The management of CD Projekt Red has taken responsibility for the rocky launch of Ciberpunk 2077 on state-of-the-art consoles.
The long-awaited title finally hit PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One last week after multiple delays and mandatory crisis cases, and has already recovered its development and marketing costs.
However, despite this apparent commercial success, many players (especially those of the latest generation base consoles) have been affected by a series of frequent errors and failures, which led CD Projekt to offer refunds to those who consider that the title did not meet expectations.
During a conference call to address this polarizing release, CD Projekt’s joint general manager Adam Kicinski explained that the board is to blame for the situation. He said they were too focused on getting the title off the shelves after three delays, and also “underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues” affecting the Xbox One and PS4 game versions.
“We ignored the signals about the need for extra time to refine the game on state-of-the-art base consoles,” Kicinski said, opening the call with sincere admission. “It was a wrong approach and against our business philosophy. Also, during the campaign we showed the game mainly on computers.
“This led to the loss of confidence of the players and the reputation that we have been acquiring for much of our lives. Therefore, our first steps are focused solely on recovering these two things. We focus on solving Cyberpunk on state-of-the-art consoles. “
During part of the calls, Kicinski also indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic affected certain aspects of production, but that ultimately these factors, which included a decrease in the number of external verifiers, were not a “primary source” of problems. .
Interestingly, when we were asked if the board was too preoccupied with the launch Cyberpunk and subsequently ignored clear issues, Michal Nowakowski, the board member responsible for publishing, seemed to contradict Kicinski’s earlier statement by suggesting that the study felt no additional pressure to launch on the date.
That said, Nowakowski reiterated that the company “didn’t spend enough time” looking at the versions of the game for PS4 and Xbox One, adding that those versions allegedly passed the certification because Sony and Microsoft “trusted that we would fix it.” things after the release. “
“It’s more about looking at, as said above, the performance of the PC and the new generation rather than the current generation,” they explained. “We definitely didn’t spend enough time looking at it. I wouldn’t say we felt any internal or external pressure to start it on the date, other than the normal pressure, which is typical of any release. So that wasn’t the cause. .
“As for the certification process and third parties, that’s definitely on our side. I can only assume they were confident that we’ll fix things after the launch and that obviously they didn’t come together exactly as we had anticipated.”
Later, in the area of questions and answers, the other CEO of CD Projekt, Marcin Iwinski, also withdrew against the notion that the company did not show the title running on base consoles to fool players, with some The Polish studio deliberately retained the console review codes and game images to keep them in the dark.
“As for not showing the console version, we’ve actually shown the images on the console, but never on the latest generation consoles. The reason is that we’ve been updating the game on the latest generation consoles until at the last minute and we thought we would arrive on time, ”Iwinski commented.
“Unfortunately, this resulted in giving it to the reviewers just a day before the release, which was definitely too late and the media didn’t get a chance to review it properly. That wasn’t intended; we’re fixing the game until the last moment “.
There’s more interesting news in the full transcript, so be sure to check it out here if you want to learn more about what turns out to be one of the busiest releases of the year.