While we’d heard a supposed account of a developer of Cyberpunk 2077 that was weakly denied by CD Projekt Red before, there’s a new piece from Bloomberg that will be markedly more challenging for the studio to deny with a single sentence, offering several first-hand developer accounts into the bungled process that ultimately led to the single-player RPG’s messy release.
According to statements from a number of developers that worked on the game, Cyberpunk 2077 was the victim of a variety of terrible management decisions, including developing the game’s new engine at the same time as the game itself was being created, which one developer likened to “[driving] a train while the tracks are being laid in front of you at the same time”; mismanaging a larger studio head count, which led to many team members feeling their teams were “siloed and unorganized”; having CDPR studio head Adam Badowski take over as director, leading to changed gameplay elements, internal clashes, and several top developers leaving the studio; a focus on “impressing the outside world,” which led to releasing an E3 2018 gameplay demo which was almost entirely fake; and of course, crunching employees, with one dev noting how he worked 13 hours a day, five days a week.
CDPR is working on getting the game fixed and studio co-founder Marcin Iwinkski had asked for fans not to “fault any of [the studio’s] teams for what happened,” it just also looks like Cyberpunk 2077’s woes weren’t just related to in-game streaming on previous console hardware but also due to a woefully mismanaged project.
