Recently, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski came out in a video explaining the behind-the-scenes situation with Cyberpunk 2077. In it, he claimed that company management was not aware of the extend and severity of the game’s bugs. But some employees have said that they knew full well that the game was a mess prior to launch.
The new report comes courtesy of Bloomberg. Over 20 current and former employees have claimed that many of the common problems were discovered. But they didn’t have the time to fix them. They also painted a very unorganised workflow for Cyberpunk 2077.
An example in the report mentions the way the game’s engine was made concurrently with the game itself. One employee described this as driving a train while the tracks are still being laid in front of the train.
Then there’s the issue of Cyberpunk 2077 running on previous-generation consoles. The report states that some engineers saw that the game was too complex to run on seven-year-old consoles. But management dismissed their concerns.
Most damning of all would be the focus that CD Projekt had with Cyberpunk 2077. Interviewed employees say that the company was “focused on marketing at the expense of development”. This went along with the many crunch allegations that we’ve heard countless times before already.
– One CDPR developer told their manager that they didn't want to work overtime, as their CEO had said would be OK. Fine, their manager said, but one of their other coworkers would just have to work extra hours to make up for them. Several other developers shared similar stories
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) January 16, 2021
This is not a good look for CD Projekt, to put it lightly. This is especially when a leading figure in the company has to come out with an apology video of sorts, only for employees to say that those were lies. It’s probably tough for the employees themselves too, having to fix the countless bugs that were identified prior to the game’s release rather than move on to working on something new.
(Source: Bloomberg)
