Cyberpunk 2077 Developer Addresses Reported Development Troubles

Cyberpunk 2077’s launch has been a big mess, and CD Projekt RED has certainly been facing the consequences over the last few weeks, from lawsuits to potential monetary fines in the future. Recently, a report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier shed light on the game’s development troubles, talking about crunch, mismanagement, and more, and now, CD Projekt RED studio head Adam Badwoski has responded to certain parts of that report.

The aforementioned report talked about the game’s E3 2018 demo, which was described as being “fake”, owing to the fact that core gameplay elements and systems had neither been finalized nor coded at that point in the game’s development. Badowski states that much of what was shown in the demo made it into the final game as is, before adding that development of games is not done in a linear fashion, and that the demo was called a work in progress for this reason.

Something else the report mentioned was that “most of the staff” at CD Projekt RED was aware that the game would not be ready to hit its 2020 launch date, with many in the studio predicting multiple delays. Badowski states in his response that for his report, Schreier spoke with 20 people from a studio with over 500 employees, and that does not qualify as “most of the staff”. 

Badowski has also addressed an excerpt from the report that talks about communication gaps within the studio due to the staff having people that speak several different languages, and non-Polish speakers feeling uncomfortable in a largely Polish studio as a result. Badowski states that company-wide emails, announcements, and meetings all mandate English, and that the studio employees staff from over 40 nationalities. This specific portion has been removed from Schreier’s original report. 

Curiously enough, reports of crunch have not been addressed. Schreier has also mentioned on his Twitter account that CD Projekt RED was contacted prior to the publishing of this report, but refused to comment on its contents, and no staff members were made available for quotes or interviews. You can read Badowski’s full response below.

Cyberpunk 2077 is currently available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC (though it is still delisted from the PlayStation Store). CD Projekt RED recently shared a rough roadmap of planned updates for the coming months- read more on that through here.

I’ve read your piece and tweets, thank you for the read. I have some thoughts. https://t.co/T3qACdrnwM pic.twitter.com/wuzy5lXoqQ

— Adam Badowski⚡️ (@AdamBadowski) January 16, 2021

(CD Projekt chose not to respond to specific questions or make Badowski available for an interview for our article, so it's interesting to see these comments arriving now)

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) January 16, 2021