How a years long effort to create Cyberpunk 2077, marred by infighting, incompetence, and poor planning, brought the Polish studio CD Projekt RED to its knees
Nearly a decade of hype led to a troubled release riddled with glitches, a livid fan base, refunds for potentially millions of players and a possible class-action lawsuit.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
This NYT account lands days after the fallout began: CD Projekt RED pulled in refunds for a glitch-riddled Cyberpunk 2077, and an investor filed a class-action suit in California federal court alleging misleading statements about the game's state. The piece is the narrative layer on top of that — a decade of hype colliding with internal infighting, poor planning, and technical shortfalls.
The reckoning deepened weeks later when more than 20 current and former staff told Bloomberg that unchecked ambition drove the project's problems, and it set up the studio's longer arc: a three-year turnaround that eventually pushed the game past 25 million units sold and a major award.
First-order effects
CD Projekt RED is processing refunds for potentially millions of players while defending against the investor class action over statements made before launch.
The studio's reputation with the fan base that powered nearly a decade of hype takes the direct hit, threatening goodwill that carried its previous releases.
Second-order effects
The staff accounts of poor planning and unchecked ambition put CD Projekt RED's internal development practices under public scrutiny, pressuring the studio to restructure how it scopes and schedules flagship projects.
Publishers and investors watching the stock and legal fallout face renewed pressure to tie marketing promises to demonstrable technical readiness rather than long hype cycles.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, AAA single-game studios learn that a botched launch is recoverable — the engine overhaul and testing regime behind the recovery — but only at the cost of years of goodwill and legal exposure, reshaping how studios budget launch risk.
The episode strengthens the case that investor-facing statements about unreleased games carry securities-litigation risk, a structural constraint on how studios market long development cycles.
The trend: Flagship game launches are shifting from hype-maximizing reveals toward launch-readiness discipline, as studios absorb that a broken debut now carries refund, litigation, and multi-year recovery costs.
SIE strives to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction, and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased Cyberpunk 2077 via PlayStation Store and want a refund. Please visit the following link to initiate the refund: http://r.socialstudio.radian6.co…
There are legitimate, justified reasons to be angry about the release of Cyberpunk 2077—but that anger should be directed at management, not developers. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
It's almost as though review scores shouldn't be granted on promises of what the game will be and instead should be granted on what the game is. https://twitter.com/...
“During Cyberpunk 2077's development, staff endured multiple periods of extensive overtime including mandatory six-day weeks to finish the game” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
one thing ill say: under a lot of the most obvious flaws is a compelling storyline and the potential for a great game. am curious if CD Projekt RED turns this into a Witcher 3 situation— a long-term success after LOTS of work fixing early mess. the hype was just too much.
“Almost as soon as the game arrived, players began posting screenshots of the most glaring glitches on social media. Entire subreddits are now devoted to the frequent, nonsensical bugs users observed as they traversed deeper into Night City.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
here is a story on the rise and fall of Cyberpunk 2077, and how a years long effort to create the world's greatest videogame brought the Polish studio CD Projekt RED to its knees. w/ @Kellen_Browning https://www.nytimes.com/...
Damn that's pretty crazy. I don't understand why people don't remember that the original dudes that work on Witcher 3 left and never worked on Cyberpunk 2077. It was some new dudes, give them a break. Everyone complained when the game kept getting delayed and now? Still crying? h…