CD Projekt Red Execs Apologize And Takes Responsibility For Disastrous Cyberpunk 2077 Launch
a potential fine hanging over CD Projekt Red’s heads, the board have finally released a video apologizing the dismal launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on last-gen consoles and taking responsibility for the whole affair.
“I and the entire leadership team are deeply sorry for this, and this video is me publicly owning up to that,” said CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwinkski. “Please don’t fault any of our teams for what happened. They all are incredibly talented and hard-working. Myself and the board are the final decision-makers, and it was our call to release the game. Although, believe me, we never, ever intended for anything like this to happen.”
The accompanying FAQ also explains one of the main reasons behind the disastrous launch, aside from deciding to ship an obviously unpolished game.
“The main culprit was having to constantly improve our in-game streaming system for old-gen consoles. Streaming is responsible for ‘feeding’ the engine with what you see on screen, as well as the game mechanics. Since the city is so packed and the disk bandwidth of old-gen consoles is what it is, this is something that constantly challenged us.”
CD Projekt Red’s top brass also assured the community that they tested the game on last-gen consoles and didn’t encounter any of the reported issues. “[. . .] Our testing did not show many of the crashes you experienced while playing the game,” they said. “As we got closer to launch, we saw significant improvements each and every day, and we really believed we’d deliver in the final day zero update.”
The studio’s QA team, however, isn’t too thrilled with what appears to be an attempt to implicitly place the blame on them.
Like no, absolutely not. Do not for a second think you can pin this whole thing on QA when in reality I can almost guarantee you they fought to the bitter end to make these problems known and you reacted by saying "ship it now and fix it later". You are NOT getting away with that pic.twitter.com/1dyyD3sOgs
— Robbie Russell (@vApathyv) January 13, 2021
CD Projekt Red’s management also said that they’re currently focused on fixing the bugs, crashes, and other issues that continue to plague the game across all platforms. They also promised to roll out regular updates, the first of which will arrive in the next 10 days. That update will then be followed by a larger and more significant update in the coming weeks.
Free DLCs will also be coming but will have to be placed on the back burner while the developers focus on fixing the game. There’s also a next-gen update planned for the second half of the year.
With all that work ahead of them, the management again promised to avoid crunch time for their employees. “The team is working to bring relevant fixes to the game without any obligatory overtime. Avoiding crunch on all of our future projects is one of our top priorities,” they said.
You can watch the full apology video right after the jump.
