CD Projekt RED has taken the opportunity to commemorate a special anniversary.
They shared this message on Twitter, on the official Cyberpunk 2077 account:
“3 years ago today we released Cyberpunk 2077. Since then, thanks to your feedback and support, we’ve transformed the game through various patches and updates into the Ultimate Edition you can enjoy today. None of this would have happened without you – our Community.
Thank you! “
It’s quite crazy to think about this game’s history, and how it will now be remembered as one of those titles that launched busted, and redeemed itself after staging a comeback. It’s the same narrative that we saw for No Man’s Sky, and after that, Battlefield 2042.
But Cyberpunk 2077’s story is particularly painful because it broke CD Projekt RED’s relationship with the community. To this day, there are gamers who will never fully trust the studio again, and it is definitely true that there are even some who don’t ever plan to buy their games ever again.
At this point, we definitely have to point out, while part of this was the disappointment of the poor launch, part of this was also the controversy after learning the poor working conditions that CD Projekt RED’s management put their developers through, including crunch, to make this game.
To make this even crazier, we were able to trace that our first report on Cyberpunk 2077 goes all the way back in 2012. That wasn’t very far from when the company pitched the game to Cyberpunk the novel’s writer, Mike Pondsmith, and the preliminary stages of production.
We were there to also cover when it hit the fan, causing the fans to call for refunds for the game across all platforms. CD Projekt RED’s language doesn’t directly acknowledge all this, but also barely hides how the company truly felt about what was going on at that time.
It certainly wasn’t an entirely positive experience for the studio or the fans, to put it mildly. But in a strange way, CD Projekt RED learned lessons from this experience, harsh but real lessons, that they will be taking for their projects in the future.
Lest we forget, even today CD Projekt RED is not in the best of positions as a company. This year, they announced they would be laying off 100 of their own employees, after making similar layoffs in The Molasses Flood, a smaller studio they acquired to make a spinoff game for The Witcher.
There’s certainly something bittersweet with this anniversary, but it certainly says a lot about Projekt CD RED that they are acknowledging it today.
