CD Projekt Red CEO Takes Responsibility for Cyberpunk 2077’s Buggy Launch

CD Projekt Red co-founder and CEO Marcin Iwinski took to YouTube this week to personally apologize for the raging dumpster fire that Cyberpunk 2077 on last-gen consoles is.

Iwinski blamed the game’s poor performance on the studio’s cross-platform strategy, with CDPR starting off with trying to make the game as awesome as possible on PC before trying to water it down for consoles. That’s the opposite of how studios normally handle cross-platform games — and why we have so many terrible PC ports. If nothing else, the game’s terrible launch should, at least, serve as a good example of why console-first development is the standard in the games industry.

The CDPR exec then pointed to the in-game streaming engine as the main culprit for the game’s poor performance, with last-gen consoles’ disk bandwidth simply being not being up to par for CDPR’s ambitious goals for Night City.

With regard to the future, the company’s FAQ on the game’s current state now includes a new roadmap for the game going forward. The game developer has decided to push forward the release of DLC content and is instead going to focus on bug fixes and optimizations for now. “We’ll have more to say about that in the coming months,” says the FAQ.

A new update with more hotfixes is expected to drop in the next two weeks, with another, more significant update to follow in the weeks after that. Free DLC packs for the game are still part of the plan, though CDPR is not committing to a fixed date yet. Meanwhile, the next-gen updates for Xbox Series S|X and PlayStation 5 are planned for the second half of the year.

Source: CD Projekt Red

The long-awaited RPG’s abysmal launch has left CD Projekt Red in quite a bit of hot water. Not only has the game’s poor performance on consoles resulted in a loss of consumer trust, but the game has even been pulled from the PS Store, and its own investors are now suing the company. On top of all that, Poland’s consumer protection agency is also investigating the developer’s behavior leading up to launch, with the company staring down potentially millions in fines.