CDPR publicly announce they're going to offer refunds

Not really. Its mostly technical and they're a huge studio so it will improve. NMS was a bad game at launch and still mediocre now.

And like i said. Their biggest mistake wasn't just putting out garbage base console versions. It was not delaying the game to 2021 and cancelling the last gen console versions.

Theres no way in hell this game will look like it does on High end PC's. the next gen consoles will get there evenetually but not last gen.

I haven't managed to find the answer to this, but I'd assume the refund negates your ability to claim your free next gen copy. Admitedly, that would make sense and I couldnt argue against it.

Knowing this would make the refund decsion much easier for me.

But then, it's still kinda off. I have to accept my current broken game, and hope it's improved, and hope that the next gen version isn't a crap show aswell.

Currently I'm in a bind, don't feel I have all the information I need to make an informed choice. Which ironically was the reason why we're in this situation already....

@efesell: I've seen people saying they've had success with Microsoft giving refunds, how widespread that is I don't know.

@chaser324: I saw some screenshots of Sony support chat logs saying CDPR said nothing to Sony and that the support teams have just been told to tell people that the game will be patched in January and February.

I don't know what is funnier, that NMS is a "mediocre" game or that CDPR would cancel the versions of the game that likely sold the most in both pre-orders and at launch. Things-that-would-totally-happen.com

I'll take it.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the classic "too much hype, gotta put it out because of our co-marketing deals" game.

I'm of two minds on this.

On one end, this is basically them covering their asses while most of their loyal fanbase pretend that the streets are paved with gold.

On the other, they're being transparent at least they're looking to fix this....even at a price of more work.

Personally, I feel bad for the devs and PR team(s) involved in this whole saga. I'm sure some were asking for one more delay and they were told no by the suits meaning they were forced to push it out. Will I return my copy? No, I'll be shelving it until most of the bugs are fixed but my experience on PS4 Pro was fine.

You know....if they said something like " We recommend playing the game on a PS4 Pro or Xbox One X",I don't think they would be getting scrutinized as much as they are.

Beats a blank. Still a shitty situation where CDPR being cagey about performance (unless you bought either a PS5, Series X, or a 3000 series Nvidia GPU from a scalper, or had 2080 Ti money before COVID) made this into a thing, but at least there's an option, albeit time limited option, to go back to square one and get the hype train going again for 2011.

Still trading blows with CS:GO at the moment, so, we'll see how these chips end up falling.

OP has been ready to stand up for and fight for CDPR no matter what as evidence by other threads where he shit on prerelease reviews despite not playing the game. Seeing this thread here and they're standing as the sole person saying this is good behavior by CDPR is both funny and not surprising.

Anyway, there is a lot wrong with what CDPR did here, but the most ridiculous aspect to me is this idea that this game just couldn't be made on the XBox or PS4. Graphically it might have been a challenge, but I'm brought back to Vinny's critique that the game is wide but shallow as hell. The game looks nice but it very much *feels* like yet another RPG from that gen...certainly not the revolutionary thing that they were touting.

Regardless, I haven't really ran into that many bugs or severe framerate issues yet on Xbox One X (only about 6 hours in), so I've been lucky as hell it sounds like. Some of the videos I've watched on are NUTS. The craziest part to me is, that when I see people excuse them for putting out a subpar, borderline broken game on Xbox and PS4, I'm reminded of the fact that there was an official, special edition, Cyberpunk Xbox One. You just can't play the "game as it is meant to be played" on it. On the official Cyberpunk Xbox. Just, hilarious in its own right.

I never had that much interest in this game, but this whole fiasco has been fascinating to watch. People have a right to be pissed off, but I can't help but put myself in the place of the devs (not so much the execs.) Imagine crunching on a game like this for months, working crazy hours, huge stress, and then seeing a 4/10 on IGN. Ouch. That must feel like a real gut punch.

You lost me at shitthesda

So it seems like refunds on Xbox are mostly going pretty smoothly, but Sony customer service is denying refunds for people who have time played on the game, parroting CPDRs promise of upcoming fixes in patches, and otherwise referring people back to CPDR. They also seem to be getting swamped with calls, mails and chats, and its pretty clear that there was no prior communication between CPDR and Sony before that statement was released. Sending them a mail directly through the address given in their statement doesnt seem to get any response yet.

What a clusterfuck.

Clusterfuck indeed.

It is mostly amazing to see them burn through all the good will CDPR has built over the years with the Witcher and anti-DRM campaigning with GOG etc.. Of course there were problematic articles about the work culture all along the way, but people were still positive for the most part. Now it's just oof.. I can only really compare it to Mass Effect Andromeda where the blowback was so bad it retroactively soured some people on Mass Effect as a whole. In this case, as Ron Funches said on the recent Beastcast, CDPR very quickly changed into a dev that you might be wary of whatever it is they put out next.

@humanity: You can go from hero to villian and back again very quickly look at Hello Games. People tend to have very short memories, CDPR went through almost the same thing with The Witcher 3. Problematic articles regarding minority representation in the game and the heavy use of crunch. Downgrade from the E3 trailers and the game had its fair share of bugs with a UI on console which barely worked.

Granted Cyberpunk seems worse but no doubt they'll patch it to high heaven, even then looking at the steam reviews 79% and rising nearly a week after launch with the game hitting 1m concurrent players across the weekend.

Given Cyberpunk runs pretty well on next gen the blowback will only come from the last gen, Skyrim on PS3 literally didn't work yet the remaster sold very well on PS4, people who really like these open world RPG's tend to have a high tolerance for jank.

How can certain publications be giving it 10/10 and sleep at night?

https://www.vg247.com/2020/12/14/sony-refusing-cyberpunk-2077-refunds/

Sony all I Don’t Know Her.

@thepanzini: Pretty much. If memory serves, TW2 had a LOT of t-posing screenshots before The Enhanced Edition

And that is what will happen again. It is going to be a clusterfuck but people are already blaming Sony and MS for CDPR just basically saying "Sony will deal with it. We are sorry" (and I am not entirely opposed to Sony catching a lot of hell for their shit refund policies).

Give it a year of freeLC (Witcher 3) and an Enhanced Edition and CDPR are good. Hell, if they are smart they'll treat the EE as a new SKU that "all current owners get for free" to try and get new reviews from outlets and a boosted metacritic. And then everyone will cheer and say how much CDPR cares about their customers and how buying a Ubisoft game is an investment (oops, how did THAT get in there?) and blah blah blah. And in a year's time the ratio of previous to current gen will have shifted enough that no outlet will run any meaningful stories on how shit of an experience it is and anyone who brings it up will just be told "Ha, you salty brah?" because evidently everyone on the fucking internet became an obnoxious 90s surfer at some point.

And we'll try to remember to get that Coolio clip from the Keenan and Kel theme song for the next time CDPR releases a game that will inevitably be underbaked after years of crunch and need another year of probably even MORE worker abuse to get to a playable state. And everyone will immediately fixate on "This is disgraceful, there should be no bugs and you are the ONLY developer to ever have a bullshot".

It sucks that they bombed the console versions. I'm playing on PC and having a ton of fun. Currently at the 20 hour point. This is the best game that I have played all year......by a long shot.

Another age-old reminder that hype is meaningless and pre-orders are dumb. Hopefully they'll give this twice the amount of TLC they gave to Witcher 3 so I can pick this up super cheap and in its best form years down the road.

There have to be so many people at CDPR leaning back in their chair, arms crossed, saying “What did I fucking tell you?” right now.

And I love CDPR offering refunds without talking to Sony and Microsoft first. I bet that lead to some real choice phone calls.

@zoofame: Look I’m not gonna get dragged into a political discussion about the ethics of capitalism in broad terms but needless to say I disagree with a lot of your sentiments.

But I’m just going focus on CDPR in general. First of let’s get some facts straight. CD Projekt don’t have very much institutional ownership at all. The split is currently

28,6% institutional ownership (which could include things like pension funds, investment banks and holding companies)

31,6% inside ownership (management and employees in general)

39,8% individual and retail investors (laymen like myself, who according to you have no sway lol)

Let’s compare that with EA just for fun. Oh boy.

00,4% state

0,5% inside ownership

7,7% individual investors

91,8% Institutions

It’s all partly why I like CDPR as a shareholder because they are not beholden to short term thinking from large shareholders, since the largest happens to be the Co Joint CEOs themselves. Who are required by law to disclose when they sell large amounts of stock, which they haven’t before or after Cyberpunk 2077 (you can look it up yourself if you want). The fact is, that the release of the game on December 10th was very bad for every shareholder including management who’s wealth dropped 30% in a matter of days, since the stock has tanked, so if the broken release was somehow driven by shareholder greed it’s been a piss poor move to say the least. There has been a massive sell off by disgruntled individual investors who was looking for short term profit after cyberpunks release, but that didn’t happen because that’s not managements priority, the long term health of the company is. Which I like.

But that’s the only thing about management I like, they handled 2020 very poorly. Which with my captain hindsight hat I can say they should have postponed the game to 2021 at the second delay. Not have inferred needless amounts of crunch on developers in just pure naive optimism. They shouldn’t have tried to embargo the last gen release, that’s the worst PR move because in no way is that going to help the company or endear the company to the consumer.

I view this company as one that’s going through some major growing pains, I just hope they don’t become the bloated unprofitable mess that is Ubisoft. CDPR has a certain spirit, you might not like it, which is fine by me, but it’s there. They aren’t controlled by outsiders, yet.

Yes they are beholden to the short term thinking of their own internal management and 8 million in preorders. I really want to see the numbers for PS4, where Sony has the express policy of not refunding if you have downloaded the software. Which people could start downloading on December 8th. Shockingly, the embargo on the current gen systems was after that date.

Everyone should remember this when some developer has some anti-DRM policy or whatever. Because that company might just be setting you up as a mark down the line.

They don't deserve respect for this.

Bingo. I really don't buy into this narrative that a lot of gamers seem to want to believe that CDPR are really the good guys in all this, and honestly they just didn't know any better--and see they apologized and are giving refunds (that some companies won't acknowledge). The problem with all that is they knowingly released an unfinished product, particularly versions of the game that either should have been axed or held back, all to increase their revenue. A corporation is a corporation is a corporation. Stop pretending they're your friends.

I don’t think they are evil or even set out to do this. This is just the final stage of bad management not limiting the scope or visual quality of their game, while also offering it on older systems. And running up against a harsh deadline as people move to the next generation and might cancel their pre-order. This isnt malice, it is hubris. Not that intent matters that much in the end. This hubris ends up hurting developers, critics and people in retail all having to deal with the fall out.

@plan6: short term thinking? None of this has benefited the company in the short term! It’s valuation is probably around two billions less than what it was a week ago lol.

Have they done some shady things? Yes, probably, the embargo thing anyways. Have they done some other poor business moves? For sure.

It’s the managements job to make sure that the future of the company is secure and that there is a work place next year and the year after that. I think MOST of the choices have been down to inexperience and maybe even incompetence at certain levels of management, certainly not greed and I doubt malice, since Adam Kicinskis personal wealth got A LOT smaller on these decisions alone. They put themselves into a corner, Where it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

@tothenines: As someone who has provided legal services to banks for well over a decade, this entire thing is emblematic of short term thinking by management and the belief they can “get through it”. I’ve been the clean up crew for some staggeringly dumb shit in my day, where I’ve had to explain to clients they fucked themselves 2 years ago and now the bill is coming due. And let me tell you, those are fun discussions that you get to have over and over as new, higher management becomes aware of the mess and steps in to “fix things”.

I will be surprised if they don’t face a lawsuit with some real teeth over the media embargo and stark difference in version quality. This isn’t some funny little graphics change from an E3 trailer, but a clear effort by the company to conceal the nature of the console releases. That whole thing is made by someone who is thinking about the next few months and not the next 3 years. Because, from my experience, lawsuits over deceptive business practices don’t go away in a single financial quarter, no matter how much managers and investors ask for their attorneys to “wrap it up.”

And that is just one of the many problems they have created for themselves.

Edit: To be clear, I’m not claiming that a lawsuit would be successful or anything. Only that it seems like it would be able to survive a motion to dismiss(the first challenge for any lawsuit) and end up being heard on the merits(if it wasn’t settled).

@plan6: So be it. If the company has to pay a fine and suffer in the short term, I think that’s the best resolution of all. I just hope the founders learn from this. Because you guys haven’t seen real shit yet until the founders quit (the people that actually care about the company) and The shareholders bring in some hired gun CEO to run the show, who in turn only cares about his salary bonus and how the next quarter looks.

That’s why inside ownership is important. Not saying founders can’t make mistakes and be “selfish” (they have clearly shown they can). But 9/10 times they actually care about the company and what it stands for.

@tothenines: In my experience, the suffering is long term and the owners/decision makers get very upset with the harsh reality that their decisions have consequences that are completely out of their control. These are often people high on their own supply and say things like “You need to explain break it down for the judge.”(one of my attorneys had to leave the room when a client said this) Or explain that policies that directly violate a local law are “industry standard” and can’t be changed. I’ve seen these people when the hammer is about to drop and the truly staggering amount of effort it takes to get them to the promised land.

Of course, this is all speculation. But I can’t be sold on the hype about business owners with clear vision right after they fuck up this badly.

@plan6: Oh I wasn't trying to suggest that either. But I think what I said has merit: Too many people like to believe that certain companies are their friends, and that this shields them from any criticism. I have no doubt that the developers tried to do right by gamers, and really did want to make the best game they can. But whenever we do talk about this stuff, we do have to talk about capitalism and this is the type of attitude it inspires. It's like you said--it's all about short term results.

Any dunce can tell you that these decisions are terrible in hindsight: Flooding the market with sequels is a bad fucking idea; everything with the release of Cyberpunk was a bad idea. But in terms of short term profit? It makes perfect sense. And hey! CDPR basically made their money back so it basically worked out for them.

@kemuri07: I only pushed back on the “evil” comment because people really value intent and think that meaning well is enough to shield a company/person from blame. People don’t understand that malice isn’t requires to do serious, long lasting harm.

I tell people all the time: Never underestimate the destructive power of informed indifference.

@Plan6: It all depends on what people mean by long term, to me long term is at least +5 years. It’s hard for me to comment on how your personal anecdotal experiences, though I don’t doubt their validity and that people like that exist. For sure they do.

But right now I’m trying to straddle a fine line between providing explanations and avoiding excuses for CDPR. The only reason I started commenting in this thread in the first place is because some generally untrue things being stated as fact was being thrown around in the midst of the fervor of this whole ugly thing.

What I think happened is that the company greatly underestimated productivity and workflow in the midst of the Covid crisis. They even stated that small things that would usually take half a minute to fix in the office would take 10 mins in the current work at home situation. The problem is that only excuses them so far, because they could have easily seen around the second delay that with the current pace the game needed way more time. Who knows why they didn’t take that into account. Optimism around the second wave? I don’t know. I just think incompetence and hopefulness. People might say greed, but I just don’t think so, as a broken product don’t review well nor sell as well. Not to mention the damage to the stock price you’re bound to get regardless.

Also the managements fiduciary duty is to 3 groups. Employees, shareholders and their costumers. In the end they chose to release a broken game which royally fucked over a large part of their costumers, bombed their shareholders (which is also themselves) but they got the profit from the preorders which helps secure the company and the employees, even though given the large amount of crunch they had to go through I don’t see them as winners either. It’s all just a big mess and no one got anything from this.

That’s why I hope this is a learning experience. Because I know they are capable of creating amazing games and that’s what matters the most to me, as a shareholder and more importantly a costumer.

Side note: I don’t know what it is and I know I’m in the minority here. But it’s like our culture views business and business men and women as inherently evil individuals and the profit motive as a bad thing. Maybe it’s because there aren’t any good business people portrayed in fiction, they are always evil. The only good one that springs to mind is Tony Stark lol, but he’s like more of an anti hero at times. What I’m trying to say is, CDPR aren’t evil, they aren’t your friends either, they are just trying to make video games and profit of it while doing so. Not saying that haven’t made mistakes this year, they have and I am personally disappointed.

The company “apologized” for racism, transphobia, and crunch but I have yet to see any meaningful change from them. Remember that 8chan discussion? Why should anyone accept their word on this, especially given they have no agreements in place with any retailer.

Guess it was too much to hope for and CDPR could never speak for the platform owners, but MS has denied my refund request citing their policy of not offering refunds for installed content.

@tothenines: Regarding your side note. I don't think it's really a byproduct of media or fiction showcasing a good business role model. Long before it was popular to criticize corporations and capitalism there were plenty of misguided content trying to showcase the "good guy" CEO. It's not like the concept has never been shown before. It's honestly just disingenuous.

But I also think it's reductive to boil down some of the criticisms levied at big business tycoon types as simply saying they are "evil because they want profit." Most wouldn't throw shade at the young entrepreneur who puts himself first in the name of making a living. But when you go from that young person making a living to multi millionaire controlling how other people make their living the context for how your viewed rightfully changes. What it means to be ethical as a business absolutely changes in context compared to if your a small team of 5 versus an Ubisoft with hundreds of studios all answering to shareholders and other overlords.

It should be clear to note that the fact that these people wish to make money isn't inherently evil. The morals come into play when you contrast what these people are willing to do in the name of money, who they are willing to throw under the bus (devs, certain consumers etc) and most importantly how much resources they actually have. Just as an example to help make my point, look at crunch. It's an ethically challenging word, especially in this space. However a lone dev deciding to crunch to release their indy project to get food to not die has far different context than a CEO or management type forcing crunch as a culture to ship a product a few months earlier to satisfy a bunch of rich shareholders that don't need money to begin with. You see what I"m saying here?

The people at the top of CDPR are just piling on the bad. There is no way they are running this shit by lawyers. Or they are just ignoring them, if they are(this happens way more often than people believe).

@digitaldisco: That's interesting. I haven't requested a refund for this, but I've had other things refunded on Xbox and it was always surprisingly flexible. Silly shit like I bought a version of a game and then the deluxe version went on sale the next day, they'd refund me and let me buy the on sale one. In some cases even when I've played the game. Sometimes I wonder if they look at my profile and see that I've been on their service for like 17 years and are extra generous. Or maybe it's just up to the discretion of the customer service person and I have excellent luck.

Profit isn't bad. I try to make a profit all the time through my job and using my time and labor. And there are good buisness people out there. My current firm is run by a guy who has moved heaven and earth to keep his furloughed employees on healthcare. He can be tough to work for at times, but seems like someone who worries about people over profit margins. My father ran our family buisness the same way, which lead to him getting burned by some shitty employees over the 40 years they have been in buisness.

But as I constantly have to remind my father, the world is not filled with buisness people like him. I've dealt with a ton of them, from shitty, thin skinned landlords to investors who will threaten to fire your law firm during every phone call.(Side note, anyone who threatens a mid level employee with pulling work is a paper tiger). And these people want the world to be shaped in a way that allows them to seek profits without any friction or slowing them down. They view things like labor laws, consumer protections laws or due process as impediments that they must tolerate. But in reality, many would bypass them if it wasn't so risky to do so.

What you are seeing in the current culture is an end to deference towards buisness and Capital. People no longer assume that the "innovators" and "job makers" shouldn't face restriction from the government. People no longer trust that companies that do very bad things will be punished sufficiently(see Wells Fargo account fraud). And that view has been building for a while, to the point where people openly attack the idea of profit as exploitive because so many large companies seem to do seek it as all costs. Which is playing out before our eyes in CDPR.

Edit: also Tony Stark exists and is beloved, despite having made all his money selling weapons. The idea that buisness people are not depicted positively in media is kinda comical.

Oof. Initial impression of Patrick's tweet is that it still continues to look like they're just passing the blame to Sony and Microsoft if they don't refund. Extremely limited time window around a holiday period, no commitment to what that help may be, and little to no comment beyond that does not seem like the appropriate way to go about this. What are they actually doing to help people who can't get past particularly Sony's strict refund policy would be nice to see.

Yah like I discussed earlier in the thread, they probably will bounce back from this in time as gamers have very short memories regarding some things, but man oh man are they stepping in it over and over again for the past month or so. They really need someone to come in and tell everyone to just settle down and stop talking for a while because even in their attempts to make good on some irreversibly bad decisions they just end up creating more long term problems. You can't help but feel for the coders, the artists, the people down in the trenches that first worked their asses off to deliver on an impossible date, and now they are looking at months of post-release patch updates with equally short deadlines. I can only hope that whatever plans they have for DLC will get shifted way down the road after the game gets into a stable enough state where they can just breathe for several months.

A hottest mess contender if I ever saw one.

Getting some strong No Man's Sky flashbacks right now, although I don't think Hello Games ever went as far as to offer refunds. How long until this naturally evolves into a conversation about how dumb preorders are?

Hello Games didn't try to offer refunds that it couldn't deliver on. CDPR can't force Sony or Microsoft to provide a refund.

@plan6: Yeah I don't really get the comparison at all. The only real thing they have in common is a level of overhype creating unrealistic expectations at launch? No Mans Sky wasn't particularly buggy at launch it's scope was just as such that it basically delivered in what we would now call Early Access. The game they sold everybody on is basically more or less a reality now after mountains of updates, many of which was free.

NMS wasn't buggy or broken on a previous generation of consoles though. Cyberpunk is. That is the larger concern here, it's not just a case of the content of Cyberpunk being underwhelming for some, the thing is broken and unplayable to the point that they had to issue an apology for it. I guess for me the other reason I find the comparison weird is because Cyberpunk is a big budget AAA open world RPG with Keannu Reeves and all this huge developer hype coming in. NMS was an indy studio that got hype for trying to do something that people thought was crazy at the time, but it didn't have like the financial backing or anything. In another universe NMS launches in Early Access with what it had at launch and nobody cares. Cyberpunk isn't an early access game misbranded it's an unfinished game on many platforms that's now being over marketed.

@hatking: well ymmv I suppose. First time I have requested a refund via MS, and did it based on CDPR PR notice. I have 14 years as an Xbox Live member did not seem to be a factor. Glad you have better luck.

The No Man's Sky situation was far far worse than Cyberpunk, Hello Games sold/hyped up a game that never existed and once released public opinion turned real fast even turning to hate.

The point is though with free updates public turned back around people are often very quick to forget, Cyberpunk is widly liked on PC and reviewed very well too its not hard to see the last gen consoles being patched up and the launch window issues quickly forgotten.

@thepanzini: that seems a little too forgiving. You are excusing their release of a broken game for some platforms with platitudes to a functional pc version and assumptions about patching. That doesn't address the fact that they knowingly released a very buggy game that is almost unplayable on non-pro versions of last gen consoles. They seem to have purposefully managed the preview coverage to hide that fact, and then made promises of refunds for affected parties that they can't back up.

The release says Xbox One and PS4 on it, not Xbox One X and Ps4 Pro. At the very least they should have never put out the console versions.

The PC, PS5, and XSX can at least overcome the worst of the issues with sheer horsepower.

@thepanzini :That is some alternative history for NMS. Followed the lead up to that game and pretty much knew exactly what it was and the scope of the game before it came out. The hype was a problem of Hello Games not tempering the wild speculation about what the game would be and its scope. But at not point did they actively withhold information from reviewers or not let them access versions of the game to drive up the metacritic score. And the game ran on consoles and didn't have crashes that caused the consoles to hard lock.

@digitaldisco: Yeah they should have delayed the game on last gen, but Unity / Battlefield 4 didn't work on any platforms and their respective franchises carried on fine, we've seen so many examples of games releasing in a poor state and continue fine. Some dev's must have the 'we are sorry' press release saved in draft, if Ark can shift 16m copies in its broken state I'm sure Cyberpunk will be fine.

Hiding the lesser version of a game is video gaming 101, nobody ever sends out XB1 code for reveiw. Titanfall and Shadow of Mordor 360 version we not seen till release either. Its a dick move but pubs always show their games in the best possible light.