Comment by lsiunsuex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lsiunsuex | Hacker News Reader

-- What was the purpose of the crunch / rushing this out the door ?

-- What was to be gained from it? Holiday sales? Delivering a product not delayed again? Management bonuses? Did the developers get bonuses for delivering "on time"?

-- At what cost did the crunch / delivering the product cause the team of developers? Now they need to keep working; fix the bugs; get this back in the store(s) and try to make everyone happy?

We go through our share of crunches. Bugs always get through and we have to fix them of course, but nothing as bad as some of the stuff I've read about this.

Management never realizes burnout is a real thing. I feel for these developers. It's double sided. Keep delaying the game / product and people get pissed off it's delayed. Ship it, and now they're pissed off its buggy. So now, everyone (programmers) are burned out; management is probably fuming over being removed from the store(s) and everyone needs to smile and get back to it, probably as a worse crunch than before. What a shitty way to spend the holidays.

It's like getting made at a company building your house that your water pipes leak but you rushed them to get it done because of some arbitrary move in date. Take the time; do it right; do a good job. Cut corners and rush stuff and deal with the consequences.

The short answer is that they gambled and they lost.

The long answer is that releasing a high budget, triple-A title across multiple platforms isn't done in isolation. They were busy coordinating advertising campaigns, partnership deals, distribution, marketing, and other time-sensitive external processes.

Many of those external contracts were likely time sensitive, perhaps with financial penalties for missing the ship date. For example, did you know that big box retail stores don't put up giant advertisements or end caps for new products for free? They actually charge vendors to occupy prime space on the retail floor and put up product advertisements within their stores. In this case, stores like Best Buy even had Cyberpunk 2077 ads plastered on the outside of the store windows with a specific release date, which they missed once already. Each time a release window comes and goes without a product to sell, the company loses huge amounts of money to these contractual obligations.

Also, building these games is expensive. If they secured external financing to pay the huge development teams, that money comes with conditions about when they must start paying it back. No product = no way to pay, unless you go out and secure emergency loans to pay off your other financing, which is about as expensive as you would imagine.

These things aren't planned last minute. The launch date window was likely determined over a year ago, with huge amounts of money and work going into those specific dates.

Really, this is a failure of project and product management. The teams should have realized that they weren't on track to reach the launch dates and narrowed their scope early on. It looks like they overestimated how much they could accomplish and assumed they could fit it all in to the allotted time, which was obviously not the case.

> The short answer is that they gambled and they lost.

I think that answers my question, which was:

Has anyone said why they didnt delay just the ps4/xbone versions? I assume some kind of contracts, but would have been cheaper to break the contract than to release a broken game. Probably would have been cheaper to delay all versions(smaller stock hit + salaries) if reports of losses are true.

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So did they see their game (that was so broken that friendly outlets went out of their way to say "DO NOT BUY") and think "we can take this gamble"?

> Holiday sales?

Ding ding ding. Missing christmas would be a huge deal.

That said, I think there's a tendency for conversations around this to ignore the finances and suggest that financial concerns shouldn't have any impact on the game's release. There's no doubt that CDPR got the balance on this wrong, but the need to find a balance is just reality.

They said in an investors call that there was no pressure to release for the holidays. They could have spent more time fixing this but choose not to

I mean.. they can say that all they want, but they're a game studio that releases one game at a time. This game was "supposed" to release 8 months ago. Financially speaking, it just doesn't make sense that they have any room here.

This was probably it. To get it right on all platforms they would have to spend several more months of development. The video game market has a certain size, if you exceed the budget too much you will never be able to make it back. Maybe this too was what caused them to release the last-gen console ports: they were starting to freak out, afraid the project would bankrupt them.

More than just holiday sales -- this point in the console generation is typically the fattest point of the sales curve. The next generation consoles are generating a ton of interest, and the previous generation is at its largest install base. Delaying a year means you miss out on the hype cycle of the new consoles while the last-gen consoles quickly fade in mindshare -- only "legacy" versions of annualized sports franchises sell on that older hardware.

I think another factor might be the fact that the lockdowns are almost over for good, which will result in declining sales of video games in general.

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