Cyberpunk 2077 shows why games industry needs a big change
- Botched release of the year’s hottest game highlights the industry’s tactic of releasing games in an unfinished state
- Updates that would place the game in a desirable state, especially on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, are potentially months away
Cyberpunk 2077 was always going to be hotly anticipated and highly debated. But now it’s a cautionary tale.
Since Keanu Reeves appeared last year at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles to announce his participation in the title, excitement for the game was been at a level that greets a new Marvel film. And the fact that it would deal with topical subject matter – including arguably questionable looks at gender, race and politics – meant that fans and the media alike were eager to spend time with the game.
Sony last week even took the drastic step of removing the game for the foreseeable future from its online store on PlayStation consoles. For those who have already bought the game, Sony is granting refunds. Microsoft responded by offering fans a refund but is keeping the game available for sale on its Xbox consoles. The game’s developer, the fan-beloved CD Projekt Red, whose The Witcher 3 remains one of the most celebrated games of the just-completed console generation, has pledged to fix the game.
Updates that would place the game in a desirable state are weeks and potentially months away.
Poland-based CD Projekt Red stated that by February the game should have enough patches to run adequately on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
The game is not without issues on the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X either (it has crashed on occasion for me on the former), but it works much better on the new hardware. Still, the new consoles, released just last month, are in short supply. For those playing on older consoles – most gamers – Cyberpunk 2077 exists in a too-fragile state.
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Though the game is in a playable state for those with the most powerful, most expensive PC technology, the decision to push through with a wide release simply heightens numerous questionable and unfortunate game-industry tactics that have become the norm.
Chief among them: that it is OK to release a game in a near-finished state, knowing that in the coming months it would be a drastically different product.
Though it’s admirable that the game medium allows for constant updates, turning games into liveable works, this also takes fans for granted, believing they’ll still be there when the work is done. To oversimplify it, imagine a film released in an incomplete state, with the studio and the creative team simply expecting consumers to rewatch it in six months when it’s actually finished.
Some developers embrace these challenges.
Games are a complex medium that stitch together art, technology and narrative components, all of them shifting based on the needs of the other elements and advancements in everything from computer power to game-engine updates, not to mention user feedback.
There is the practice of releasing a game in so-called “early access”, providing a more transparent look at the development process. This year’s critically adored hack-and-slash game Hades, for instance, was available to purchase in a pre-release form for two years before it was properly finalised.
This can, however, deal a blow to any sort of publicity and marketing campaigns. The game industry is highly secretive, and often attempts to turn meaningless details, such as the reveal of a character’s name, into a news story. Early access destroys this careful build-up.
The decision to rush Cyberpunk 2077 before the holidays points to long-standing and underlying issues about how the mainstream industry views its entertainment.
CD Projekt Red was aware of the game’s hiccups, even admitting that it failed to show how the title ran on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. For all the supposed big ideas about the future of our world that the game possesses, this is evidence the studio ultimately considered it little more than a product, one that was so hotly anticipated that consumers would overlook the fact that it was not ready for prime time.
Reeves himself hadn’t seen the finished version of the game at the time we talked – and he acknowledged he would need a more game-inclined friend to show it to him. His interest in the game seemed fuelled in part by the success CD Projekt Red had with The Witcher 3 and in part to gain a better understanding of how games affect all media.
“I don’t know where it’s going, but I know it’s going to be wacky,” he said. “It’s a good kind of puppeteering. Like, if I can play with the animation, I have more control.”
And yet it’s rare, as we just saw at the Game Awards this month, for a developer to be allowed to speak candidly about the art, the theories and the politics that inform every game. In such a climate, video games are handled with the cold precision of a new tech product rather than a work of entertainment. Thus, critical analysis around games is more vital than ever.
In turn, the legacy of Cyberpunk 2077, regardless of how it rebounds in 2021, will be that it is remembered as the work of a studio that disregarded the time its development team needed to finish the game – and in turn viewed its fans and the media with cynicism, even as it courted both with a product it specifically hyped as being politically edgy.
It’s far from the first time this has happened, but rarely has it been done with such callousness.
