In the video game world, redemption stories usually aren’t quick. That’s because if a video game developer or publisher fails with something like a title in a franchise or a console, you have to wait until the next one for the redemption to happen. A great example is Nintendo. When they failed massively with the Wii U, they couldn’t redeem themselves until the Switch came out and blew up the sales charts. That was a massive redemption for them. CD Projekt Red however is bucking that trend when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077. Because despite a disastrous launch, people are coming back to the game again for the first time in almost two years.
Cyberpunk 2077 was meant to be CD Projekt Red’s greatest triumph. Something that would top The Witcher games they had made in the past. They had the perfect setting, and they had the ideas to make it all work, but the execution was off in a big way. Not to mention the infinite amount of delays got the game talked about so much that it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype, especially once it launched in late 2020 as a buggy mess on most systems.
To enjoy the game back then, you had to play the PC version and have an incredibly powerful PC to run it. If you had the console versions on Xbox One and PS4? You were lucky if it ran. Fast forward to now, CD Projekt Red’s team has been working for nearly two years to get the game back to what it should’ve been at launch. Add to that, the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has brought hype back to the franchise, so gamers are going back to the title to see what it’s like now versus what it was upon launch.
The numbers don’t lie, Cyberpunk 2077 is selling again, and people are playing it in numbers that haven’t been this high since early 2021!
Naturally, the team at CD Projekt Red is happy with this development, and on a Twitch stream, Quest Director Paweł Sasko talked about what this meant to him personally, and the emotions it brought forth in him. He talked about how the team has been working for this moment for almost eight years, and so to finally have people enjoying it is special:
“To have this moment, of people liking something that we did, it’s really feeling a bit unreal. That finally people are appreciating it.”
This is something that gets lost in the hustle and bustle of game creation. There’s plenty of emotion that goes into a work cycle like that, and so when a game fails or fails to live up to expectations, it hurts the team! They don’t want it to fail, and they wonder what they did wrong. So for Sasko and his fellow devs to get this redemption moment? Yeah, it must feel great.
Source: Reddit
