Case Cyberpunk 2077

Making substandard quality things must end, Cyberpunk 2077 is proof of that.

Cyberpunk 2077 was over-hyped and delivered into the market as a buggy mess. They used crunch to achieve a buggy mess - why was any of that worth it?

Crunch is no longer ok, as consumers are voting with their money on this.

This has been industry norm for a long time. Cyberpunk's crunch hour system was leaked to the public, and it received a lot of criticism around the launch of the game.

People are currently saying that it is no longer okay to make production with inhumane practices and terrible quality, and they vote on this fact profusely.

Dysfunction is the kind of thing that tends to breed uncontrollably and that is truly what Cyberpunk 2077 shows.

Now, it can be speculated in many ways as to what sort of patterns result in inferior quality. I would like to do that here.

Patterns of INFERIOR QUALITY

Deadlines

One such speculation is that it is simply a matter of poor thinking about deadlines and product "readiness." Deadlines inherently breed dysfunction in many ways. They force people to overwork, people tend to make the call without running it by management, and they do it enough times to cause systematic problems. People come to work increasingly on edge, they snap at each other, and they produce fewer quality things. In the case of CDPR, this devolves into crunch becoming the norm.

Pressure

One could also assume that it is a system of pressure that is so deeply inherent to the company’s culture that there is simply no way for a middle manager to say ‘no’ to their superiors or management without deep personal consequences. This minor mechanism can lead to full scale disasters, because when communication doesn’t work from top to bottom, or vice versa, then there is no way to reconcile problems that occur. Middle managers will accept concessions to quality and involvement because they can no longer handle the load. They will start letting things slide because it simply makes coming to work tolerable.

Pressure is about being in a tyrannical power structure, which tends to lead to dysfunction on a large scale. In the case of Cyberpunk, it is fathomable that there are investors placing pressure towards people, who have very little options aside from buckling under it in every turn. Power hierarchies can exist on many levels and turning a blind eye to it leads to constant problems. This alone could explain all of Cyberpunk’s issues.

Money

It might also be an overly intense focus on the monetary side of the equation. Deciding to target previous gen consoles back can mean that the engine that had been built was no longer compatible technologically, and it required vastly different technology. This kind of thing could easily require all the game assets having to be remade to support slower load times on a binary level. It is clearly apparent that with Cyberpunk 2077, many of these types of late adjustments to the technology were made, as the game arrived at the market in a completely broken state.

Imagine making a game that is technologically groundbreaking and having to port it backwards before it even hits the market. As a developer I would walk out of the project if that kind of a decision was made.

A complete project management failure, which is usually explained by there not being enough people who resist these kind of late changes, or there is simply not enough technical understanding in the upper management that they could make informed decisions. It could also be a complete lack of two-way communication and reciprocity.

Human element

It is also likely that there could be an inability to see patterns and human behaviors which ends up backloading the work towards the end.

The game editor tooling might have had bad automated constraint monitoring for how the tools are supposed to be used. The tooling would breed bugs on a massive scale.

If everything is allowed and permitted, the outcome is chaos in all software projects.

If people could place assets in any what way and link entities in any way without the tooling providing adequate integrity checks and warnings about the logic that was made, this could lead to a lot of technical issues.

When the tooling has little to no automation to avoid common configuration errors, or to enforce a specific team wide strategy of configuration, then big teams will create brittle garbage at lightning speed that has zero tolerance for change.

The tooling might also have no instrumentation to find common configuration problems.

This tends to take most development efforts by surprise, that the bigger you are, the more automation and heuristics you need around problem detection. Also, you need to agree on some rules of conduct, and try to achieve some type of uniformity - otherwise changing things later becomes impossible.

Competence management

It could also be that CDPR had a competence issue, which they did not address. They had grown aggressively and might have simply ignored this. They had junior developers and assigned tasks without consideration for how mentorship should occur within the company.

How do you make sure that the new person joining does things in an agreed way, and do you even have an agreed way? Is it ok that every developer hacks away in whatever way they prefer, or do you have some standards for how things are made and are there any review practices?

Lack of competence management on a small or big scale breeds incredible amounts of issues.

Blindness

In the end, bad deadlines and poor thinking can be just as detrimental to the overall quality of the product, as the inability of a single person inside the company to recognize that what they are doing is suboptimal. All it needs is one person to lead a whole to a disaster. We are all blind to some things, and the hope is that together we are slightly less blind.

In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, its release was delayed two times, which in the public reception sphere was viewed equally as, "Take your time to finish the game, and for god’s sake don't make this game by pushing your developers to work inhumane hours." I think the fans would have been happy to wait any amount of time to receive a quality product.

On the other hand, the CD Project Red stock took a beating even before the game was released. Somewhere along the way, concessions in quality were made enough times, as to backload the work to the point of making the deadline impossible to make.

CDPR had no idea what game they were playing and what cards they had in their hands. They had the option to ride the goodwill they had until the very end and produce any level of quality they wanted. They chose not to use this option and let their pride for promises get in the way of making something amazing. They lacked a holistic understanding of all the things that were happening and the opportunities they had.

With higher quality thinking on all tiers of making this game, a higher quality product would have been made. In the end, the management decisions weighed just as much as the individual choices of the developers to deliver something that is now regarded as a disaster.

It is not hard to imagine a world, where with better awareness and more thorough thinking, a better outcome for CD Project Red could have occurred. Also, we must not forget that for good thinking to occur, it is important to perform maintenance on your production system in a way that enables people to think in the first place. This means looking inwards, self-reflecting.

It is self-evident, that sleep, enough rest and downtime are critical components for thinking. If you take a cut from those things, you cut yourself. You cut yourself in the long term, as you cannot hire people into those cultures anymore.

Importantly though, this case points out that simply making something is not enough in the current times. It is just as critical how it is made, and if the way of working is ethical. CD Project Red faces multiple class actions at the start of 2021 for their dishonesty and sheer blindness towards themselves - simply for a breach in quality.