The costs of buggy game launches are mounting | Opinion
Rob Fahey
Contributing Editor
Friday 18th February 2022
Fans of dystopian futures, rejoice; a mere 15 months after Cyberpunk 2077 launched to the clamorous noise of an orchestra playing a fanfare suddenly falling down a well, the formerly much anticipated game is now, supposedly, actually playable.
An enormous patch released this week fixed countless bugs and brought with it the oft-delayed versions of the game for what are now the thoroughly current-generation consoles; watching the lengthy stream in which developers CD Projekt Red introduced the new patch, there was some palpable tension between wanting to be celebratory over what has undoubtedly been a pretty intense year of development work, and trying to strike an apologetic tone over a patch that really only brings the game up to the basic level of functioning consumers are entitled to expect from a full-price AAA game.
Cyberpunk 2077's latest patch means it's finally in a shippable state... 15 months after release
Meanwhile, Electronic Arts is having a problem with its own dystopian future. The company is in full damage control mode over Battlefield 2042, whose buggy and incomplete state at launch has earned players' ire to such an extent that there must be serious internal conversations going on about whether there's any possibility of return from this brink. Ordinarily, an online petition demanding players' money back wouldn't be worth the paper it isn't printed on, but the sheer numbers putting their names to protests over the state of Battlefield 2042 are somewhat eyebrow-raising - matched only by the absolute lack of numbers the game is posting in statistics on services like Steam, suggesting a total collapse in the player base of a game that was meant to be a
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