Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed, again, into December
www.rockpapershotgun.com
We were so close, folks. With a month to go until its planned release, CD Projekt Red have chosen to once again delay Cyberpunk 2077, pushing back the open-world RPG’s release date at the eleventh hour to get all nine platforms in shape before release. Cyberpunk 2077’s release date is now December 10th, three weeks […]

It is, of course, worth noting that devs at CDPR were already crunching to meet that previous deadline. Today’s announcement doesn’t mention crunch, but I’d be surprised if staff weren’t in for another three weeks of gruelling conditions to get this thing out the door.

God I hate the industry

    • GhostOfChuck [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah, it's really fucking dumb that so many games are beholden to an arbitrary release date that gets picked strategically around the holidays or at the end of business quarters to pad out a businesses quarterly earnings.

      I think the ubiquity and accessibility of patching games has a lot to do with it. Like, I remember getting games back in the day and not even knowing patches were a thing. You couldn't ship a game that was a broken piece of shit and then patch it later, because patches weren't really a thing due to internet access/game clients like steam not being as widespread. So you'd get a lot more of "We'll launch when we're ready" because you knew you had to ship a finished game and couldn't rely on fleshing it out over the months following release. (or even worse, selling the fixes/expansion of the game to consumers with DLC after the fact)

      I could also be speaking out of my ass, I'm no game dev.

        • GhostOfChuck [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          Yeah, exactly. I have no issues with patches in and of themselves if they're used for their intended purpose. But the shift to "games as a service" over the past few years is really nefarious.

    • PermaculturalMarxist [they/them]
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      4 years ago

      I feel like marketing whips people into a frenzy to buy the game, but it also has this useful side-effect of creating a kind of "organic" pressure for game devs to meet these impossible deadlines set by the shareholders. The mindset of "you wouldn't want to let down your fans, would you?". If fans had any awareness of video games as these incredibly labour-intensive media objects made in sweatshop conditions, they would stop being so complicit in pressuring game devs to crunch until their bodies give out and their personal lives are ruined.