Full development of Cyberpunk 2077 would not have started until 2016

A new report on what went wrong with the deployment of Cyberpunk 2077 points out that the overconfidence of CD Projekt Red’s management is a key issue and reveals that the game’s “full development” – announced in 2012 – only started in 2016.

Jason Schreier from Bloomberg interviewed more than 20 current and former CD Projekt staff, and found that the game’s development was plagued by unrealistic timelines and technical issues. The company “hit the reset button” on the game in 2016, but a demo of Cyberpunk 2077 shown at E3 in 2018 was “almost entirely wrong,” according to the report. Development has also suffered from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with programmers on the PC version and testers on the console version working separately from each other.

In the months leading up to its launch on December 10, reports revealed that Projekt Red staff were working long, arduous hours to meet launch deadlines. Almost immediately after leaving Cyberpunk 2077, console gamers have encountered widespread bugs, frame rate issues, and other issues. Less than a week after launch, Sony had withdrawn Cyberpunk on the PlayStation Store and offered refunds. An investor is suing CD Projekt Red for the failed launch, and earlier this week the PC version of the game was available for purchase for almost half of its original price.

Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwinski posted a mea culpa for the messy release, claiming that despite the generally positive reception of the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077, the console version of the game “did not meet the quality standard that we wanted it to meet.” The company plans to release the game’s first big update in the next week.

According to Bloomberg, CD Projekt Red was always focused on The Witcher 3 when Cyberpunk was announced in 2012. Executives of the company apparently believed they could replicate the success of this game by developing Cyberpunk. And in a detail that did not make the final modification of the Bloomberg story, Schreier tweeted that the game had changed a lot since its first announcement; until 2016, he says, it was a third-person game.