Why Cyberpunk 2077's Release Reveals Cultural Problems in Software Development

[@bngwtrproductions]

Rushing that crap out for Christmas will lose you money when the game doesn't work. No kid will ask for it.

[@ZygalStudios]

Damn right! You don't have a game if it can't perform correctly!

[@bngwtrproductions]

The internet being so readily available to everyone is a bad thing for the last few years for the gaming industry. People know immediately if a game is bad. Sometimes before it even fully releases. I remember when I was working at GameStop that people were lined up for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 before we opened, and some of those people returned it without even opening it because the game was such a buggy mess and they found out before playing.

[@ZygalStudios]

@@bngwtrproductions Crazy for sure. But I will say this, it offers some accountability for game studios. Because remote updates give an excuse to make a game buggy on release and push fixes right after the game is out. That's unacceptable in my opinion. Updates should still be used of course as they've done some amazing things, but putting out a half assed game because you can just push updates should NOT be the norm. And that's a cultural problem. People shouldn't have to take to social media if a game is done correctly.

[@BubblegumCrash332]

Damn dude this is like the best take on what's happening with Cyberpunk that I've heard 👍👍

[@ZygalStudios]

Thank you! My experience in industry has taught me this is a constant struggle! It's just usually not that bad and is totally manageable. But this game had some pretty public issues and it's obvious this needs to be noted so it's not repeated I the future!

[@BubblegumCrash332]

@@ZygalStudios I hope so, this is turning out to he one of modern gaming's biggest controversy. Maybe it's loud enough to create some change

[@ZygalStudios]

@@BubblegumCrash332 I really hope it does.

[@michaelanderson3958]

I think that with these massively invested titles, they need to pace their release and have a plan to support their product over time since its clear just how painful it was to ship a product supposedly 'ready'. Its obvious that the scope of 2077's Main Story did not benefit from the bloat of a massively open world, and since we're already on the warpath for rolling updates... it probably would've been easier on everyone had 2077 shipped as a smaller, polished experience with exciting, massive updates to follow.

[@ZygalStudios]

10000% agree with this. I still don't understand why they didn't take this approach. Money talks, I suppose.

[@peceed]

@@ZygalStudios Money is always on the side of sanity :)

[@TonOfHam]

Don't forget to mention the development paradigm of using force vs letting the system architecture do most of the the work. What I mean is, when developers are creating the design behind a given functionality they often don't understand how to control the states of their creations, leading to all sort of bugged out nonsense. It's clear that the core functionality and later bug fixes were done using "hacks". What i mean is, instead of finding out why your function went into a certain "bugged" state or how you must design your function to run on the required hardware to solve the specific problem, the developer adds more checks and conditions to try and strong arm the function into behaving as expected, even though it does not want to. This lack/ignorant design mentality leads to functions getting into states that no one predicted or planned for and breaks the game illusion to make you realize that the developer had no idea of the problem he/she was trying to solve in the first place.

[@DrewB183]

Agreed 100%. Great video!

[@ZygalStudios]

Thank you Drew! :)

[@partlyawesome]

I think blaming the engineering team is a bad call here, they're not the ones that decide the scope.

[@Sinn0100]

Hold on a minute....not all console versions of the game were bad at release. I played Cyberpunk 2077 on our launch Series X and aside from it missing certain "next gen" features it ran almost flawlessly. Yes, I experienced a few minor bugs but nothing that made it difficult to play or impede my progress. My fiancee played it on our launch PS5...now that, was a disaster of mass proportions. I think she was able to make it 45 minutes into the game before it started crashing over and over again.