Cyberpunk 2077's Free Trial Is An Admittance Of The Game's Failure

thegamer.com:

Remember when Cyberpunk 2077 was the biggest game in the world? After the unparalleled success of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt it seemed CD Projekt Red was unable to fail, sitting atop the world with a pompous confidence that would inevitably be its downfall.

The original launch in December 2020 was a disaster. Sure it sold millions of copies and the PC experience was masterful with the right hardware, but the console versions that the majority of players had been waiting for performed terribly and were riddled with so many unforgivable bugs that wading through the mediocrity just wasn’t worth it. Some soldiered through, while others decided to wait for patches and the inevitable next-gen version.

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I’ve written before that a comeback on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S to rebrand the game is already far too late. Gamers are fickle creatures, and having them change their spots is something that only happens once in a blue moon. Cyberpunk 2077 remains a meme, a stain on the legacy of CD Projekt Red that will haunt the studio forever. And so it has, because the long-awaited update’s release arrived with an unexpected whimper.

Yesterday saw the company hold a stream which was essentially a Zoom call alongside a continuous stream of live gameplay. I appreciate the honesty on display here, largely because Cyberpunk 2077 doomed itself to failure thanks to a marketing cycle defined by misleading demos and overblown trailers as opposed to allocating resources to actually finishing the game that was subject to continuous delays.

It’s a refreshing perspective to take, but one that only serves to highlight what this RPG should have been at launch, and how the development