Here’s a completely original title that we absolutely haven’t seen repeated consistently in the past two decades: ‘Stuffy suits attempt to elbow their way into the gaming industry with no knowledge and promptly ruin everything’.
Reports are surfacing that the developers working for CD Projekt Red have been grilling executives on how they’re running the ship straight into the rocks with multiple false reports to the public, early releasing of titles, and generally running the name of CD Projekt Red right into the ground.
Another dev asked: Why did the company say the game was complete in January when that wasn't true?
Though Cyberpunk was delayed 3 times, consensus from current and former employees speaking to Bloomberg is that their deadlines — set by management — were always unrealistic.
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) December 18, 2020
The arrival is fury is frankly expected, although it coming from the developers themselves is an interesting twist rather than a rabid fanbase.
When you consider it, however, it makes far more sense than it ought to: the developers’ works are what players around the world are interacting with, and is a lasting contribution to humanity that will be referenced and experienced for decades, if not longer. Such is the life of a work of art.
The executives above the developers, however, are the ones that have to call the shots and talk to the public; there is no way that a developer has any interest in fielding fifty questions a day while trying to figure out save systems or pathing. The disconnect between developers and executives is at an all-time high, reportedly, while developers are frustrated that the mandatory six-day workweek wasn’t enough to fulfill absurd timelines for a rushed title.
Now the very name of the company that these developers have been grinding for is in danger as Sony removes the title completely from the PlayStation store in an unprecedented act while Microsoft attempts to work with the Polish studio to widen their return policy.
It’s a mess, and it’s one that seems to firmly point to incompetent executives attempting to guide a game to fruition without understanding the industry, where the phrase ‘we’ll fix it live’ is a hex with catastrophic consequence.
CD Projekt Red executives are asking pointed questions, and executives are reportedly both flippant and vague in responses: after all, they’re executives and developers are the peasants in this bizarro world of technology married with archaic business practices.
The clamor from a vocal group of gamers to release is frankly a nonfactor: gamers clamor for everything, all the time, and it’s not a precedent that has been set where developers throw their hands in the air and say ‘it’s what they want, let’s ship a fundamentally broken title’.
Now the developers are in a very rough predicament: they either stay with the company and attempt to continue the grinding crunch to bring the game into a playable state far faster than they should, if the title’s release was properly managed, or they shift and try to find new work in the midst of a global pandemic while the frank disaster of Cyberpunk 2077 hangs over their heads.
There is a depth to the Cyberpunk 2077 catastrophe that is both nuanced and concerning for the industry as a whole. Here’s betting that nothing changes.
