Uprising is in the air at the Polish video game publisher CD Projekt SA after the company’s highly anticipated, and three-time delayed, latest title was released with scathing glitch reviews.
Frustrated and angry staff fired questions at the board during an internal video meeting on Thursday that opened with management apologizing for Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch, two attendees said. It was a fitting atmosphere for a company whose slogan, plastered all over the Warsaw office, is “We are rebels.”
Developers asked blunt questions about the company’s reputation, the game’s unrealistic deadlines, and relentless overtime in the months and years leading up to until the game’s release on December 10.
The meeting took place earlier Sony Corp. is shocking announcement that it is pulling Cyberpunk 2077 off the PlayStation Store and will offer a full refund to any customer who requests it. During the staff meeting, CD Projekt’s directors said they had made an arrangement with Sony but did not provide details. In a Twitter post on Friday, the company said that “following our conversation with PlayStation, a decision has been made to temporarily suspend digital distribution” of the game.
A spokeswoman for CD Projekt said the company would not comment on internal meeting discussions.
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the biggest games of the year and has been a financial success, with more than 8 million pre-orders and excellent sales records for PC games. But players have found the game full of bugs, especially on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles of the last generation, making CD Projekt shares plummeting and leading fans and critics to describe Cyberpunk 2077 as incomplete. CD Projekt’s stock fell 12% in Warsaw on Friday, underscoring a steady decline this month that wiped out gains for the year.
During the development of Cyberpunk 2077, staff have had to endure multiple periods of extended overtime, including mandatory overtime six days to finish the game, Bloomberg reports. When asked about this crunch time in the Q&A, the directors said they had plans to improve production practices in the future, but they didn’t, according to one person who was there.
An employee asked the board why it said in January that the game was “complete and playable” when it was not true, to which the board replied that it would take responsibility. Another developer asked if the directors of CD Projekt felt it was hypocritical to make a game about exploiting companies expecting their employees to work overtime. The answer was vague and noncommittal.
Many industry observers have wondered why Cyberpunk 2077, which was first announced in 2012 and delayed three times in 2020, still seems unfinished. Several current and former employees who worked on Cyberpunk 2077 have all said the same thing: the game’s deadlines, set by the board of directors, have always been unrealistic. It was clear to many developers that they needed more time.
– With the assistance of Konrad Krasuski