CD Projekt reflects on Cyberpunk’s launch: ‘It became cool to dislike it’
Reflecting on Cyberpunk 2077‘s troubled launch, CD Projekt‘s comms boss has argued that the game received some overly harsh criticism when it was first released.
While acknowledging that the game needed to be improved when it first arrived in 2020, Michał Platkow-Gilewski told GamesIndustry.biz he believes it deserved a better reception than the one it received, and suggested that some people jumped on the bandwagon to criticise it because it was fashionable to do so.
“I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive,” he said. “Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast.
“That was the tough moment. We didn’t know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff. That took us a lot of time, but I don’t believe we were ever broken. We were always like: Let’s do this.”
Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most highly-anticipated games of the last console generation, but things went badly wrong for CD Projekt when it finally arrived in late 2020.
After three delays, the highly anticipated RPG released for PC and consoles with a host of technical problems, resulting in refunds being offered, the game being pulled from the PlayStation Store, and CD Projekt facing lawsuits alleging it misled investors over the quality of the title.
Following six months of patches designed to improve the game, it returned to Sony’s online marketplace in June 2021, when CD Projekt said it believed Cyberpunk 2077‘s performance had reached a “satisfying” level.
CD Projekt is currently preparing to launch Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion in September,
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