After issuing a public apology yesterday regarding the poor performance of Cyberpunk 2077 running on last-generation consoles, joint-CEO of CD Projekt Red, Adam Kiciński was part of a conference call with the management board. The recording and transcript for this are available now and finds him admitting that the studio didn’t put enough attention on the game for last-generation versions and that the studio assumed that Microsoft and Sony Interactive Entertainment had expected the studio to have fixed any issues present during certification.
In his opening statement, he said, “the initial feedback from those playing it on the oldest last-gen consoles is way below our expectations,” after saying the game received positive feedback from those on PC, Stadia, and next-generation consoles. However, back in November, he confirmed that the game ran surprisingly well on last-generation consoles.
“After 3 delays, we as the Management Board were too focused on releasing the game,” he admitted “We underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues, we ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles. It was the wrong approach and against our business philosophy”
There are apparently big updates for Cyberpunk 2077 planned for January and February, and there were some fixes applied last weekend, with some more fixes due to be pushed out within the next 7 days.
When asked about management being too focused on pushing the game out, Michał Nowakowski, a board member at the studio said that “We definitely did not spend enough time looking at [last-gen versions]” and that the studio didn’t feel any external or internal pressure to get the game launched by December 10, 2020.
He also answered a question regarding the certification process and third-parties, saying that it was the studio’s fault, “I can only assume that they trusted that we’re going to fix things upon release, and that obviously did not come together exactly as we had planned.”
For those playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox One and PS4, CD Projekt Red says that it is planning to have the game “in much better shape than it is now”. However, if you’re hoping that this means the game will be on par with Xbox Series X | S, PS5, and PC, then ” that definitely isn’t going to happen.”
Marcin Iwiński, joint-CEO and co-founder touched on the reason behind not showing last-generation performance in the build-up to release. “The reason is that we were updating the game on last-gen consoles until the very last minute, and we thought we’d make it in time” He added, “Unfortunately this resulted in giving it to reviewers just one day before the release, which was definitely too late and the media didn’t get the chance to review it properly. That was not intended; we were just fixing the game until the very last moment”
Cyberpunk 2077 saw the studio make a profit on day 1, with the game hitting 1 million concurrent players on Steam alone in 12 hours of being released. However, the state of the game has led to many seeking refunds and complaining about the poor performance. The game is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S, and Stadia.
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