CD Projekt reflects on Cyberpunk’s launch: ‘It became cool to dislike it’

Reflecting on Cyberpunk 2077‘s troubled launch, CD Projekt‘s comms boss has argued that the game received some overly harsh criticism when it was first released.

While acknowledging that the game needed to be improved when it first arrived in 2020, Michał Platkow-Gilewski told GamesIndustry.biz he believes it deserved a better reception than the one it received, and suggested that some people jumped on the bandwagon to criticise it because it was fashionable to do so.

“I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive,” he said. “Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast.

“That was the tough moment. We didn’t know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff. That took us a lot of time, but I don’t believe we were ever broken. We were always like: Let’s do this.”

Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most highly-anticipated games of the last console generation, but things went badly wrong for CD Projekt when it finally arrived in late 2020.

After three delays, the RPG released for PC and consoles with a host of technical problems, resulting in refunds being offered, the game being pulled from the PlayStation Store, and CD Projekt facing lawsuits alleging it misled investors over the quality of the title.

Following six months of patches designed to improve the game, it returned to Sony’s online marketplace in June 2021, when CD Projekt said it believed Cyberpunk 2077‘s performance had reached a “satisfying” level.

CD Projekt is currently preparing to launch Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion in September, which is said to make even more significant improvements to the base game.

For Platkow-Gilewski, whose job it is to oversee studio contact with players, media and influencers, he hopes the DLC will go some way to rebuilding the trust that has been lost with some of the company’s fans.

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“I was personally not happy with how things turned out. I was not expecting that,” he said. “I knew immediately that we had to come back. I liked the spot we were in. I’m not talking about the peak of hype, but two years before that, we had our community, we liked them, they liked us, it was awesome to work at CD Projekt Red.

“After the release it was tough, but I knew that we had the same people. The gamers are the same… we just need to fix our relationship. The only thing we can truly do is just deliver what we are capable of. I have a feeling that soon we will be able to do that and hopefully that will be a new beginning for everyone.”

Platkow-Gilewski also discussed how CD Projekt itself, which had grown rapidly and also become known for crunch culture, needed fixing in the run-up to Cyberpunk 2077’s release.

“It’s really hard to change a company when you have to deliver something and you have a deadline,” he said. “It’s not the best moment for that. Everyone was waiting for the release.

“These changes would have happened anyway, but [the Cyberpunk situation] was another motivation. It was a wake-up call, to say let’s rebuild, let’s restructure, let’s rethink… what can learn from this? It’s not an easy fix.

“It’s not like you can decide to do something differently starting tomorrow. It’s a process that’ll probably take a lot of time, but I can see that the company works in a different way than it used to. And no-one wants to repeat the mistakes that were made.”

Phantom Liberty will entirely overhaul the way Cyberpunk 2077 is played, according to CD Projekt.

In an interview this month with creative director Pawel Sasko and quest designer Despoina Anetaki, VGC was told that “all the core main systems” of the game have been “redone or updated in a major way”.