The Fake Redemption of Cyberpunk 2077

let me tell you a story a story about a game one of the most prominent and long-awaited games of all time in fact and one that would turn out to be Gaming's greatest disappointment a story about why that game failed all of these setbacks and misfortunes the hubris and expectation that would pile up to cause this Monumental Fall From Grace a story about how that long abandoned game years after release found Redemption through an anime of all things and a story about how that Redemption might have been built on a lie this is the story of cyberpunk 2077. [Music] thank you [Music] but before we dive into video game development and cool anime I want to talk about something actually important this video is sponsored by rage Shadow Legends this is actually this time like this isn't a bit they're actually sponsoring me that was the best segue I could come up with raid is the first ever game to bring a true console level experience right to your phone I mean how many playable characters does cyberpunk have huh one or I guess two but you only play as one in like a flashback and like it's it's a whole thing it's complicated you know how many champions raid has over 600 and with countless ways to build your team new content added all the time and millions of combinations you can actually play this game until the year 2077. now with raid's giant roster of Champions it isn't hard to pick one you like for example have you seen skytouch Shaman she can heal others by hurting herself and keeps your team in the fight with powerful Buffs or what about 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to get started because you can also use the DK Rises promo code for a bunch of free items that can instantly level your strongest Champions to level 50. and this promo code is good for new and existing players all the way until October 25th and hey if you haven't already started playing raid yet then once again go click my link in the description description or scan this giant QR code that's been here this entire time to get unique bonuses worth thirty dollars I'm talking a free epic Champion 200 000 silver an XP boost and energy refill and one ancient Shard to get you more champions in game and if you want to go get your rewards then just go right over here that's that's where the rewards are that's they're they're waiting for you there they're right there just go get em raid Shadow Legends start rating today Shadow Legends I found the suit jacket in a dumpster I'm gonna go take a nap now [Music] CD projekt Red founded in 1994 by Marcy Nowinski and Mikhail Kaczynski started off by selling illegal pirated computer games in communist Poland and despite starting off the company incredibly based they felt the need to spread out and start selling video games legitimately so the team eventually turned into a Polish video game localization company before transitioning into development with a video game adaptation of The Witcher The Witcher was a success and so CD projekt began development on The Witcher 2 which was an even bigger success and so finally The Witcher 3 was created as the penultimate game in the trilogy taking nearly four years and 80 million dollars to create between the start of development on The Witcher 1 and completion of The Witcher 3 CD projekt Grew From about 15 people to over 250 and became a publicly traded company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange though more important than that they also became one of the most beloved video game companies in history because if you've ever played a video game before or you'll know that the Witcher 3 turned out to be one of the most popular games ever created an open world RPG with an expansive world and complex characters The Witcher 3 is still heralded to this day as some of the best that gaming has to offer and Not only was the game good but the model it operated under was uniquely fair for the industry shortly after launch The Witcher 3 would get 16 free DLC and two full-sized expansion packs both almost as big as the game itself and for a much lower price all of this did wonders for CD projekt Red's reputation they had successfully founded themselves on pro-consumer practices and good games and were in the good graces of basically every person that knew about them so when in January of 2013 a new trailer dropped for a game from cdpr called cyberpunk 2077 it became kind of a big deal foreign [Music] teaser trailer for cyberpunk is a near Masterpiece a slow build CGI trailer with a song playing over it that I probably can't show due to copyright it's an incredibly good teaser for the game and just a fun watch in general in fact all of CD projekt Red's trailers have been good even going back to their very first trailer for the first Witcher game over 15 years ago and this is all very deliberate I think I should get across right now that CD projekt Red is a very marketing focused company they put a lot of time and money into their trailers and marketing and advertisements and have always outperformed even larger AAA studios in that department and this will be something very important to understand going forward cdpr cares a lot about the publicity of their games and company now while the trailer is good there's only one part of it I want to focus on right now and that would be that it ends with one definitive statement coming when it's red ready this as it turns out will be the most ironic line in the history of gaming but anyway following this teaser trailer in 2013 comes the release of The Witcher 3 in 2015 which propels them into the Limelight and then much later in 2018 a full trailer for cyberpunk drops at E3 this trailer features full narration covering the basic premise and main character as well as more detail about what the game's titular location night City will look like but what really got people talking was the whopping 48 minute long gameplay demo going through levels from the first few hours of the game that dropped alongside it the demo showed gun play and stealth in the open world and all of these complex and well-oiled mechanics that were all shown off in full painting a picture of a very polished and detailed game now they flash a giant Banner Over the Top of the screen saying work in progress the entire time but the demo itself is still surprisingly well put together and it is very clearly promising the features that it shows off you even if they may look different in the full release and not only did this get people excited but the game won over 100 awards at E3 that year on just that demo alone which is such a stupid Concept in general but undeniable proof of the game's pre-release success what had started as a dull interest was now whipped up into a frenzy of excitement for this game which again means that cdpr was doing their job as marketers well and they would only get better at this at next year's E3 where they would drop a full cinematic trailer The Cinematic at E3 2019 is yet again amazing though it does weirdly spoil the biggest character death in the entire game for some reason but it's the end of this trailer that I think really got people stoked I'll just let it play out for itself yeah oh my God oh my God if the previous trailers were adding wood to the fire of hype that this game was building the Johnny silverhand reveal threw a can of gasoline on it Keanu Reeves walking out for the reveal of this game was like a Super Bowl halftime show it's pretty unbeatable as one of the most insane video game trailer reactions including the time Killer Instinct got someone to give a standing ovation out of a wheelchair and with keanu's reveal came the information the game would be released on PC PS4 and Xbox One with a release date on the 16th of April 2020. so with all this the floodgates were officially opened the reveal trailer built hype the gameplay demo showed a closer look and Keanu Reeves brought it home all we had to do now was wait I mean this is going to be the greatest game of all time right hey remember when I said CD projekt Red was a marketing focused company well that was a lot more true than anyone even knew at the time because that 48 minute gameplay demo showing real in-game footage and gameplay yeah that was entirely fake it was an entirely different demo build of the game that CD projekt Red had scripted to a t to show what the final game might look like because while the initial teaser and announcement came out in 2013 the full development of cyberpunk didn't start until 2016 when the team that was working on The Witcher 3 was freed up and that development also started with the Game's new director Adam Bukowski changing Focus entirely from a third person game like CD projekt was used to to a first person shooter meaning every asset and scrap of code would have to be built from scratch apparently several top developers at cdpr walked out of the company due to this massive overhaul surely a sign they were off to a great start suffice to say the mechanics shown off in the gameplay demo weren't even built into the game game yet because the game wasn't even built yet at all what had happened was the development team was told to focus entirely on this gameplay demo for E3 instead of actually working on the game and this had taken months away from the already short development time on this ambitious project cdpr's marketing had just blatantly lied about the state of the game with this demo in the hopes they'd have enough time to fully Implement everything they showed and as it would turn out time was not on their side because not only were they behind due to spending time on this fake demo but development on the real game was starting to fill up with problems and complications in order to increase the scope and graphical Fidelity of the game CD projekt has started development on their new engine red Engine 4 while making it meaning they were essentially driving a train while building the tracks in front of it CD projekt Red is also a very PC Centric company and so their philosophy on this game was to make a beautiful looking game on computer first and then scale back on Console to adapt to their lower performance but as it would turn out the console's performance would suffer significantly throughout nearly all of development because even scaling back as far as they could the giant Map size and little loading zones meant the memory requirements for the game were too much for consoles to handle and finally at the center of all this slow progress they were making CD projekt Red was dealing with the consequences of an obscene amount of so just before development started on cyberpunk in 2016 CD projekt was entirely focused on The Witcher 3 and with this Focus came a lot of crunch the company has since gotten some pretty vicious backlash for the mandatory overtime that employees had to go through during the last year of that game's development the company's CEO March Nowinski would even do an interview after the fake 2018 gameplay demo say that they wouldn't be enforcing mandatory crunch on employees for the development of cyberpunk because he thought that the conditions that the employees working on The Witcher 3 face were inhumane his words not mine however due to the developments starting late and going slow when the promised release date in 2020 was just around the corner and the game wasn't even close to finished CD projekt started to panic and so the game was delayed with an announcement on January 16th of 2020 that the game's release date would be moved up to September now the public saw this as a shocking moment but were overall still pretty positive on the game after After All City projects marketing going into it was that it would be out when it's ready so if it wouldn't be ready then the fans could wait until it was but internally all hell broke loose the same day they announced the Game's new launch date March Nowinski would go on a public call with shareholders to tell them that mandatory crunch should be enforced on at least some employees so this team have already exhausted developers who had just come off of working overtime for The Witcher 3 before starting development on cyberpunk were now being forced to work overtime again and quite a lot of it from several internal leaks it was reported that some employees at cdpr during crunch time were working 13 hours a day six days a week several developers later stated that they had been made to work nights and weekends for over a year and the company enforced mandatory Six-Day work weeks for all employees during the last few months not only this but the timing couldn't be worse because something else happened to slow down development in March of 22 20. so the development of cyberpunk during these last few crucial months moved entirely out of office and normally this wouldn't be a terrible issue for a company but game development in particular revolves around good communication city project like other Studios had an open Office Space meaning that any Department could communicate with any other by just walking over and talking to them but with everyone working from home that communication would slow to a crawl which was made even worse by the engine still being built alongside the game and all of the console performance issues still happening and this unfortunately is still not where it ends during all this chaos and going back to 2019 CD projekt had been working with an outsourced quality assurance company called Quantic labs and this might be some of the most convoluted nonsense I've ever covered in a video so Quantic Labs is a QA or quality assurance company which means that they have entire teams of people that when hired to work on a game will just play through it Non-Stop and point out every bug or glitch or problem that they encounter and normally these teams are supposed to be well trained enough to point out the reason the problem occurred so the devs can go and fix it normally this is what happens what happened with cyberpunk 2077 was that the team Quantic Labs had sent to Poland to work with CD projekt was entirely made up of Juniors CD projekt had expected people with years of experience but apparently the most experienced person in the entire team had less than a year Quantic Labs then enforced a quota of 10 bugs a day to find for each of these Juniors to I guess increase productivity but this goes against basically the entire philosophy of QA where finding one major bug is infinitely more valuable than even a hundred smaller ones yet Quantic would continually tell their employees to ignore larger bugs to meet their arbitrary quota so doing what they were told the team started reporting every small visual glitch or insignificant problem they could find just flooding the developers with meaningless issues to solve instead of finding anything actually hurting the game to try and remedy this and I guess increase productivity again Quantic then doubled the team size sending over some even less experienced staff which meant that the original unexperienced QA team now had to train the new hires while still trying to meet their quota this eventually got so bad that CD projekt reportedly told developers to ignore the QA team completely because they were just submitting hundreds of useless bug reports foreign so with all these major problems leading up to launch that first delay was only a minor relief the game was still not even close to being ready and to add insult to injury in February of 2020 CD projekt Red was hacked by a group that claimed to have gotten source code for The Witcher 3 and cyberpunk 2077 and we're holding the information Ransom though cdpr declined to pay them come June then and CD projekt delayed the game one more time to November and even with the mandatory Six-Day work week starting in October the game was delayed One Last Time To December 10th and this last delay was the most sudden of them all as it came after they had announced the game had gone gold meaning they had started printing physical copies apparently ninety percent of the company was not even told about the delay until afterward and cdpr had even confirmed to people on Twitter that they could take time off from work for the release only to delay the next day but even with months of delayed time to work in the game it was just not finished the bugs were still prominent the console versions were still underperforming which most of the team didn't even know about because so few of them had Dev kits to develop the game on but with this final release date of December 10th CD projekt couldn't Push It Forward anymore you see games are incredibly seasonal products selling an average of two to three times more during the holidays and while cyberpunk had already recouped its losses from pre-orders at this point missing out on a holiday release would mean missing out on a ton of potential sales and they couldn't delay by an entire year because the plan from the executives was always to release on the PS4 and Xbox One you know those consoles they could barely get the game to run on at this point because they wanted to double dip when the next generation of consoles came out by delaying any further they'd miss that window and have to release on both generations of consoles simultaneously while also missing out on their biggest sales period and they had told investors previously that this was an impossibility and so December 10th was decided to be the final release date no matter what the game looked like meanwhile the public was none the wiser I think everyone had massive suspicions at this point but nobody truly knew the extent of the game's problems cdpr just kept pushing messages like we're finishing up the game to make it perfect while they were actually scrambling to have it run at all and so as one last Shady marketing tactic when the company had to give out early review copies to journalists they only gave them PC copies and they had them all site embargoes that made sure they weren't allowed to show any of their own gameplay footage as CD projekt said that the game would be patched before release this means that when the reviews came out they were entirely positive because nobody had gotten any performance issues on their expensive PCS and they were told that any bugs or glitches they saw wouldn't be in the final version so by December 10th not only is this game still presenting itself as functional but the reviews are glowing and so we get to Launch foreign I think without exaggeration that the launch day of cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most chaotic days in the history of gaming the only thing I could really liken it to was the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan where the doors to the boat open and everyone just gets immediately blown to shreds or actually it would be like the opening scene and Saving Private Ryan if there were so many bullets on screen that it turns your TV off because the game was so popular that the second the clock hit midnight on launch day steam went down completely so many people had tried to get the game on release that they crashed the biggest game distribution website in the world for several hours though 12 hours later long after steam had came back up cyberpunk had crossed 800 000 concurrent players on just steam alone including consoles and other PC retailers the game had millions of people playing it the day it came out and while this hype train had effectively launched cyberpunk and CD project into the atmosphere they would slowly start to burn up on re-entry because people started to have questions questions like why are all the NPCs T posing why can I see every tree in the game through walls why did my game Crash and why on the outside of the city on a giant sign do they misspell the word night that last one's my favorite by the way you see despite pushing out as many patches and fixes as possible even leading to a giant change in the game's code hours before release pretty much every bug or glitch or problem in a video game you can think of was happening in cyberpunk 2077. in fact here's a list of just some of them that I'll scroll by instead of covering each one though the biggest bug was actually one where every item you crafted or picked up in the game would increase the size of your save file and if that file got too big it would implode on itself deleting all of your progress meaning in order to avoid your save committing seppuku you had to avoid picking up or crafting items in what was advertised as RPG game of the decade though the most public problem at launch which I foreshadowed basically this entire video was the performance on consoles crazy I know after everything I talked about how could they not run smoothly while PC had frame rate dips and terrible optimization the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game were basically unplayable they ran at an average of less than 25 FPS dipping down to 10 when any action started happening and they had on average twice the amount of crashes as every other platform and as most people are aware the console performance was so bad that only a week later Sony took the game off their stores and offered a full refund to anyone who bought it along with Microsoft and GameStop offering full refunds for the game due to the massive backlash [Music] within the week of launch pretty much all of the Goodwill that CD projekt Red had built up with Decades of meticulous marketing was gone not only were the bugs apparent but entire features promised in marketing material like the demo were completely absent the open world that was shown in initial trailers had to be scaled back before launch the NPCs that were compared to those in Red Dead Redemption 2 were barely functional the dynamic cops promoted for the game turned out to just spawn behind the player if you had a wanted level and didn't have the ability to drive so you could just run away from them in fact none of the NPCs have the ability to drive because the car AI in the game didn't exist they were all hard-coded to follow specific paths and would not react to anything around them unless you physically blocked their path which even then didn't always work and the game's supposed complex RPG nature seemed to be a lot more shallow than initially advertised you only had one uncustomizable apartment Cosmetics didn't change anything but base stats the dialogue options and life paths barely had an effect on gameplay after the first hour in a game about transhumanism and the ability to change every part of your being you couldn't even change your appearance after the opening of the game you were stuck with the same haircut the entire time oh yeah and I forgot to mention the initial marketing for this game promised multiplayer for it like a full GTA online multiplayer mode CD projekt Red still to this day has never brought that up again despite the game having a solid foundation there was a lot missing to cover every controversy would take hours so I won't but there's also been more videos made on the game than there are bugs in it which is a lot if that wasn't clear so after all this comes to light reviewers who had previously rated the game highly started to lower their scores to protest the misrepresentation hate against the game became the norm on social media and cdpr's own investors filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for misleading them on the state of the game which ended up settling outside of court for 1.85 million dollars all the while the company's public stock which was the biggest in all of Poland at the time by the way dropped 50 percent and if this wasn't bad enough for the company those same developers who had just worked six days a week for the months leading up to release all had their bonuses tied to the game getting a review score above 90. to give some context the game's current score on PC is an 86 and on PS4 is a 57 though the company's execs mainly the CEO marchinoinsky did step up to take responsibility coming out with a five minute long apology video explaining everything they knew at the time they admitted the game is optimized for PC first and said the in-game streaming engine was the main culprit for the problems on consoles and they said the major bugs in the game weren't caught in time for launch and they weren't even aware of a lot of them which does seem to line up with the information we later got about Quantic labs and finally they said the developers would all be getting bonuses for their hard work regardless of review scores [Music] and of the immediate aftermath of cyberpunk 2077. they screwed up got burned and now had to live with the consequences and those consequences were months of being the laughing stock of the entire gaming industry Bloomberg would even release an article later detailing the game's problems in development from first-hand accounts of people on the team a lot of information in that article is what I've talked about earlier in this video but they did put out a quote on what they think caused it all interviews with more than 20 current and former CD project staff most of whom requested anonymity so as not to risk their careers depict the development process marred by unchecked ambition poor planning and Technical shortcomings employees discussing the game's creation for the first time described a company that focused on marketing at the expense of development and an unrealistic timeline that pressured some into working extensive overtime long before the final push and if this all sums it up perfectly there wasn't one single reason why cyberpunk failed but a a perfect storm of mismanagement and lack of forethought that led to This Disaster but it is still obvious that the company cares a lot about cyberpunk they very clearly wanted it to be special and even though the blame does ultimately lie with the higher-ups who decided to launch I don't think there's anyone involved with the game who doesn't wish they could have done better but what could CD projekt possibly do at this point to fix the game and their reputation [Music] project quickly put out a road map detailing the game's post-launch patches and hotfixes and started working on them massively improving the game what is this they got cyber attacked are you kidding me okay so the company fell victim to a massive Cyber attack in February of 2021 that delayed the patches quite a bit honestly I think at this point Martin Nowinski is the victim of a Witch's Curse because I don't know how this much bad luck can befall one company but after this they started to put out regular patches to the game sure they did delay those patches several times and changed the road map completely on four different occasions but I'm just gonna gloss over that let's get to the Redemption hotfix 1.02 and 1.03 December 10th 2020 fixed critical game progression and stability errors hotfix 1.04 December 11th removed the flashing effect on brain dances that gave a reviewer a seizure okay slight hiccup to the whole Redemption story let's just move past that I think they're fine hotfix 1.05 December 19th fixed unprogressable quests and console bugs hotfix 1.06 December 23rd remove the save file limit on PC fixing the corrupt save glitch patch 1.1 January 22nd 2021 improvements to memory usage and game stability on consoles patch 1.11 January 28th fixed bugs introduced in patch 1.1 God alright patch 1.12 February 5th resolved code vulnerability in the PC version of the game this was right after the Cyber attack by the way patch 1.2 March 29th more improved stability on consoles fixed major bugs improved performance improved Graphics audio and animation patch 1.3 August 17th improved driving balance and gameplay as well as actual new content like a new car some new clothing and a new appearance for Johnny silverhand patch 1.5 February 15 2022 you can now buy apartments and change your appearance inside them new weapons and weapon mods combat AI is overhauled crowd AI is actually added to the game driving has improved traffic AI is added to the game balance is fixed even more cyberware combat hacking perks NPCs Vehicles weapons UI quests and the open world each get a list of fixes and improvements plus the game finally comes out on next-gen consoles with Ray tracing and improved graphics for each and finally as of this video patch 1 1.6 on September 6 2022 The Edge Runners update which added wardrobes New Missions new weapons and exclusive content related to the cyberpunk edge Runners anime as well as a long list of fixes and improvements just as extensive as 1.5 now with this the game has come a long way since launch if that long list of patches didn't make it obvious they have fixed a lot not only has performance substantially improved across the board but several promised features like multiple apartments and customizable appearances have started to actually be put into the game and enough has been improved that PlayStation even re-listed the game for digital download albeit still with a warning to expect some issues going back and replaying it you can definitely feel a noticeable difference firstly the bugs are definitely less drastic than when I first beat the game at launch I mean it's still incredibly janky but more in a lovable Skyrim sort of way than a oh my God my eyes are bleeding and also I think it bricked my PC kind of way plus the gameplay does feel smoother and more refined the version I originally played was broken to hell where for the entire second half of the game I was one-shotting every enemy with a random Katana I picked up including Adam Smasher but almost all of the gameplay has been tweaked quite a bit to be more enjoyable and balanced now the core game is still fundamentally identical the added features and improvements have polished it up quite a bit but it's not even in the same ballpark as what was promised in the original marketing but cyberpunk right now is definitely a lot closer to what I think the developers intended at launch it is absolutely wild that it took us two years to get here but with the company is now second statement that they won't be enforcing any more crunch I'm willing to give the devs some breathing room and I should say in my opinion cyberpunk was never a bad game even the buggy launch day version was still full of promise and there's definitely a reason why reviewers give it 9 or 10 out of 10 when they couldn't see any bugs the story is engaging and well written the characters are interesting the setting is immaculate and all of this led me to put over 90 hours in the game before the first big patch even came out I literally have every achievement in this game except one because I never upgraded any of my abilities to max level and at launch the RPG of the decade didn't have a Respec option but regardless of that I like this game I wanted it to succeed and I'm glad it's finally starting to now it isn't the best game ever I will forever hold the opinion that it's closer to a Far Cry game than an actual RPG but it is fun and I believe that it's worth playing also any game with run the jewels in the soundtrack deserves at least like a 7 out of 10. though as you can imagine patches alone aren't enough to change hearts and Minds cyberpunk in order to fix its reputation needed a lot more than updates it needed a Revival one that would turn out to be the responsibility of Studio trigger [Music] The cyberpunk Edge Runners anime time and was initially announced in June of 2020 created by CD projekt Red and written by a man with an unpronounceable name the anime adaptation was entirely worked on by Studio trigger and came out September 13 2022 and it is amazing now I am already a big fan of trigger as you can see in my fan service video where I detail a lot of that company's history and gush about kill a kill but Edge Runners is something special it takes the most Punk setting you can think of and gives it to the most Punk studio in animation it's energetic it's emotional it's violent as all hell to the point that I can't even show you half the show because it's so splattered in Sex and Gore the whole story follows a dive into night City through the lens of David Martinez a teenager who gets dragged into the darker side of this world through a tangled web of motivation and relationships every one of the 10 episodes is like a roller coaster ride taking you deeper and deeper into the darkness until eventually you're begging to be let off but it keeps going until all that's left is the chromed out core where your heart used to be because nobody gets a happy ending in night City oh and it also has Rebecca the best character in all of fiction the show is captivating to watch and perfectly Blends and utilizes the genre of cyberpunk way better than even the game does not only does the setting feel more fleshed out and real but in just three episodes you get more attached to some of these characters than ones you spend 60 hours with in the game and despite the clear message about how bad this world is the show is an incredibly romanticized version of it which only makes the game seem that much more appealing and with entirely in-game locations and cameos from several of the game's characters the tie-in truly feels like an extension of the material that 2077 introduced and so with the release of edge Runners naturally a lot of people came back to cyberpunk the whole anime just oozes with a personality and World building that sells you on night City and makes you crave more of it so after two years of regular updates and a more stable game to come back to people started to come back just the first week after the anime came out CD projekt reported that cyberpunk was getting over 1 1 million new players a day and on Steam alone the game had crossed 100 000 concurrent players which for context was higher than the Witcher 3's all-time record the tie-in anime for cyberpunk was an unprecedented success it had completely changed the image of the game to the general population and while there are still a lot of people with negative opinions about the game the sentiment that cyberpunk wasn't actually that bad started to take off however I think it's again important to remember just how good at marketing CD projekt Red is Edge Runners for as amazing as it is on its own is essentially one long commercial for the game that's the entire reason for its existence much like how arcane was made to tie in to League of Legends don't get me wrong the creators of the anime and everyone working on it were absolutely making it to make a good show I don't want to come across like I'm saying it was just made as a cash grab but it is marketing and very effective marketing at that watching Edge Runners sells you on a world with Rich detail and spectacular design just like 2077's original trailers it shows you parts of this world that are unique and interesting and not all that present in the game even the main plot point of cyberpsychosis is just not in 2077 at all like it is in the show in a game that's entire upgrade system revolves around cybernetic enhancements and so while I have only praised for that team and the product they delivered I do just want to point out the intention was to take the good will of the work of Studio trigger and rub it off on the main title foreign [Music] so what now what do we possibly do with this information because we now have an incredibly good idea of what caused cyberpunk to fail and what caused it to succeed afterwards and strangely both are connected to this intense focus on marketing and would you look at that cyberpunk recently had its new expansion Phantom Liberty get announced along with a sequel in development and a new Witcher game all of which got promoted heavily after the success of edge Runners now I want to say that cdproject has learned a hard lesson from their failure and they'll use that to be better going forward but I don't know if they will because even with the launch catastrophe the game has still sold 20 million copies since then they actually made a pretty big profit from this if not as much as they want it and the publicity is still turning around in the game many hold the feeling of getting burned by CD project closely but many will just forget and the amount of people skeptical of the company and their games will only grow smaller as that buggy launch gets further and further away CD projekt Red have said that they're going to avoid Crunch at all costs going forward and that they're going to make their new games with more thought and planning and fair treatment of employees but they also said that after The Witcher 3 and that was a [ __ ] lie in fact CD projekt have just blatantly lied a lot and it's sad to say that they only ever owned up to it after they got caught and faced backlash so with even their worst failure starting to turn around they might just decide to double down again start forcing devs into crunch time for the sake of another ambitious game this time with even more volatility as they desperately try to redeem themselves I guess only time will tell if they've actually improved as a company or if all of this is just PR from the kings of video game marketing because if there's anything to take away from this video it's the power of consumers Goodwill the Goodwill that city project red utilized to launch themselves into success the Goodwill that they burned to make a profit and the Goodwill that they've rekindled due to clever marketing and being aware of how it can be used against you is essential to making sure that it isn't I want CD projekt Red to succeed I want them to be the amazing pro-consumer company that they say they are but I also want to hold them accountable the biggest company in their entire country overworking their employees to strive for profit and lying to the public the entire time they did it only owning up once it affected their bottom line if that doesn't sound like a villain in a cyberpunk story I don't know what does so just be aware the next time a company is promising you the moon because they might not be able to deliver it thanks for watching [Music] [Music] please [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Lextorias

Views: 192,170

Keywords: lextorias, the deceptive redemption of cyberpunk 2077, cyberpunk, cyberpunk 2077, cd projekt red, cyberpunk edgerunners, edgerunners, cyberpunk 2077's deceptive redemption, cyberpunk 2077 redemption, cyberpunk 2077 comeback, how cyberpunk 2077 fooled the world, how cyberpunk 2077 tricked everyone, the fake redemption of cyberpunk 2077

Id: HPYYmyhf3ns

Length: 40min 30sec (2430 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022