better idea of how to mitigate the damage. As it is, Cyberpunk 2077 stands as perhaps the games industry’s greatest ever monument to the potential pitfalls of self-publishing.
