"Worst Week of My Life": PlayStation Called CDPR Head at 1 AM After Cyberpunk 2077 Release
Back then, Cyberpunk 2077 performed so poorly that the game was removed from sale on the PlayStation Store.
Some players still remember the state of Cyberpunk 2077 at launch. Back then, CD Projekt RED's ambitious game greeted pioneers with a formidable number of bugs and imperfections.
Recently, one of CD Projekt RED's executives, Michal Nowakowski, participated in the Deconstructors of Fun podcast. During the conversation, the period of the game's release was also touched upon.
Nowakowski learned that Cyberpunk 2077 was to be removed from sale on the PS Store from Sony itself — he received a call at 1 AM:
I got a call from PlayStation. This is probably the worst week of my life. From a business perspective — definitely. And even if I recalled some personal failures, this week would still be in the top three worst. It was a real nightmare: a lot of sleepless nights and all that. And I think it was hard not only for me but for the whole team, because we found ourselves in such a strange situation: we understood that we managed to create something special, that the core of the game is really something. People had been waiting a long time to see it and play it. And these technical problems [...] severely impacted the project.
Today, Nowakowski believes that Cyberpunk 2077 should not have been released then. He clarified that the decision to release the game was made by CD Projekt RED itself — they were not pressured by investors:
We should not have pressed the “release” button — by no means. Of course, we later figured out what went wrong. Many claim that investors pressured us, demanding to release the game — that's not true. We are a flexible enough company to make our own decisions, and we were not held under pressure by some mythical investor saying: “Release it right now, or else…”. That's not how it works.
The developers expected to fix the bugs in Cyberpunk 2077 within a week or two, but it ultimately took more time.
Currently, CD Projekt RED is developing The Witcher 4 — the game is planned for release in 2028, as well as a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, which does not yet have a specific release date or window.
The developers have learned from the problematic release of Cyberpunk 2077, so they now practice a different approach to work — there must always be a working build for each target platform. If a problem arises on one of the platforms, development is suspended and work resumes after everything is fixed.
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