There was some degree of runaway expectations.
I think there was also some degree
that they weren't extremely forthcoming
with the state of the game.
The Cyberpunk 2077 story is very much kind
of a story of everything they can
and will go wrong in game development.
What is this bug?
Jack, his AI flipped out.
It wasn't there before.
Where's my gun?
I can't shoot.
The release of Cyberpunk 2077 in December
of 2020 will go down as one of the most
disastrous game launches in history,
and it instantly rewrote the narrative
of it's celebrated developer, CD Projekt Red.
Larger studios with bigger budgets weren't able
to create the same quality of open world game.
The inside story of the making
of Cyberpunk depicts a process marred
by unchecked ambition, unrealistic timelines,
and a focus on marketing at the expense of development.
When CD Projekt stock was at its high
it was the largest stock in the Polish stock market.
Cyberpunk was supposed to be the biggest game of 2020.
This was a game that was starring Keanu Reeves.
This is a game that was
from the makers of The Witcher Three.
This was supposed to be the big temple release of last year,
and for it to become such a disaster for so many people,
I think will have pretty far reaching consequences.
CD Projekt's origins are somewhat unique
in the games industry.
In the West and Japan, the late eighties and nineties
were dominated by games for the home console market,
and characters like Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog
were becoming household names.
The same was not true in a post Soviet
and economically depressed Poland.
Most gaming was done on PC's and most games were copied
and sold in small markets around the country.
You could go to the market down the street
and buy and sell CD's,
and these two guys of and Marcin Iwiński
and Michal Kiciński decided they were going
to start selling CD's and they wound up striking a deal
with the people who made a game called Baldur's Gate,
which was kind of like the Seminole role-playing game
in the late nineties.
It was never a business.
It was kind of lifestyle.
So we're actually pretty bad with counting money.
So you can kind of think of it almost like Nike,
you know, where Phil Knight was selling shoes
out of the trunk of his car, you know.
You can kind of think about it the same way.
It was, you know, just selling physical goods
and then evolving that into a much broader enterprise.
CD Projekt, named for selling CD's, would move
on from just reselling games to localizing Western
and Japanese made games into the Polish language,
but it wasn't until 2002 that the company would make
its own game, The Witcher.
The Witcher is a huge, huge series,
huge fantasy series in Poland,
and so it was a pretty big deal that these guys
got the raise to make the video games.
The Witcher book series as a source of national pride
in Poland and as CD Projekt released The Witcher Two,
the video game series would become an important
economic symbol for Poland, as well.
CD Projekt Red had become this behemoth
of an institution in Poland and they were really big
in the Polish technology scene because
they were getting more worldwide attention
than most Polish companies do, and making a lot of money,
and in 2011, when Barack Obama came
to visit Poland, the prime minister actually gave
him a copy of The Witcher Two.
I confess I'm not very good at video games,
but I've been told that it is a great example
of Poland's place in the new global economy.
But it would be the launch of The Witcher Three in 2015
that would elevate CD Projekt Red from representing the best
of Poland to representing the best of the games industry.
I mean really, the thing people look
for first and foremost, I think, is
that the game is just good, and Witcher Three
was just a phenomenal game.
There's a level of just storytelling, an emphasis
on making every side quest count, on top of the atmosphere,
the dialogue, the character interactions,
the different ways stories can end.
They nail that.
Other open-world games felt empty and forced,
and the developers of them gave excuses
as to why there couldn't be more rich story or interactions.
And The Witcher Three blew them out of the water.
CD Projekt Red was beloved.
They were seen as a studio that was willing
to make what the player wanted and to truly put in the love
and effort required to make a high quality game
that really connects with the people playing with it.
And the winner for Game of the Year 2015
is The Witcher Three.
The Witcher Three would go on to win
over 250 Game of the Year awards,
but along with being a critical success
for CD Projekt, it was also a financial success.
Estimates put the sales of Witcher Three
at around 28,000,000 copies in 2019,
a huge step-up considering by 2014
The Witcher and The Witcher Two had only combined
to sell 8,000,000 copies.
And with two large expansions for The Witcher Three,
CD Projekt also helps separate themselves
from other AAA publishers at the time.
And the Game Award goes to, oh man,
I have to pay a microtransaction to unlock?
That's so stupid that this has to,
hold on, I got this guys, here we go.
Other games, and the most notorious, you know, one
to do this was EA's Star Wars Battlefront Two.
They got really aggressive on microtransactions
in a game that already costs at least $60.
You could have paid more
if you bought the premium editions,
but not only was it that they were being very aggressive
and trying to get you to spend money,
but you could actually get items that helped you win.
Well, gamers kind of draw the line
in the sand there and they don't like that.
CD Projekt had done this phenomenal job
of marketing themselves as a gamer friendly company.
We've said this a million times and I'll say it again.
We're gamers, first of all,
and we all like to be treated fairly,
so it only makes sense that as developers
we apply the same principle to everything
we do here at CD Projekt Red, so giving everyone a bunch
of free DLC was an absolutely no brainer.
They said, "We're not gonna sell you DLC,
that's like horse armor packs than other nonsense.
We're gonna just give you free stuff
and then we're gonna sell big expansions
as part of The Witcher Three."
And not only were they really good,
they were offered at a fair price.
And this is a company that was seen as just
like a company that really cared about quality
and cared about its customers, and would not do anything
to kind of screw fans over the way
that fans see that EA and Activision
and all the other big publishers do.
With a critically and financially successful game,
as well as the Goodwill from the gaming audience,
all the focus would shift
to CD Projekt's next release, Cyberpunk 2077.
It's actually funny.
They first announced it through like a press release,
and then they showed off a trailer at the beginning
of 2013 that was like the CGI trailer of like a woman
and it was all sorts of cool cyberpunk stuff,
flying cars lots of stuff, but it wasn't really
until after The Witcher Three that Cyberpunk began really
like building up this feverish level of hype.
CD Projekt Red, though, wouldn't put
out another trailer for Cyberpunk
until 2018 at the E3 Trade Show.
And they showed off a, it was
like a two minute trailer of Cyberpunk, looked pretty rad.
And then they showed behind the scenes
for E3 attendees, for press, and anyone else
who could score an appointment in there.
They showed this forty-five minute demo
and it blew people away.
Welcome to the gameplay demo walkthrough
of CD Projekt Red's upcoming title, Cyberpunk 2077.
The gameplay you're about to see is
from a work in progress version of the game.
Everything you see is potentially subject to change.
Holy .
This, if they can live up to what
they showed me, it's game over.
It all looked incredibly impressive.
They had enough action, enough narrative beats
with just the right amount of tension.
They touted how each of these NPC's,
there are thousands of them, each one
with their own daily routines and everything.
We've greatly enhanced our crowd and community system
to create the most believable city
in any open world game to date.
So, yeah, so people were certainly blown away
by this demo.
It won E3 Awards and just people left
the theater just in awe.
What they didn't know, of course, is
that the demo was completely fake.
Fake demos are common at E3.
Studios put together builds of games
that show off what they intend the game
to be like, rather than the actual state of the game.
What was unique about this demo was
that it was impressively long.
It kind of plays into this idea that CD Projekt
is very much a marketing driven company,
and so demos were really, really important to them.
So it was really important that they make this demo
blow people away, which it did,
but that might've come at the cost of like some time
they could have been spending on the game.
A year later at E3 2019,
fans would get another big surprise.
Whoa, no way!
Oh, what!
Please welcome Keanu Reeves.
Of being there, of walking the streets
of the future is really going to be breathtaking.
You're breathtaking!
You're breathtaking.
The Cyberpunk trailers showed gorgeous cities,
beautiful lighting, really cutting edge technology
when it comes to the rendering of the game itself.
People were very excited to be immersed
in this gorgeous cyberpunk world.
They saw over 8,000,000 pre-orders, which is a ridiculously
large amount for any title to sell, let alone pre-sell.
And you saw the stock price start
to go up and up and up and the right,
you know, pretty much in a straight line.
If you just look at like the Polish stock market,
like the WIG Index, when CD Projekt stock was at its high,
it was the largest stock in the index.
And that was around the time that they announced
that the game would be coming in April of 2020.
Behind the scenes people were pretty shocked
that they were saying April.
I don't think a single a person who worked
on that game actually thought they had a chance
of coming out in April of 2020.
So in April of 2019, I published an article for Kotaku
about the making of a game called Anthem, which is a game
from BioWare that was disastrous in many ways
and the article kind of ran through why that was.
And then afterwards, I started hearing
from other developers who had stories to share
that they said sounded a whole lot like Anthem's,
"The deadline is unrealistic, the direction keeps changing,
things are floundering, we're going through
a lot of problems, this sounds exactly
like what you wrote about Anthem."
Around that same time, perhaps coincidentally,
I heard from the CEO of CD Projekt Red who wanted
to reach out to me specifically to talk about Crunch.
CD Projekt Red had a reputation for Crunch,
especially during the development of The Witcher Three.
Their management wanted them to have a reputation
for treating workers well and not forcing them
to go through Crunch, so Marcin Iwiński,
who's the co-founder and co CEO of CD Projekt Red,
came to me and said, "Hey, I want to make a vow right now
that we're not gonna force anybody
to Crunch, that people will not have
to work mandatory overtime on this project."
Over the course of reporting
Bloomberg has conducted interviews with more
than twenty current and former CD Projekt staff,
most of whom requested anonymity,
so as not to risk their careers.
CD Projekt declined to comment on the process
or provide interviews for this story.
The company would end up delaying
the game three different times, first pushing
from an April 2020 release to September,
then November, and once again, to December 2020.
In order to meet the deadline, the studio would scale
down the size of Cyberpunk's main city,
as well as canceling some features.
And while those measures helped, developers still
said they were under significant crunch, including one
former audio programmer who claimed to work up
to thirteen hours a day, five days a week, and stating he
had seen friends with lost their families over this.
This was not a big secret in the office that the game
was not going to be ready, but a similar sort
of thing happened with The Witcher Three and a similar sort
of thing happens with a lot of games, where they don't
seem ready until suddenly everything just clicks.
Some of the best games ever made,
like were created through this process.
I don't know that it's the most efficient
or the wisest way to make video games,
but it's what a lot of people do.
I think that management there has genuinely tried to
change it, or at least said they wanted to change it,
but it has proven very difficult to change that
when you make games in this one specific way.
Game studios, some of them see Crunch
as part of their core culture.
That all of their games that they've made
under Crunch have been successful,
so it must be a core element to the magic recipe
for creating good games, and that's really not the case.
We've run studies and seen that
at eight weeks of working sixty hours plus,
the output of a professional is the same
as if they were working forty hours a week,
so chronic overwork degrades how effective someone is
to the point where then it becomes negative,
and overworking them is just getting
you less and less productivity.
And so these guys, the people at CD Projekt, having
made The Witcher Three, were kind of riding on that high.
You could call it arrogance or confidence or whatever
you want to call it, of having made The Witcher Three,
and I think that like having a certain level
of confidence can certainly be a good thing, but
in this case it could also be dangerous because it kind
of blinded them to the reality, which was
that this game wasn't going to coalesce.
Cyberpunk was an ambitious project
by any standard, but for CD Projekt Red,
it was also a very large departure from The Witcher.
Cyberpunk was a sci-fi world, rather
than a medieval fantasy.
Instead of a third person game that revolved
around combat with swords and shields,
Cyberpunk was a first person shooter.
Making Cyberpunk would require CD Projekt to invest
in new technology, including its game engine.
Games have to have a lot of logic behind them.
When someone talks about developing a game,
particularly in their own engine, they're not just talking
about creating art assets and setting
up quests, they're talking about building
the rendering systems, figuring out the shaders
and graphic systems and physics systems.
It's a lot of low level work,
and a lot of that low level work prevents some testing
and progressing of the game forward.
Which is sort of like if you were driving a train
while someone else was in front of you
like laying down tracks, as you went.
You're like trying to make a movie while someone else
is building the camera at the same time.
It's very, very difficult and makes things go super slowly
and makes things go very inefficiently
and just hampers everything.
And that's actually why game development studios
prefer open offices.
It's so that the team can see what everyone else is working
on and have a passive sense of the state
of the game and how it's going.
But in the final months of development,
developers in Cyberpunk were mostly doing
this development from their homes.
Across Poland, all malls, restaurants, clubs
and bars, closing down with a ban
on gatherings of more than fifty people.
I think because of COVID, there was a lot of issues,
not just in terms of development and the timing,
but also the communication side of it.
And Quality Assurance is a huge part of game development
that a lot of people don't talk about.
QA testers help run the game through its paces
to figure out any issues it may have.
Then they write report tickets
and send it back to developers to fix.
It's easy to underestimate the amount
of time it'll take to fix a few bugs that you find.
There's a little song that I appreciate.
There's ninety-nine little bugs on the wall,
ninety-nine little bugs, take one down,
patch it around, 117 bugs in the code.
Making that even more difficult was just how
many different platforms the game was coming out for.
Due to the delays the game was simultaneously coming out
for PCs and Google's new streaming service, Stadia,
as well as the console systems that would now include
the next generation PS5 and Xbox X,
as well as the previous generation
of consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One.
And while the hardware and the systems were in some cases
seven years old, they represented a large market
of console gamers, particularly in the West.
That is really, really complicated, and porting
and dealing with like optimization
across the platforms can be really, really challenging.
And when you are a company as CD Projekt Red is,
that primarily develops on PCs and is used
to making games for PC's, sometimes not everybody
in the studio will be like even bothering playing
the console versions, as is what happened here.
And what we saw with Cyberpunk was a case where
the console versions, the console versions,
were just a complete mess, and when management announced
in October that the game had gone gold,
meaning it was ready to be pressed into discs,
there were still major bugs being discovered.
Exhausted programmers would scramble to fix as many
of these problems as they could via a day one patch,
and CD Projekt did their best to control which versions
of the game would be seen before the release date.
So with the video game review process,
you are sent, first, some guidelines.
Here's what to reveal and what not
to reveal when the game launches,
what spoilers are important and what aren't,
and they give you these guidelines
alongside an NDA or some kind of embargo.
When I read through the embargo and the restrictions
I realized just how restrictive it was.
So reviews came out a few days
before the game came out and they seemed pretty good,
but reviewers all caution that they said,
"Hey CD Projekt only let us have the PC version.
They didn't let us have access
to the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game."
The thinking at CD Projekt was maybe,
"Okay, we have a patch plan that maybe reviewers
didn't have access to, like a day one patch,
so we don't want them to show footage
of the game before it's ready to go."
And maybe they thought, "Hey, the console versions,
they're gonna get a patch like the day before it comes out,
so we don't want to talk about that.
We don't want to show those versions just yet."
But no matter what the rationale was
behind CD Projekt doing this, ultimately
it turned into the true scope
of the games problems being hidden.
On December 10th of 2020 the game was released,
and it didn't take long for the problems become public.
Oh, now it works.
He T posed.
Stop, T...
Yeah, I mean obviously the T posing stuff can be kind
of funny, but when it keeps happening
it really starts to break your immersion.
My car would spawn where another car was already at,
and so they would like collide
and then both cars would explode or something.
There are a lot of like people's quests
ending unexpectedly, or like AI's appearing.
One common one was that someone who was supposed
to be just like with you on one mission, like a buddy
with you on one mission would just follow you
for the entire game and just inexplicably,
they would just be around with you.
One hilarious bug that I discovered when
I first loaded up the game on launch day was there
were tiny trees covering every single thing in the game.
I was playing through the prologue
and there were just little trees everywhere.
I did try Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation Four,
and for me it's as good as unplayable
with that level of performance.
There are segments where it runs at like twenty-five
to thirty frames, but then there are segments
where it's clear the frame rates are at like,
your fifteens and twenties, and aiming
with an analog stake while frame rates are rising
and dipping, it's simply impossible.
The experience in those last gen consoles will be so bad
that Sony would take the unprecedented action
of removing the game from its digital stores.
I mean, the stock started selling off little by little
and then a lot by a lot, you know, it kind of cascaded
to a point, and then once we saw Sony turn
off the ability to buy the game and offer refunds,
that was kind of the drop that the bottom fell out.
Yeah, so about a few weeks after the game came out
the CD Projekt's Co-founder and Co-CEO Marcin Iwiński came
on a video and he spoke for about five minutes
and tried to address point by point, like some
of the things that people have been talking about.
Please don't fault any of our teams for what happened.
They all are incredibly talented and hardworking.
Myself and the board are the final decision makers
and it was our call to release the game.
It was just kind of justifying their actions
and apologizing, and vowing
that they would fix this game, and they wanted
to regain people's trust, et cetera, et cetera.
CD Projekt Red would release three hot fixes
in December and two more patches in the coming months.
In their apology video CD Projekt Red would also release
a roadmap for their future plans,
for both their DLC content and future patches,
although exactly when these things
would come was a little vague.
It's to be seen what they do.
I mean, I think to save face, they have to do what
they can to fix Cyberpunk, but how much resources they
dedicate to premium DLC expansions to the online mode
is still kind of up in the air.
We have to see what they say about that.
Or do you kind of just do what you can, stop the bleeding
and just move on what you're for?
You know, at what point do you have to just say,
"We're gonna nip this in the bud and move on?"
It's gonna be a lot of focus for a lot
of investors in the next few months.
There's a lot of precedent in the video game industry
for redemption stories, for video games coming out
in a pretty bad shape and then getting fixed,
patched, updated, added to over time.
We've seen it with No Man's Sky,
we've seen it with Destiny, we've seen it
with Final Fantasy 14, a lot of these online games.
One thing that they could do is, say,
anyone who bought the game will get
like the DLC for free as an apology from us.
There are a lot of things they could do,
I think, to win back the fans.
I think it's apparent looking at the release
of Cyberpunk 2077 and the reception
of it that gamers overall are much more tolerant
about pushed back release deadlines,
and understand that a game that is rushed or built
under Crunch is less likely to come
out in the state that they would like it to.
I make videos about these companies
and it's not because I want them to fail.
It's because I want them to get better.
I hope CD Projekt looks at everything that's happening
and just actually makes some changes.
I'm going to quote Shigeru Miyamoto from Nintendo.
He's like the father of Super Mario,
"A delayed game is eventually good.
A rushed game is never good."
And this is a company that was not lacking for money.
They had plenty of cash, and so the decision
to not do so will go down in history as a very poor one.