How CD Projekt Red Squandered A Decade of Good Will
If you had asked me back in March, I’d have listed CD Projekt Red as one of my favorite game developers in the industry. From the beginning of January, I played through The Witcher, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, including the “Hearts of Stone” and “Blood and Wine” DLC story additions. This three-month long journey exposed me to some of the greatest writing I have encountered in video games and introduced me to some of my favorite characters in fiction. With this highly esteemed impression towards CD Projekt Red’s work, I was able to think back at the Cyberpunk 2077 presentation at E3 2019 – who could forget Keanu Reeves’ appearance? – and buy into the hype surrounding the forthcoming game. If I had known the countless ways that CD Projekt Red would squander their sterling reputation throughout 2020, I’d have never given Cyberpunk 2077 a modicum of attention.
Sometimes change happens slowly, then all at once. I feel this is largely true of how my opinion of CD Projekt Red has changed throughout 2020. It didn’t bother me when Cyberpunk was delayed into April of 2020. My general ethos towards game delays is that you should never announce a specific release day until the game has gone gold and is ready to ship, but that if the game doesn’t meet the target deadline, delay the game so as to not crunch (i.e. overwork) employees. CD Projekt Red did seemingly everything within its power to grind up against my ethos on this issue.
Not only did Cyberpunk get pushed back from 2019 to April 2020, it proceeded to be delayed three additional times – the final delay being roughly two weeks to improve its performance on the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, the platforms for which the game was (ostensibly) initially built. These three postponements delayed Cyberpunk 2077 for more than a year. After watching extensive gameplay, reading reviews, and catching glimpses throughout my Twitter feed for a week, it became clear that Cyberpunk 2077 was not ready to release despite those unprecedented delays. We’ll cycle back to the fact that this game needed more time in the oven.
Crunch Culture: Innumerable Delays
I couldn’t stop myself from audibly groaning every time I encountered one of the dreadfully yellow press releases that coincided with each Cyberpunk delay. Each time I saw that yellow banner, I groaned not for myself – who, at the time, had the game pre-ordered and was eager to play – but for the developers who were directly affected by each delay. In May of 2019, CD Projekt Red told reporter Jason Schreier that the development team on CD Projekt Red wouldn’t enforce mandatory crunch on the game before release – a shockingly uncommon policy for an industry that prides itself on overwork. This interview, however, was prior to the initial delay from the announced 2019 release date for Cyberpunk 2077.
After the first delay, it became clear that Cyberpunk’s development was not going as planned. Either they encountered major setbacks along the way, tripped over their own ambition, or simply had a management team whose incompetence cannot be overstated. The situation seems to be a mixture of all three possibilities. Whatever the case may be, the interminable series of release date delays came at a very human cost: the social and emotional lives of these employees. Furthermore, these employees didn’t learn about these delays until the general public did. As these ugly yellow announcements went live on Twitter and the public reacted, the endlessly-crunching developers learned of this disheartening news for the first time.
What formerly was a promise to protect humane working conditions and avoid crunch became what is known in the industry as a “deathmarch” towards the ever-moving goalpost of release dates. You have to take a moment to imagine what it is like for the employees on the front lines, receiving this disheartening news. Most developers sort of accept some crunch as intrinsic to the game development process. (I say most because some of the industry’s leading indie developers are regularly outspoken against the issue. In fact, one of 2020’s Game of the Year contenders, Hades, was marked by a development cycle that repudiated crunch entirely.) But the manner in which crunch was covertly (and overtly) forced upon the developers under CD Projekt Red’s management is immoral and unacceptable. Every deadline carried a promise of relief from crunch; every delay carried a guarantee of more to endure.
The Ineffectiveness of Crunch
There’s also the lateral issue that crunch is not only inhumane but ineffective. It is a generally accepted ethos within indie spheres of the industry that crunching actually makes game developers worse at their job. Whether through fatigue or burnout, more errors are made under conditions of crunch than without. When the management is this ineffective so as to produce a deathmarch of crunch, the tradeoff between shipping a game by its release date and creating errors that can be patched out later is too lucrative, especially considering the 8+ million pre-orders of Cyberpunk that have already allowed CD Projekt to recoup on their investment into the game’s development. Whether or not this is an ethical business practice doesn’t address the issue that crunch makes games worse, not better. It’s like trying to sod a yard while someone is actively seeding weeds behind you. Sure, the soil is covered, but it won’t grow and thrive as intended.
Which returns us to the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 was released in a broken and unfinished state – despite an unprecedented series of delays. Virtually every review that dropped on the embargo date devoted a significant amount of time describing bugs and glitches in Cyberpunk 2077. Each review contained ubiquitous mentions of physics glitches, broken questlines, and even crashing the hardware (not to mention software crashes) of the people playing. We learned soon after these reviews dropped – however glowing or critical – that 100% of embargoed review copies were played on PC. So, in other words, people were only able to review Cyberpunk 2077 on the highest end hardware, leading to reviews that were unrepresentative of the proper experience as it exists on older hardware, notably consoles.
When people started posting console footage of Cyberpunk 2077, I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. There were rumors and reports, not to mention a final press release with the delay after CD Projekt Red celebrated the game going gold (which means the final build of the game is ready to print on retail units for distribution), that one of the major setbacks that the team was having was optimizing the game on previous-gen hardware (i.e. Xbox One, Playstation 4). The messaging around the previous-gen hardware came solely from CD Projekt Red, who were quoted by GamesRadar as saying Cyberpunk 2077 ran “surprisingly well” on then-current consoles. This has been nowhere close to the case, even now that some major issues from launch have been patched out.
Releasing a Broken Game on Playstation 4 and Xbox One
Some of the problems that console players were experiencing, at least those like myself who have been unsuccessful in acquiring a next-gen console due to lack of supply, are issues that should have never passed Sony’s or Microsoft’s certification requirements. Indie games have been turned down for lesser issues. Basic issues like frame rate, texture mapping, pop-in, resolution dips, and the plethora of aforementioned bugs, plague the game. The situation is so poor that CD Projekt Red released an apologetic press statement as of the day of this writing, the wording of which sparked my need to share these thoughts. The press statement begins:
“First of all, we would like to start by apologizing to you for not showing the game on base last-gen consoles before it premiered and, in consequence, not allowing you to make a more informed decision about your purchase. We should have paid more attention to making it play better on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.”
In their first line, CD Projekt Red admits to one of the shadiest and scummiest actions I have seen from a gaming company – apart from the likes of EA, Ubisoft, or Activision – in a long while. CD Projekt admits that they were completely deceptive with their marketing for the game on the console generation for which they began development (and marketed the game!) in the first place. By limiting all review copies to PC instead of console – the place where the game needed (and needs) the most work – CD Projekt Red disingenuously narrowed the lens through which reviewers could inform consumers, completely omitting footage that accurately captured the state of the game they released on December 10th. (Also of note, reviewers were not allowed to even show their own PC footage of Cyberpunk 2077 until the game released.)
The second line of this press release equivocates the console issue entirely, because they explicitly stated in their final delay’s announcement that the game was being delayed specifically to optimize performance across multiple platforms. What really should be said here instead is that they apologize for lying to their consumer base, or at least deliberately obfuscating the truth, and rushed the game out anyway for unstated reasons: their investors. (It’s worth noting that CD Projekt’s stock has dropped precipitously since the game’s release.)
The rest of the press release continues to apologize and promise that the Playstation 4 and Xbox One versions would be improved in future patches. They explicitly promise a patch in January and follow-up patch in February. (Is that really enough time to fix everything wrong with the game? I think not.) But therein lies the rub. Sure, I’m happy that people who purchased Cyberpunk on past-gen consoles are going to receive support that improves their user experience. But I am haunted by the notion that, in this industry where a unfinished product can be sold and then patched, crunch begets more crunch.
In my initial draft for this article, I bent over backwards to suggest that CD Projekt Red did the right thing by offering refunds for dissatisfied players on those storefronts, but I’ve had to update this piece before publication because they haven’t even gotten that right. Though CD Projekt Red explicitly said dissatisfied players could obtain refunds through Sony’s and Microsoft’s storefronts, they have in fact struck no such agreement with either company prior to their apologetic press release, and now countless players who purchased Cyberpunk digitally are being turned away and are stuck with the game, receiving hollow auto-replies that CD Projekt Red will instead eventually patch the game to improve their overall experience.
I worry, amongst all this talk of fixing a broken game, that most people on the consumer side of this equation forget about the aforementioned deathmarch that employees have endured up until this point. What this promise of January and February patches belies is the fact that the crunch did not end on December 10th. They’ve got, publicly at least, two more months to grind away at the game in the same tired way they’ve done for over a year while crunching. In choice words, developer Rami Ismail summarized my thoughts precisely regarding this issue.
Why I Cancelled My Pre-Order of Cyberpunk 2077
I feel like I need to take a deep breath at this point in the article to make a few things clear. First, I had Cyberpunk 2077 pre-ordered since June of 2019. I cancelled my pre-order in November of 2020. I will not be purchasing this game any time soon for a number of reasons that are adjacent to everything I’ve described in this article thus far.
I find it unforgivable that CD Projekt Red executives publicly promised to preserve and protect humane working conditions, proceeded not to, and backpedaled when held to public scrutiny. Notably, I recall the callous and flippant remarks of co-CEO Adam Kicinski, who tried to argue that crunch conditions weren’t “that bad” before privately apologizing to employees in the company. I know that boycotting this release won’t make a dime of difference in CD Projekt’s coffers, but the balance between personal beliefs and actions has to be struck somewhere. Excessive, unrelenting crunch was enough for me to take a moral stance against it, however insignificant my action might be.
But then reports about this game’s racism and transphobia started surfacing. Let’s start with the issue of transphobia, because it most directly affects me and is something I am passionate about. Readers of Epilogue will know that I came out as transgender in the fall of this year, just to get that out of the way, so I am obviously invested. One of my favorite games writers, Stacey Henley, extensively covered the instances of transphobia in Cyberpunk – from imagery in the game to the marketing around the game itself. Every bit of trans representation, down to the character creator itself, is deserving of severe scrutiny. As with crunch, I had to ask myself a similar question: can I square my moral beliefs with my actions as a consumer of this video game?
Then there’s the problematic at best, racist at worst, stereotypes plaguing specifically Japanese characters and culture in the game. In an excellent piece for Wired, George Yang explores the idea of “techno-orientalism” and how Cyberpunk 2077 unimaginatively reinforces harmful attitudes and stereotypes towards eastern Asian people. I am far from an expert on the Asian-American experience, but the fact that the game lacks any neutral accents and instead relies on thick Japanese accents for all of its Asian characters is unimaginative (and crass) at best. This goes deeper than a surface level critique given the hostile and aggressive portrayal of Japanese culture at every relevant plot point throughout the game.
The Downfall of CD Projekt Red’s Reputation
When I think of how much my attitude towards Cyberpunk 2077, and by extension CD Projekt Red, has changed over the past two years, it’s a stark contrast. From the “breathtaking” moment at E3 2019 to the video series of Night City Wire, I had every reason to hype up the game. My love of their work with the Witcher series felt like enough to justify any misstep. But as I have paid attention this year, CD Projekt Red’s inhumane working conditions, their boldfaced lies to consumers, and their callous disregard towards how their media presence has harmfully impacted minorities have completely tarnished this game for me.
I have even lost respect for GOG, CD Projekt’s storefront, which is often heralded as the DRM-free alternative to Steam or the Epic store. Notwithstanding GOG’s history of needlessly edgy social media posts, the issue in question that diminished my view of their services surrounds an indie game. Two days after the press release that caused me to write this article, GOG announced early in the morning that they would be bringing Devotion to their store. Devotion, a Taiwanese horror game from 2019, was unceremoniously ripped off Steam store for an in-game meme comparing Chinese president Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh, and has been unavailable since. Our own Emilia Rose covered this game on her podcast last year, which had me enticed to play it myself.
When the news was announced that Devotion was coming to a storefront where you could once again legally purchase it, I joined the rest of games Twitter to espouse my joy! But before noon on the same day, the official GOG account, vaguely citing “messages from gamers” as their reason, suddenly decided to reverse this decision. Devotion would not be receiving a release after all. Immediately, this tweet was set ablaze.
It’s immensely disappointing to see what had been an otherwise stalwart defender of consumers bow to “messages from gamers” (i.e. the same political pressure that got Devotion removed from Steam in the first place). Within minutes, I was seeing comparisons to how Blizzard tanked their reputation with the Blitzchung situation last year – except CD Projekt seems to be speedrunning their downfall, tarnishing their reputation within a single week. For all of GOG’s edgy marketing, not to mention Cyberpunk‘s thematic recalcitrance to authority, it seems CD Projekt has no spine to speak of.
Yet another insidious practice by CD Projekt Red that has been brought to light in the wake of Cyberpunk 2077’s release is the manipulative terms with which the company had initially established terms for employee bonuses. They would only be receiving their promised bonuses – again, think of the psychological reality of crunching on the front lines of development for well over a year – if the game earned a 90 or above on Metacritic. In a leaked email, the management at CD Projekt have since walked back this promise. But when financial stability and success depends on factors out of your control, like Metacritic, and the only way you feel like you can control it is by working harder and longer hours, it cannot be a healthy work environment. You cannot undo those months and years of stress.
The whole situation reminds me of the revolting story of Bethesda when they published Fallout: New Vegas, which infamously fell one point shy of 85 on Metacritic – the number that the developers needed to earn to receive additional compensation for their work on the game. Developers should not be financially punished for the opinions of professional critics. Nor should a reviewer have to worry about how their score affects the financial lives of game developers – yet another reason why I applaud large outlets like Eurogamer and Polygon from dropping scores from their reviews entirely.
Astounding Problems That Escaped QA
I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the game just looks… bad? I’ll admit that I’m no fan of first person perspectives in video games. With the exception of VR, I cannot think of a single game I’ve played where I preferred the first person perspective. With Cyberpunk, everything from the melee to the gunplay to the driving looks bland and awkward. There are undoubtedly some cool tricks that the game is able to pull off using this perspective, like jump cutting rapidly between scenes or zipping along a shootout car chase sequence. But all things considered, it is glaringly obvious that Cyberpunk is CD Projekt Red’s first foray into first person perspectives.
Furthermore, it seems that CD Projekt Red didn’t learn a thing from their experience overhauling The Witcher 3 – a game I revere but that endured a similar cycle of unending crunch and then frequent post-release patches. Basic things like accessibility settings have been completely ignored, with no option for basic features like keybinding and text size scaling. I have yet to hear anyone praise the in-game menu system for its visual presentation or ease of navigation. Thinking back on each of the Witcher games, it’s appalling that CD Projekt Red has somehow regressed in this regard.
Liana Ruppert of Game Informer famously alerted the public to the fact that the main story of Cyberpunk included a seizure-inducing sequence of red and white flashing lights, severely risking her and other photosensitive players’ health. CD Projekt Red didn’t even have a warning about this seizure-inducing moment anywhere in the game. They’ve since added a warning after immense public pressure – but it’s worth noting that there are no in-game options to avoid this sequence.
Within hours of her reporting for Game Informer, a disgusting mob came after Ruppert for reporting on this issue, spamming her with videos intended to instigate additional seizures on her part. It was a moment where every games journalist I follow was in her mentions, wishing her safety and health. It was also a moment of reflection. This is a slice of gaming culture, or at least, the culture that CD Projekt has actively created through their marketing and social media. I feel nothing but disgust at this point. Surely a company cannot be blamed for the extreme actions of their fan base, but I have never seen such a toxic fanbase for a game – even considering the most fraught discourse of the year in The Last of Us Part II.
Will CD Projekt Red Learn From Their Mistakes?
You are not a bad person if you bought and played Cyberpunk 2077. But I cannot purchase and play this game – at least right now – in good conscience. I have enjoyed the endless articles on the game, cracked a smile at some bizarre Easter eggs like the BB from Death Stranding in Cyberpunk, and most of all laughed at all of the absurdly broken glitches and bugs shared all over Twitter. But at the same time, I have listened to the marginalized voices who have spoken up about some of the problems I have outlined here, and I am choosing to hold CD Projekt Red to the same standard that I hold other publishers. I’m sure this game will be a lot better to play in a year, and maybe that’s when I decide to play it – either used on console or heavily discounted on PC – to join the critical conversation.
I also don’t intend to beat down on this game just because it is broken on consoles. There are a number of reasons why Cyberpunk 2077 initially met a 90 score on Metacritic, and I don’t doubt that there are some incredibly impressive moments throughout the experience. Coming from a team that worked on one of my favorite games of all time in The Witcher 3, this whole situation feels unfortunate. I wish we could hit the reset button. But since we can’t, I think it is worth being stubborn to uphold the values that I believe in, especially when the game in question is supposedly about speaking truth to power.
As I wind down these thoughts, I want to reiterate something that Gary Kings shared on Twitter that feels summative of my approach to this situation with Cyberpunk 2077 and CD Projekt Red. The idea is that I am cognizant of the fact that boycotts don’t (generally) work. Here is how Kings continues the Twitter thread:
“If you boycott, do it for you, as an exercise of your own values. But if you really wanna hurt these egotists, attack their reputation. Make it so that every conversation about their work, praise or criticism, is also a conversation about their transgressions. Their working conditions, their transphobia, ableism, racism. Make that stink follow their every achievement, every award, every 9/10, until they fix it. CDPR were NEVER worried this game wouldn’t sell, and yet at one point they felt the need to reach out to press to declare they wouldn’t crunch this time. That turned out not to be true, obviously, but the fact that they reached out betrays what they care about: reputation.”
And that’s what I needed to address here: CD Projekt Red’s reputation. Never has a developer fallen so far from grace in my eyes. Never has a developer that I care about made so many seemingly uncharacteristic moves in one year. Never have I felt my enthusiasm for a game completely fizzle out and die in such a short span of time. Like Kratos says to Atreus in God of War, I don’t want CD Projekt Red to be sorry, I want them to be better. This press release promising patches and fixes isn’t good enough because it reveals that they didn’t learn the lessons of crunch. How could they, when investors are tapping their watches and they have probably the most pre-ordered game of all time in their stable?
Something deep in my gut doesn’t believe that CD Projekt Red has any reason to improve their horrible practices unless people like me who adore their other games speak up. I have no doubt that CD Projekt Red will patch up Cyberpunk 2077 – at least on PC and new consoles. That will take time. But no amount of patching will be enough to make me forget their transgressions. CD Projekt Red will have to do a hell of a lot more than fix the game they said was finished for me to buy one of their games ever again.
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