As we’ve talked about numerous times over the last several years, a key frustration in the game industry right now is that gamers have to deal with titles that launch in broken states. We’re going beyond simple “Day One patches” and calling out the teams, especially AAA teams, who think they can just release a game in a broken state and that everything will be fine afterward. While it’s almost impossible to tell “who started the trend,” we will say that Cyberpunk 2077 was a key catalyst in what was to come, for after YEARS of development and delays, it finally came out on console and PC…and very few people could play and enjoy it.
The aftermath was sudden and almost brought CD Projekt Red down. People were demanding refunds, Sony stopped selling the game on its store, and more fallout came. It took YEARS, and a Netflix anime, for the game to be fixed and for people to give it another chance. Fast forward to now, and the game has “righted the ship” and even had an impressive port on the Nintendo Switch 2. CD Projekt Red has earned back SOME of its cred and is now looking to the future. However, as they revealed at Gamescom during a special interview with The Game Business, they aren’t ignoring the past one bit.
In the chat, Michał Platkow-Gilewski, the VP of public relations and communications for the game dev, revealed that having “physical events” where gamers could weigh in on the demos they played was something that was lost to the crew in the final months before release:
“But the one mistake, or thing we missed, were physical events. Places and moments when we could have dialogue with community, with gamers, with influencers, with journalists… with everyone. Events are great for setting expectations and managing them, because you can get a feeling for what they are thinking. When you are in the online world, it’s way harder. After Cyberpunk 2077, and we were promoting [Cyberpunk expansion] Phantom Liberty, we decided that physical events would be a really important part of the campaign. We created the Phantom Tour, which were a series of events where we went around the world, from Brazil to Japan, and met with journalists, with influencers, but mostly with gamers. We were presenting them the game in a cinema, and then they had a chance to play.”
If this lesson has truly been learned, then they’ll apply this to their upcoming titles so that another disastrous launch can be avoided.
