Cyberpunk 2077's launch

"Today, we're taking a look at Cyberpunk 2077, the most hyped video game I've ever seen. The hype for this game would have you believe that it was going to change gaming forever... The hype for this game was an absolute curse for the final product no matter what CD Projekt Red delivered, it could be the best video game ever made, it was still going to disappoint people who put these incredible, unrealistic expectations on it. But now, the game is finally out and the question begs to be asked: Does it live up to the hype? Has gaming truly evolved?... The answer is "no", this game never stood a chance at reaching these expectations."

- Crit1kal, summarizing Cyberpunk 2077's massive hype

On December 10, 2020, after a troubled 8-year production cycle and several delays, Cyberpunk 2077, an action role-playing game developed and published by mh:awesomegames:CD Projekt, was released for Microsoft Windows, mh:awesomegames:PlayStation 4, mh:awesomegames:Xbox One, and Google Stadia. The game received generally positive reviews from critics, but mixed-to-negative reviews from users. However, one thing that critics and gamers agreed on is that the game was released in an unfinished state, which caused it to be filled with massive amounts of bugs and glitches, especially on the base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions. The fact that the game was extremely hyped before release has made the reception from the gaming community much worse. Many reviewers and journalists have cited three factors which lead into the rocky launch of the game; management problems, crunch, and Christmas rush.

Early development
Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in May 2012 and a teaser trailer was released in January 2013. However, the development of the game was on hold due to lack of manpower and officially began on May 2016 after CD Projekt Red had finished their work on the Blood and Wine expansion for mh:awesomegames:The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. They began upgrading their REDengine 3 to complement the game. CD Projekt Red was also granted subventions of US$7 million by the Polish government to aid the development.

In 2018, CD Projekt released several teasers and promotional development details on Cyberpunk 2077. According to them, they partnered with Digital Scapes to craft additional tools, Nvidia to achieve ray tracing in real-time, QLOC for quality assurance, and Jali Research to procedurally generate the lip-sync for all ten localizations. By August 2018, the story was fully realised and could facilitate a complete playthrough. The content was nearly complete in mid-2019, with the rest of development focused largely on polishing.

Delays, COVID-19, and hype build-up
Thanks to the marketing team of CD Projekt, Cyberpunk 2077 gained the attention of the gaming community. CD Projekt released several trailers that showed various features and advertised the game as the "next-gen open world experience". The trailer also showed in-game content that was not in the final game, such as interactive NPCs, dynamic environments, and much more.

Even before the release of the game, Cyberpunk 2077 won hundreds of awards, such as the best game, the best RPG, the best PC game, and people's choices award from IGN. After E3 2019's third trailer which revealed Keanu Reeves to be one of the main cast members in the game, went on to become one of the most discussed and hyped games by the gaming industry. During the final phase of development, CD Projekt decided to cash-in on the hype train by releasing a boatload of merchandise before the game's release, including but not limited to; Funko Pop figures, a card game , an anime series on Netflix , a smartphone , and even sneakers.

At E3 2019, the third trailer set it up for a April 16, 2020 release. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CD Projekt Red's staff started working at home, causing a halt in localisation and causing the game to be delayed to September 17, 2020.

Despite the studio's disavowal of mandatory overtime in May and June 2019, "crunch time" was implemented in the final weeks of development. The crunch happened due to resource management problems during the pandemic which were caused the game's release date to be delayed again to November 12, and finally to December 10. Due to the aforementioned overwhelming hype, after CD Projekt delayed the game for the final time, a handful of people expressed their outrage towards the delay, and some would go as far as sending death threats to CD Projekt's staff.

Roughly before the final launch date in December 10, a leak from a physical copy of Cyberpunk 2077 revealed that the game suffered from several bugs and glitches.

Launching disasters, backlash, and CD Projekt's attempted recovery
Immediately after the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, many players reported several performance issues such as poor optimization and various bugs and glitches, and also cited various missing features in the game. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions were reported to suffer from much more terrible optimization problems, namely awful texture and model rendering, poor in-game physics, downgraded graphics, game-breaking bugs, and a massive amount of technical issues.

A few hours after the game's release, CD Projekt released a 58 GB day-one patch to fix various technical issues on the PC version of the game. However, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions were left largely untouched.

Prior the release, concern had arose due to CD Projekt's strict review embargo terms did not allow reviewers to use recorded gameplay in their reviews if they wished to publish the review prior to the release date of the game, and also over the fact that reviews were only based on the PC version of the game. As a result, this evoked the distrust of some consumers. After the news about the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions' terrible performances, many users and critics have suspected CD Projekt of media manipulation and review rigging, and speculate that the game's rocky launch was due to the fact that it was being rushed for Christmas and a tie-in with the mh:awesomegames:PlayStation 5 and mh:awesomegames:Xbox Series S/X's launches. This, combined with the overwhelming hype prior to the release of the game, created huge backlash towards CD Projekt.

Five days after the releases, CD Projekt issued an apology statement regarding the terrible launch of the game, and also issued a refund for the PlayStation 4's and Xbox One's physical releases. Because of how broken the game was, Sony removed the game from the PlayStation Store on December 17, 2020, and offered full refunds for those who purchased the game from said store.

Despite mixed-to-positive feedback, Cyberpunk 2077 was a massive commercial success, with over one million copies being sold during the first few hours of the game's release. Although this has raised concern to the gaming community, as they worried the game's success might have contributed to the "release it now, fix it later" trend of recent AAA titles.

However, due to trust issues with the fanbase and community, along with another controversy regarding the removal of Devotion from GOG Store due to Chinese pressure that happened within a week after the launch, CD Projekt's stock values suffered a drastic drop of over 25%. On top of that, investors and law firms have been readying up lawsuits over the deception.

If this wasn't enough bad luck for the company, around mid-January of 2021, CD Projekt's game codes for The Witcher 3 and Gwent were stolen by a ransomware made by hackers under alias "HelloKitty". The same group launched another attack on late February of 2021 to steal the source code of Cyberpunk 2077 as well as more source code from Gwent, forcing CD Projekt to cancel the update for both games. It is reported that the stolen source codes were later purchased from the dark web by an unknown user.

Videos
VhvDy8h3FG8 yp7uWIh3CjU uWPNGg5Qj5A sx-2AfO-fPc WEGM_CiqOLc YvRlUdv_yLg pr5hcOf3MBM LoIIhms1M4M er7kcH2fiqI P-8RTMrgTTw RaI3gEHF5Hg b3nA29jgJB8 OwYhf4YSmc8 CqEMEjJj4hs DIjZjWiuTZg C9ocqjfm2nM <youtube width = 320 height = 180>WmuooF_mBn8 <youtube width = 320 height = 180>omyoJ7onNrg <youtube width = 320 height = 180>QNCuypF0cu8 <youtube width = 320 height = 180>J7E_HBXCnmg