Cyberpunk 2077 Studio Heads Facing Backlash from Staff

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As if 2020 wasn’t a disappointing enough year already, the release of the highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 had turned out to be a dud, and the game has been removed from the PS Store with refunds offered to people who had purchased the game. While a lot of people online are angry that CD Projekt Red would release something that was clearly incomplete, it’s revealed that the developers who had also worked on the game are mad at the heads for marketing the release poorly.

According to Bloomberg, an ‘internal video meeting’ last week was held with the management apologizing for the poor launch. As it turns out, angry staff members had fired questions at the board for botching the release, one employee asking the board why they said the game was ‘complete and playable’ last January.

If anything, the developers had been boxed into a corner thanks to the marketing of the game, and it was said that the biggest flaw was that the deadlines set by the board of directors ‘were always unrealistic’. Besides the game getting delayed three times, developers were said to have been forced to crunch with mandatory 6-day work weeks just to meet deadlines, and when the game was released, it was still full of bugs.

CD Projekt Red directors were said they would have plans to improve production in the future, but even then they didn’t elaborate on what those plans necessarily are. As of now, it’s said that shares for CDPR are plummeting, and it’s all thanks to Cyberpunk 2077’s poor launch.

While we should expect Cyberpunk 2077 to be fixed well into the next year, it is a disappointment that the game should release under such terrible circumstances. The culture of game development has been a major source of scrutiny lately, and hopefully other studios can learn something about employee exploitation when it comes to this whole fiasco.

Cyberpunk 2077 is now available for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.