On 27 October 2020, two of CD Projekt’s bosses, studio head Adam Badowski and co-founder Marcin Iwiński, put out a statement pushing Cyberpunk 2077 back once more, from 19 November to 10 December. Shipping on old consoles, new consoles and PC at the same time meant preparing and testing nine versions of the game. It might seem unrealistic, they wrote, that “21 days can make a difference in such a massive and complex game, but they really do.”
It was the third delay. The game had first been announced in 2012. At the E3 trade show in June 2019, with Keanu Reeves on hand to promote it, CD Projekt set a date: 16 April 2020. Then it became September. Then November. Now December.
Inside the studio, some people could only wonder how they would make April. More than 20 current and former staff later talked to Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, most of them anonymously. One said they had thought the date was a joke. Judging by the team’s progress, some expected the game to be ready in 2022. They made memes about the delay and placed bets on when it would come.
Full development, employees said, had only started in late 2016, and the studio was building much of its engine technology at the same time as the game. One developer compared it to driving a train while the tracks are laid in front of you. Even as the timeline looked less and less realistic, management said delaying wasn’t an option. It wanted the game out before the next PlayStation and Xbox were even announced, so it could sell on the old machines first and give those buyers free upgrades later. Some engineers saw that a city this crowded was too much for consoles that were seven years old. They told Bloomberg that management dismissed their concerns, citing its success with The Witcher 3.
In late September 2020 the studio ordered six-day weeks, breaking an earlier promise not to impose crunch. In October, management announced the game had “gone gold”, ready to be pressed onto discs, while major bugs were still being found, according to Bloomberg’s sources. Then came the 21 days.
Cyberpunk 2077 launched on 10 December and sold 13 million copies in its first ten days. It had problems on PCs, and on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One it was almost unplayable. Reviewers had been sent the PC version. The old-console version, Iwiński later told investors, reached them one day before release.
Four days after launch, joint chief executive Adam Kiciński opened an investor call with an explanation: “After 3 delays, we as the Management Board were too focused on releasing the game.” The board, he said, had ignored signals that the old consoles needed more time. On the same call, board member Michał Nowakowski said the company had felt no pressure to launch on the date beyond the normal kind.
A week after launch, in what Bloomberg called an unprecedented move, Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store and offered every buyer there a full refund. Microsoft offered refunds too. CD Projekt’s shares fell 30 percent between launch day and mid-January.
In a January video, Iwiński said the company had “underestimated the task”, and that its testing had not shown a big part of the problems players hit. The developers Bloomberg spoke to disagreed. Many of the common problems had been found, they said. There just hadn’t been time to fix them.
The game went back on sale in the PlayStation Store on 21 June 2021, six months after Sony took it down.