🍪 Cyberpunk 2077 survived the scandal, and that should make CD Projekt more nervous, not less
Hello there console survivors, refund-form veterans, and Night City citizens who somehow made it through floating cars, melting NPCs, and one of the strangest redemption arcs in AAA history. Today we are looking at Cyberpunk 2077, a game that launched like a corporate lawsuit generator, disappeared from the PlayStation Store, got rebuilt for years, sold more than 35 million copies, and is now the foundation for Cyberpunk 2. That last part is the uncomfortable bit. CD PROJEKT RED did recover the franchise, but the industry lesson sitting under the neon is messy as hell.
Night City launched straight into damage control
When Cyberpunk 2077 finally released in December 2020, the conversation split almost immediately. PC players were dealing with bugs, sure, but many base PS4 and Xbox One players were watching a totally different disaster unfold. Crashes, texture problems, broken AI moments, unstable performance, and enough visual nonsense to make every bug compilation creator feel employed for life.
The biggest public slap came from Sony. The company removed Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and opened full refunds for players who bought it digitally. That is not a normal “rough launch” problem. That is a platform holder saying, publicly and loudly, that the product had crossed into a category it did not want to keep selling.
CD Projekt also apologized for not showing the game running on base last-gen consoles before release. That detail matters because the scandal was never only about bugs. Players felt they were denied the evidence they needed before paying. For a studio that had built its public image on being the “good guy” alternative to more cynical AAA publishers, the optics were poison.
🦊 Kiki: I remember that launch energy, and bro, it was so weird because people wanted to defend CD Projekt like they were defending a childhood friend who had just crashed your car and said the road was at fault. The PC crowd was posting pretty screenshots, console players were posting evidence like a courtroom drama, and every argument online somehow turned into “well, my machine runs it fine.” Very useful. Truly. The nastiest part was the trust gap. A buggy open-world game can be annoying, even funny sometimes, but hiding weak console footage before launch? That changes the mood. That makes people feel played.
🍪 Chip nervously holds a tiny refund receipt with both hands, eyes glossy and enormous.
The development gossip was uglier than the memes
The internal stories around Cyberpunk 2077 are where the scandal gets more interesting. Reporting from Jason Schreier, later summarized and expanded in The New Yorker, described a project that was already seen as rocky before release. Former employees had talked about crunch, and in 2020, Schreier reported that CD Projekt Red ordered six-day workweeks despite prior promises to avoid mandatory overtime.
Then came the postmortems. According to the same New Yorker piece, Bloomberg reporting said top developers had left after clashes over direction, developers had found problems before release but lacked time to fix them, and the famous 2018 demo was described as “almost entirely fake.” Studio head Adam Badowski disputed that framing, arguing that a work-in-progress “test of vision” naturally differs from a finished game. That defense may be technically reasonable in game development terms, but it still lands badly when the final product ships in that condition.
There is a broader pattern here that every AAA watcher recognizes: a vertical slice that sells the dream, years of marketing that hardens the dream into consumer expectation, then a production team forced to wrestle reality into the shape of a trailer. CD Projekt did not invent that problem. Cyberpunk just became one of the cleanest examples of how vicious the backlash gets when the gap is too visible.
🦊 Kiki: This is the part that always makes me twitch a little, because gamers see a fancy demo and think, “cool, that game exists somewhere.” Meanwhile, devs are probably staring at a cursed prototype held together by deadlines, hope, and some poor tools programmer’s emotional damage. And yeah, companies know players think that way. They benefit from it. They let people turn controlled demos into imaginary finished games. Then later everybody acts shocked when players compare the shipped version to the fantasy they were sold. I don’t even need to make a big moral speech here. If your marketing is doing parkour while production is crawling through glass, eventually someone bleeds in public.
🍪 Chip peeks from behind a neon “E3 Demo” sign, slowly lowering it as sparks fall from the ceiling.
The apology said more than it wanted to
After launch, CD Projekt’s leadership tried to frame the issue around the difficulty of adapting a highly ambitious PC-focused game to old console hardware. Marcin Iwiński said the team underestimated the task of making the game work on previous-gen consoles. He also pointed to the in-game streaming system, the technology responsible for feeding content into the world without constant loading breaks, as a core reason the console versions struggled.
The more revealing line came from the investor side. CD Projekt co-CEO Adam Kiciński said management had been too focused on releasing the game, underestimated the scale of the issues, and “ignored signals” that the base last-gen versions needed more time. That is corporate language, but the meaning is blunt: people knew enough to worry, and the release still happened.
That is why blaming the hardware never fully worked. Yes, PS4 and Xbox One were old by 2020. Yes, Cyberpunk was ambitious. Yes, open-world streaming is hard. But CD Projekt chose to sell that version of the game, at full price, on those machines. The console was not hiding in a trench coat pretending to be a PS5. Everyone knew what hardware was being targeted.
🦊 Kiki: The “old consoles were old” argument always felt like someone selling me soup in a cracked bowl and then explaining bowl physics. Cool, thanks, I still have soup on my pants. Nobody forced the company to launch on those machines in that state. Nobody forced the marketing to keep the hype train moving while the console version was giving off smoke signals. And honestly, the apology worked better when it stopped trying to sound technical and landed on management responsibility. That part felt closer to the actual mess. Decisions got made above the people fixing the bugs at 2 a.m., and players ended up buying the consequences.
🍪 Chip sits beside a tiny overheating console fan, waving a miniature caution flag.
The comeback was expensive, calculated, and weirdly effective
CD Projekt did not walk away from the wreckage. The studio patched, rebuilt, and reworked the game across years. Phantom Liberty became the prestige recovery move: a major expansion, a cleaner design statement, and a reminder that the studio could still deliver strong narrative RPG work when the foundation was stable.
The numbers show how much money went into the comeback. CD Projekt said Phantom Liberty cost about 275 million PLN in production and 95 million PLN in marketing, roughly $85 million combined at the time. Reports around CD Projekt’s investor presentation also estimated the broader post-launch rescue effort, including next-gen work and the expansion, at roughly $125 million.
Then Cyberpunk: Edgerunners did something almost unfair. The Netflix anime, made with Studio Trigger, turned the vibe around for a huge chunk of the audience. CD Projekt said the show’s popularity and the reception to update 1.6 had a measurable impact on sales, and by the end of September 2022 the game had passed 20 million players.
By Q3 2024, Cyberpunk 2077 had passed 30 million copies sold and Phantom Liberty had passed 8 million. By Q1 2025, Phantom Liberty had surpassed 10 million. By Q3 2025, the base game had passed 35 million units. The cursed launch became a very profitable long-tail machine.
🦊 Kiki: This is where the industry gets morally annoying, because the comeback is real. The game is much better now. Phantom Liberty is good. Edgerunners slapped. Players who waited got a completely different experience from the people who bought in early and got Night City held together with duct tape. But the business outcome is also dangerous. Because somewhere, some executive can look at this and think, “See? Launch messy, fix later, still sell 35 million.” That thought should be illegal in at least seven countries. The recovery deserves credit, absolutely. The launch still deserves to be remembered with a little side-eye and maybe a chair thrown gently across the room.
🍪 Chip: claps once for Phantom Liberty, then immediately points at a sticky note that says “do not repeat launch.”
Cyberpunk 2 is the test CD Projekt cannot cosplay its way through
The next Cyberpunk game, previously known as Project Orion and now referred to by CD Projekt as Cyberpunk 2, has moved into preproduction. CD Projekt said the team responsible for the next big Cyberpunk game completed the conceptual phase in 2025, and the project is being developed through CD Projekt Red North America, with Boston and Vancouver playing key roles.
This North American push is not cosmetic. In 2024, CD Projekt announced senior hires for Project Orion and said the follow-up was being headed by its US and Canada-based North American arm. Several veterans from Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty are involved, including Gabriel Amatangelo as game director and Paweł Sasko as associate game director.
The engine question also matters. CD Projekt has moved its future development strategy toward Unreal Engine 5 through a strategic partnership with Epic Games, after years of struggling with the costs and complexity of proprietary open-world technology. The company has already shown its Unreal Engine ambitions through The Witcher 4 tech demo work, with CD Projekt saying the partnership is focused on tools and features for large open-world development.
For Cyberpunk 2, the problem is no longer whether people care. They clearly do. The harder question is whether CD Projekt can build without letting the marketing department turn preproduction into prophecy. After Cyberpunk 2077, nobody needs another “when it’s ready” ritual that quietly becomes “when the quarter needs it.”
🦊 Kiki: I want Cyberpunk 2 to work. I really do. Night City has too much style, too much mood, too much weird little trash-fire humanity to waste because some spreadsheet goblin wants a release window tattooed on the team’s forehead. But CD Projekt has to act like a studio with scar tissue now. Show less until the thing is real. Stop letting trailers become contracts written in neon. Let the devs cook, and please, for the love of every broken NPC who walked through a car in 2020, test the console versions like actual humans will play them. Cyberpunk 2 has a chance to be the redemption arc without the clown makeup. That chance disappears fast if the old habits come back wearing a new engine hoodie.
🍪 Chip puts on tiny safety goggles and stamps “PREPRODUCTION MEANS EARLY” across a glowing roadmap.
The lesson hiding under all that neon
Cyberpunk 2077 is now both a warning and a success story. That contradiction is why it remains so fascinating. It was a launch failure severe enough to trigger refunds, lawsuits, platform delisting, and years of reputation damage. It also became one of CD Projekt’s biggest commercial pillars, with 35 million units sold and a sequel officially moving forward.
That is the messy AAA lesson. Players punish broken launches, but great worlds can survive if the studio has enough money, time, goodwill, and stubbornness to rebuild them. Most studios do not get that second life. CD Projekt did.
The question for Cyberpunk 2 is whether CD Projekt treats 2077 as a trauma to learn from or a business case to optimize. One path leads to a better game. The other leads to another neon apology video.
⚙️ Stay skeptical inspired by every player who asked why console footage was missing before launch
⚙️ Keep receipts inspired by the bug compilations, investor calls, and postmortems that kept the story honest
⚙️ And remember a redemption arc can fix a game, but it does not magically clean the decision-making that broke it
🦊 Kiki · 🍪 Chip · ⭐ Byte · 🦁 Leo
