Cognition Dissemination: The Wrong Lessons Will Be Learned from Cyberpunk 2077

To merely say that CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 had one of the messiest launches in video game history feels like an understatement, given the sheer amount of drama that’s happened around it.

All of the problems it arrived with are tough to remember from memory. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions perform as bad as expected on the base console variants, and patches thus far have done little to improve them — if they can be improved. All the current versions arrived in such glitchy states that it undoubtedly made even Bethesda’s development studios blush.

Not to mention the litany of misleading and outright false promises made during its marketing campaign, which gave the impression that the marketing team promoted a different game. One of the key demos that led to people boarding the hype train was completely fake, an explanation for why several features shown in it were neutered for the final product if they made it at all. Everything remains a total mess even one month later, as class-action lawsuits are just getting started, but within this disaster lies lessons for the future for developers, publishers, and the gaming audience.

None of them will be learned, however, by anyone involved. Cyberpunk 2077 is hardly the first game to launch in a messy state, and there is zero chance that it will be the last. Instead, alternate lessons will be taken from publishers, and none will be the advice the erudite gaming audience want them to note. This will get worse.

Cyberpunk 2077 launched with a litany of problems the game is largely still beset with, only a few of which I laid out above. CD Projekt Red is assuredly working on patches for the worst problems alongside the next-gen console versions, though not all the problems. Again, it’s an open question as to whether the current-gen versions can be fixed. But you can bet that the company’s management is doing the mental version of diving into a pool of coins, Scrooge McDuck style. The launch was so heavily criticized that it caused retailers to adjust their refund policies to accommodate this game. Sony also pulled it from sale on PlayStation Network and, as of this writing, still hasn’t made it available again. Yet even after taking all that into account, it still sold 13 million copies at launch.

Management has seen those stellar sales numbers, and they will care about little else. It might even be enough money to weather the lawsuits still coming their way. All other efforts will be to save face, to promise those who purchased and didn’t refund it that they are very sorry and they’re trying to fix it.

This is, wouldn’t you know it, exactly what CDPR co-founder Marcin Iwiński did in his video address, in which he provided a sort of roadmap for when it will be polished. He also detailed why the last-gen console versions turned out the way they did without acknowledging how they lied about its quality, and noted how the next-gen versions have been delayed until the second half of the year. There’s no acknowledgement of marketing overselling the game’s features. While crunch issues are addressed in how Iwiński says they won’t force the developers to do so for this particular upgrade, there’s no mention of how they were forced to meet unrealistic deadlines during the main development cycle. The video was enough damage control to satisfy a certain ardent audience, but nothing more.

Part of the reason for Cyberpunk 2077’s success involved how CDPR’s marketing managed to animate the worst gamers on the internet with its edgelord campaign. Videos showed off how hardcore and cool the game itself would be, which isn’t too much of a problem. The bigger issue came from their behavior on social media, particularly Twitter, in which they cracked jokes that elated the worst people in our ongoing culture war.

They never specifically embraced the alt-right types, but that’s not necessary when they can crack enough transphobic jokes and expressions of insensitivity to indicate whose side they’re taking. The social media manager was (and is) also smitten with Elon Musk, who himself fits the definition of a cyberpunk villain and has now become the most annoying person on Twitter now that they’ve finally banned Donald Trump. Some among this audience are feeling burned by the main game, but expect plenty more of them to defend CDPR no matter what happens. That’s just how culture wars work.

The history of recent entertainment works has shown us that if a particular product disappoints an audience, that can be reflected in the sales of a future product regardless of its reception. The words “can be” are important there, because it doesn’t always happen. Bethesda suffered no setbacks with their internally-developed games on Sony platforms despite several of their PlayStation 3 RPGs flat-out not working after players progressed far enough in them. Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and especially The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim were broken on the system, but their audience was, fortunately for Bethesda, the forgiving type. The same is could happen with CDPR, doubly so if they work their marketing magic and again animate the internet’s hives of scum and villainy for their next project.

Anyone reading this or following video games online should be mindful of how hype cycles work. Cyberpunk 2077 was the most visible example of one that went very horribly awry, but again, it’s hardly the only example. It wasn’t even the only game in recent memory to have a fake demo to excite the audience, another key example being Bioware’s Anthem — a game within the lengthy process of being redesigned from the ground up.

There are situations where pitiful initial releases can lead to improved versions that match the original promise. Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky is one of the best examples of this triumph. But it’s difficult to get the impression that this will happen here with management not admitting to the biggest faults. Studio head Adam Badowski instead attacked the press following the posting of a new Bloomberg piece about its trouble development, which says more about how they’ll carry on from here than anything. It speaks volumes about the pitiful management at CDPR that a whopping 20 employees went on the record to speak about how poorly handled the production process was. It’s all edgelord all the time for these people.

This isn’t to say the game won’t be improved in the future — it will. But for it to receive the improvements it needs, and for CDPR to continue as a better company from here, they need to examine their problems and change how they work. If they don’t, we’ll (and I’ll) be right back here writing about how developers were exploited and how people fell for yet another misleading marketing cycle.