THEY TOOK IT OFF THE STORE.
THEY.
TOOK.
IT.
OFF.
THE.
STORE.
Sony Interactive Entertainment (a.k.a. PlayStation) removed
Cyberpunk 2077 from their store
yesterday. You just can’t buy the game anymore. It’s that busted.
I recorded a review/impressions podcast with Steven and John today about the video game
Cyberpunk 2077. We blocked an hour out, but ended up going for two. This isn’t because we were espousing unfettered praise. We spent almost all of that time talking about all of the ways this game serves as a monument to the ills of AAA game development in 2020. It is a game that was produced under
incredibly unethical working conditions, with mandatory
crunch destroying the lives of the people making the game. It’s not even good! The higher ups abused their rank and file development team to release a game that is a steaming pile of mediocrity
and now they have to give everyone their money back.
It’s unprecedented. I cannot think of a move as dramatic and decisive as Sony pulling the game from the store. I’ll always remember where I was – sitting at my desk on a stream with Steven while they played a
better cyberpunk game. It is a tacit admission that the game was not ready for primetime, that it should not have been released. But the move to remove the game from the store also implicates Sony a bit.
When I worked on Call of Duty XII: Black Ops III, we had an internal certification team that was in charge of making sure that the game would eventually pass certification once we sent the (near goldmaster) build to Microsoft. When bugs or issues would be reported that might stop the game from getting Sony or Microsoft’s green light, they were escalated and remedied quickly. One of these issues came on the Xbox team (on which I worked) when I figured out that you could just make your clan tag a racial slur with no ramifications. This was an easy fix – we just hadn’t implemented the banned word filter yet – but that bug was sent over to our internal cert team and they (quickly) kicked back the fix. Black Ops 3 also features an effect similar to the seizure triggering
flashing light sequence that was present in Cyberpunk’s BD sequences. I remember conversations being had and the scene that the effect was present in being changed a handful of times during development, with the dev team eventually landing on something that was deemed acceptable for submission to Sony and Microsoft.
I know how much work went into ensuring that video games pass certification. And I refuse to believe that if Cyberpunk 2077 were any other video game, that it would not have passed cert. It’s incredible that more people aren’t talking about this. The BD sequence is impossible to miss, it’s required to complete the game.
deep sigh
Anyway, you’ll be able to listen to our takes on the game early next week in the Fanwidth feed, so make sure you’re subscribed. Until then, I leave you with my favorite bug from my week and a half with the game.