Source (unfortunately in polish but you could translate it and understand the basic gist)
Edit: I translated the most important points of this piece and I'm too tired to compose TLDR, if someone is willing to do that I would be thankful. Cheers!
At the end of 2019 (according to basic rules of game developement) a vertical slice was given for rating, such internal demo's purpose is to show the structure and mechanics of the entire game in a nutshell: missions, combat system, graphics, music...
The result was shockingly bad - only 1% met set requirements.
It was so bad that this result was NOT disclosed to the whole company. "This is the first time this has happend" - tells us one of the employees of the Quality Assurance department.
This department has a whole list of so-called requirements, which are necessary and the game must meet them. Cyberpunk 2077 was made according to standard game dev life cycle in which successive stages followe one another: pre-alpha, alpha, beta and gold.
If the project is 5 years old and it has a premiere in a few months it should be at least in the beta phase and have all the features. Alpha should have core features, beta has everything ready, only still underdeveloped.
There should be 80%, not 1% that met set requirements.
At this stage there should only be polish which is fixing any errors. Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't even close to that level then - at this point our informant is spreading his hands showing helplessness
Edit (where I will add additional information as I read):
Bad state of the game in the beginning of 2020 was confirmed by outsourcing companies "Outsourcing companies said it was the worst build they've ever got" CDPR employees report.
CDPR hired reviewers for so-called silent reviews. Those were the reviews of the game in its current state (April) which were made by 3 reputable journalists from the west who signed NDA and began reviewing PC version of Cyberpunk 2077.
As Spidersweb found out, journalists didn't have good news for CDPR. They predicted that if Cyberpunk 2077 would be released in September (it was after 1st delay) then the game would get around 60/100 score on average.
They also rated graphics 6/10, RPG elements 5-6/10, gameplay 7/10 and music 8-9/10
However, same journalists see a ray of hope. They believe that if the release date is postponed by 2-3 months and the developers manage to create additional mechanics + fix the most serious erros then the average score should jump to 85/100
They also said that the score could be over 90/100. But to do that CDPR would have to delay the game to April 2021, fix not only the most important bugs but add new mechanics and rework some of the existing ones that according to them "were simply badly done". And we should remember that they got PC version of the game.
"Publisher is planning a release window. These are large, quite complicated and expensive mechanisms. At some point, someone makes a decision that this is coming out unfinished. Sometimes it is in the end of a financial quarter, a year or whatever" - Says Marcin Iwiński, co-funder of CDPR at Woodstock 2015.
However, in his opinion this adaptation to the requirements of the publishing cycle wasn't an explanation for releasing underdeveloped products - "These are bad decisions, I disagree with them. I will always defend the game, because the game IS THE MOST IMPORTANT*. We have a saying in our company -* no one remembers unifnished games released on time - because people want to buy a finished product. I don't want to go watch Star Wars and see unpainted spaceships. If I saw this I would say - damn what is this mess!? - I think that is bad and the brand of the particular game will suffer a lot from it."
(My personal note - this all is pretty fucking ironic)
That was the answer to the question about Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Knight (which was big buggy unoptimised mess on PCs). Iwiński was asked how would he handle things if he was in charge of that developement proces - "What decision would I make? I would probably release the game on console and delay PC version. I would say that we're polishing the game and adding a lot of additional content to repay fans for the delay. Of course, being in such is already bad, we should go back 2 years and differently plan things to prevent it from happening. RELEASE GAMES SHOULD BE FINISHED, BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE PLAYER PAYS FOR*."*
CDPR's 7 Deadly Sins:
- The sin of envy. The iron grip of CDPR's board.
CDPR devs said that Cyberpunk 2077 problems are basically Witcher 3 all over again and that Hollywood payrolls are shorter than the list of bugs fixed after the premiere of that game. According to many employees the main problem of CD Projekt Red and, as result, Cyberpunk 2077 is one: The management board keeps a firm grip on the vision of what the product should look like. Sometimes it has its advantages (meaning, bosses and team leaders sit over the game, working with normal devs on demos. It builds hope - we hear from employees.
However, something different happens more often. Like how it happend with Witcher 3, someone from the board said one day - "What if Geralt could dive?" - It sounded great, except it required brand new quests, an environemnt to design. A lot of work.
"Someone had a fantasy and it was necessary to postpone Witcher 3 premiere" - says one of the former employees. He says it was the same with Cyberpunk 2077 - "There were tons of the ideas from the board which delayed the work on the game."
The other issue pointed out by the different developer is how CDPR is delegating tasks - "In bigger, more mature companies the board gives general tasks and teams are delegated to develop the details on their own. It's not the company which made The Witcher where they had only around 30 people. Nevertheless, management still behaves like this and has too much ego to allow people to work independently."
- The sin of pride. Biting off more than one can chew.
The Witcher was supposed to be done in a year with 4 developers. It ended with 5 years, almost 100 developers and 28 million polish złoty invested.
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition was annouced to come out in May 2008, it got released in fall of 2008.
Witcher 2 on xbox was planned to be released at the end of 2011. It was delayed for around 6 months.
Witcher 3 original release date was in fall of 2014, they ended up with may of 2015.
After every success, they forgot how overly ambitious they were. And they forgot it again with Cyberpunk 2077. For a very long time game was meant to get released in 2019.
According to Janusz Tarczykowski from Rock Square Thunder CDPR shot themselves in the foot by planning to release multiplayer component. Physics don't work the same for singleplayer & multiplayer games. And because of that they had to rewrite them completely.
They decided to create game and engine at the same time and it didn't work out for them really well. Even if designers came up with something there was no way to test it if the engine doesn't exist. So people waited and always when they were done with the engine, bugs and glitches appeard and they had to be fixed. This created infinite loop.
"There is a law in programming - you won't build any complex system from scratch*. You can see it in the example of Amazon, who founded its game studio some time ago and immediately stated that they were going to do super-large productions. They hired great experts, pumped in lots of cash and thought it was enough. Meanwhile, you have to go step by step"* - says Tarczykowski
- The sin of greed. The more projects, the worse.
CDPR bought polish studio Metropolis. Board got involved and ruined the chances of the project being complete. They decided to take devs and merge them with Witcher team.
They also outsourced The Witcher console version, called "The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf", to french company called Widescreen Games. But they did little to no research and it turned out they weren't competent to finish this project. CDPR board had to go to France personally to see how project looked and they decided it wasn't going nowhere. They had to cancel it and because it was in contract they signed with Atari (The Witcher publisher) CDPR had to extend partnership with them to Witcher 2. In overall they lost around 1 million $
And as you can imagine by now, they didn't learn from this lesson. Instead of finishing Witcher 2 they decided on starting production of the sequel and remake of Witcher 1.
- The sin of gluttony. Hype for new ideas.
If we look at CD Projekt Red history they have as many unfinished projects as they have released ones:
- The Witcher: Outcast
- The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf
- They
- The Witcher: Battle Arena
- The Witcher: Versus
- The Witcher: Adventure
"For some reason CDPR inisted on Gwent, a witcher card game. A game well rated, but a bottomless pit - 100 artists worked on this game*, which is a huge number. And huge costs. Marketing and developement of this game is counted in* tens of millions of polish złoty*"* tells us former employee of CDPR, who worked on Gwent
We heard that for many devs Gwent was the essence of problems in CDPR's project management - the board insisted that it should be a console card game, even tho it's not a type of game for such devices. Nothing meaningful came out of it.
Moreover, in parallel, work began on Cyberpunk 2077, which channeled Gwent, especially in terms of marketing, says another CDPR employee who has been working on Gwent for a long time.
After gwent's premiere, the management released a lot of pressure that was on this game and its developers. They introduce Agile management, people started working with normal game dev principles, crunch was only for volunteers, managers were left more freedom and the product started to somehow earn money.
In march 2020 Gwent was released for android and the effects were visible almost immediately: console revenues for Gwent in 2020 amounted to just 0.2% and from Android to 26%
- The sin of lust. Lack of work culture.
If you come to work at 5am in the morning, nobody will notice your hard work. But they will notice your sacrifice if you show up and sit to 8PM in the evening. Because it doesn't matter if you work a lot, it just matters when you work.
When former Metropolis' devs noticed how CDPR worked they quickly fleed and created their own gaming studio called 11 bit studios.
At the time of the financial crisis CDPR invited polish investor, Zbigniew Jakubas, for a tour. He recalled that he noticed how nobody cared about his presence. Everyone was staring at their screens working. Former devs laugh about it because the board ordered them to not roam around the studio.
Less funny story is about developers who were so trained to crunch that they worked 40 days in a row without taking even 1 day off.
Employees also point out that the crunch is never evenly spread across all teams. In years 2017-2018 Gwent team was crunch to hell and many developers decided to jump to Cyberpunk team because it wasn't crunching as hard at that point. So many people decided to change teams that board decided that if someone would sing off from Gwent team that would mean 6 months ban before they could join Cyberpunk team.
But jumping to Cyberpunk 2077 team was like going from bad to worse. Of course, crunch was there all along and it continued which is ironic because in 2019 board claimed that crunch would be for volunteers. But as they went closer and closer to delayed release date that voluntariness started to fade more and more.
- The sin of sloth. Lack of drawing conclusions from past mistakes.
In 2015 CDPR decided to hire Bob Watson, experienced manager from Ubisoft Singapur as a QA Director. QA team gathered with him and summed up work on Witcher 3. One of the QA employees recalles - "The guy broke down, he started banging his head on the table in the room we were sitting and said it was impossible that the game even released"
Bob lasted in CDPR for over a year, history was once again repeated. In 2014 CDPR hired new art director from Ubisoft, that guy lasted only 3 momths.
We can't say that company doesn't change. It is better than it was 5 years ago. The approach to crunch and wages changed. External company carried out audits and they showed lack of trust in CDPR board and sense of pay inequality.
In 2019 employees prepared reports on the wages in the market for management board. This was accepted in 2020 but with the assumption that the salary will increase with the next promotion of the employee.
However, these changes turned out to be insufficient. Piotr Krzywonosiuk, today an executive producer at Techland, was the main producer at CDPR until May of 2020. He's gone in the end credits for Cyberpunk 2077 - so on the final run before releasing the game they replaced one of the producers of the entire product.
Apart from Krzywonosiuk, several important personas left CDPR after the release of Cyberpunk 2077:
- Paweł Świerczyński, who was cinematic director
- John Mamais, who was executive producer for Witcher 3
- Andrzej Zawadzki, who was Lead Game Designer
All three were long-term employees. Although they were in shorter service for the company than the loudest departure of the last few days, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. Special commission assessed whether or not he had mobbed his employees. He was found innocent. But in the opinion of many of Spidersweb sources he was a difficult boss who often reacted very emotionally.
CDPR has less and less of their employees love - people are waiting until June. Then they will get benefits for Cyberpunk 2077 because only current employees, who can't be on notice, get these awards. "Those are bonuses ranging from 3 to even 12 salaries, so people just want to save a little after this hard work. But as soon as the benefits are paid, the layoff will start like crazy. Because seriously, people are fed up" - tells a former employee of the QA department.
- Sin of wrath. Everybody hates CD Projekt.
All of this ended up with perhaps the worst blow for CD Projekt: A failed game meant that their beloved, cheeky players, for whom the company had crunched their employees, turned their backs on them.
"The bar was so high that it was difficult to meet the expectations. It's hard to be on top all the time" - says Grzegorz Zajączkowski, European Commission Digitization Leader and adds that players like underdogs and as long as you start from such a position, you are a loved developer - "And when you become a leader, people start to be less gentle. And every mistake is loudly commented."
Then CDPR got hacked and they got a problem. Not because of the leaked codes of the game - "A much bigger problems than the leakage of game codes is that they could lose some personal data, especially the payroll" - emphasizes Michał Bobrowski, board member of GRY-Online SA. And he explains that stealing employees in gamedev is daily bread.
Everything that CDPR did before the premiere of Cyberpunk 2077 seemed perfect. Marketing, Keanu Reeves' involvement, presentation... Investors believe in the great succes of the game until the very end.
The anger poured out on "The Reds" for all their sins is perhaps the company's most important problem today.
CDP Red Dead Redemption
"CDPR are the most gold-mouthed motherfuckers in this industry" - says Marcin, former tester - "What they build for themselves: 'We're CDPR, we are like from players to players, we love you, you can have free stuff here, we are better than everyone, we take care of you' and inside there's the worst sweatshop you can imagine. They will do damage control in such a way that over the next few years they will start releasing free add-ons, repairing Cyberpunk 2077, finally rebuilding it and players will be satisfied again" - he says
His words sound very harsh but he's not alone in this sentiment towards CDPR. Even the people who support them (more or less because it's polish company, because their revolutionized gamedev in Poland) do not spare bitter words on what has recentlly happend in the studio.
"Until the release of Cyberpunk 2077 I observed the company's communication strategy with the market and the players themselves with great respect and recognition. Since December I can't understand what they've done. With both 1st and 2nd Witcher they had some slip-ups here and there and yet they always dealt with such crises very well. They managed those well and constantly took care of their public image. I really do not understand why they failed this time" - sighs Michał Bobrowski
Jacek Brzeziński, once the head of The Witcher, has no doubts that the bright image of CDPR was a bit exaggerated. On the other hand the situation has not changed, CDPR is the largest polish gamedev company, making games that are the most successful when it comes to polish titles. "These are undeniable facts, so it is not that CD Projekt is an empty shell." - says Brzeziński. He wonders if the business blow was so strong that people who make final decisions will draw some serious conclusions from it.
One of polish gamedev veterans who still works with CD Projekt says - "It's not a process-driven and structured company. It's based on humans. And it may be good, because it has to be Agile. They could roll over and get up. They knew how to run when they had to. After all, they were close to bankruptcy serveral times and always dodget the ax somehow. And most importantly, after all they always came out stronger than they were before. It's just you can't see it today."
"First of all, this strength isn't seen in their latest strategy. I expected that they would show a bomb, something that would make people fall in love with them again. And this time everything is so saggy, bland, and conservative. You can see that, unfortunately, they have no idea how to recover what they missed and what drove the whole company: the love of the players" - he concludes.
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