Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch has been a major event that the industry is likely going to collectively look back to for years to come. The poor state of the game launched in, especially on consoles, led to widespread backlash and criticism, to the game being delisted from the PlayStation Store, to a large number of refunds being issued by CD Projekt, and hell, even to class action lawsuits. Even though from a commercial perspective Cyberpunk 2077’s sales have been extremely successful for the Polish company, it’s also been a huge learning moment for them, who until not that long ago were the darling of the masses.
The developer is determined to keep working on fixing the game and ensuring that it’s brought up to an acceptable level of quality, and speaking recently at the company’s consolidated financial briefing (via IGN), they said that the game’s troubled launch has been a big lesson for them that they’re unlikely to forget any time soon.
“We managed to introduce a new IP to the market and to the minds of gamers around the globe,” they said. “Now with The Witcher franchise, we have two strong pillars on which to build the future of CD Projekt. But of course, as well know not everything went as planned. It has been a huge lesson for us that we shall never forget.”
They went on to add that they’re “going through a lot of changes inside the company and we believe we’ve taken a lot of lessons from everything that’s happened so far.”
Many of these changes have already been spoken about publicly. CD Projekt has confirmed that, unlike the long drawn-out marketing cycle of Cyberpunk 2077, they will start marketing their future games much closer to their releases and will only stick to showing footage from the actual game rather than “concepts”, and will show footage for all the platforms their games will release on. At the same time, they’ve also confirmed that the separate multiplayer Cyberpunk project has ben cancelled as the developer looks to re-examine how to implement multiplayer in its single player projects going forward.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia. PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions are due out later this year.
