Yesterday, CD Projekt Red announced a delay to their major new game, Cyberpunk 2077. The game will now miss it’s April 2020 original release window, having been pushed back to September 17, 2020. CD Projekt Red had previously committed not to use crunch to make sure that the game would be ready in time for the original April 2020 release date. And it looks like both of those statements ended up being false.
“We’ve committed to that already,” said CDPR’s Marcin Iwinski in an interview with Kotaku last year. “It’s a direct result of our production planning and we’re trying to make it realistic, and not make it a ginormous burden on the team. Why we’ve been making this public commitment is because we really care about the people that are making this game.” It still remains to be seen if CD Projekt also backtracks on their promises not to use aggressive monetization in the new game.
“To some degree, yes–to be honest,” Kicinski said in a Q&A following the news of the delay. “We try to limit crunch as much as possible, but it is the final stage. We try to be reasonable in this regard, but yes. Unfortunately.”
CD Projekt Red already promised to not give in to crunch culture in earlier statements, making this whole thing very transparent. It’s clear that such a statement held very little weight when push came to shove. And it just goes to show exactly how much needs to change in the video game industry. If the second a major AAA release hits problems, crunch appears as the solution, then nothing has really changed.
Cyberpunk 2077 is now releasing on September 17, 2020, for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. A Google Stadia port is also currently in the works. Although at this rate, I would take anything said about this game with a big grain of salt.
