Cyberpunk 2077 developers admitted to releasing a raw game Low wages, overwork and problematic management

Bloomberg was able to conduct its own investigation into why Cyberpunk 2077 turned out to be a raw game. It turned out that behind a failed start there are a lot of problems within the company: from incorrect planning of release dates to not the best working conditions. All this led to the fact that the Polish company CD Projekt SA has been trying to fix it for a month and a half, but so far it has not been very good at it.

CD Projekt SA CEO Marcin Iwiński explains for the second time in a month

There are, perhaps, two main problems: the development of the engine in parallel with the creation of the game itself and the poor understanding of technical issues on the part of management - marketers and managers did not understand how long it takes to fully create a game. In an anonymous interview with more than 20 current and former CD Projekt employees, they say that already in the first discussions of the game, the company chose to focus on marketing at the expense of development, and the unrealistic release schedule of Cyberpunk 2077 led to the fact that some worked overtime long before the release. ... It should also be said about low salaries: a beginner programmer received only about $ 700 a month. 

According to one of the employees, the developers, based on the state of affairs in 2019, expected the game to be released only in 2022. That is, marketers "sped up" the schedule by more than a year. At the same time, the company did not want to license solutions and technologies that could be licensed in the process of creating Cyberpunk 2077 - instead, they developed them independently. It turned out more expensive and worse than if they used well-debugged analogues.

Another employee described the process of creating Cyberpunk 2077 quite vividly: "Imagine that you are driving a train, in front of which the rails are laid." It's about the parallel creation of the engine and the game itself. In general, it is obvious that the developers involved in the creation of the game clearly understood that Cyberpunk 2077 would be released raw.

What's left now? Correct situations with the help of various patches - instead of starting to expand the game universe of "cyberpunk" or switch resources to the next part of "The Witcher". The head of CD Projekt SA, Marcin Iwinski, promised the next major patch at the end of January, and then, a couple of weeks later, another. He also released a public statement this week, in which he took personal responsibility for the failed start of the game and asked fans not to blame the team. This, by the way, is Iwinski's second apology in a month, which is seen as an attempt to reassure investors. And this is not surprising, because since December 10, amid all the problems of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt shares have fallen by 30%.