As you may have heard by now, Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed again, and will now grace your rig in December. In response to the news, several of CD Projekt Red’s leaders held a conference call with investors to talk about the decision (thanks, biznes).
Shedding some more light on the delay, the studio explains that the most recent change is different from the others. That’s because Cyberpunk 2077 is ready to go on PC and even plays well on next-gen consoles. The company is, however, finalising the current builds for PS4 and Xbox One.
Talking about the new release date, CEO Adam Kicinski explains that the decision wasn’t easy but, inevitably, you’ll only get one chance to make a first impression, and a good one means more sales. “Better initial reaction to the game always works in favour of more sales,” he says. “That is why we are delaying, we don’t have to, but having this extra time gives us more certainty that everything will be in the game when we release.”
Following on from the recent delay, Kicinski explains that CDPR is planning some “organisational changes” with future projects as “too many things were put together at late stages”.
Throughout the cyberpunk game’s development reports of crunch have been frequent. More recently, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that one staffer had clocked in 100 hours in one week and that the delay doesn’t mean much as some developers “were going to be crunching into December anyway for a post-launch patch”.
Schreier also says that plenty of the Cyberpunk 2077 devs found out about the delay when CDPR tweeted about it. So at the same time as the rest of us. Even if they were going to be crunching anyway, though, it sounds like a gut punch.
Look, a CDPR dev told me recently that they'd just clocked a 100-hour week. Another (former) dev just told me they saw some of their friends there and they looked "physically ill." So kindly gtfo with the "but but but I work long hours too" responses
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) October 27, 2020
Some of what Kicinski says in the conference call was touched upon yesterday when CDPR announced the delay on Twitter. Cyberpunk 2077 had gone gold, leading plenty to believe CDPR wouldn’t delay it again. Once again, though, the dev explains that the game could probably be released, though that doesn’t mean it should.
“Passing certification, or ‘going gold’, means the game is ready, can be completed, and has all content in it,” CDPR tweeted. “But it doesn’t mean we stop working on it and raising the quality bar.
“On the contrary, this is the time where many improvements are being made which will then be distributed via a Day 0 patch. This is the time period we undercalculated.”