The ramblings(?) of a Mad Man
Let me put on my tin foil hat here for a moment.
CDPR is obviously a multiplatform developer now and has to deal with both M$ and Sony. Once you get into the multiplatform business there are also some rules you have to follow, the first and most important one being:
You shall not make the pc version look too good or too superior in any way in comparison to the Xbone and PS4 versions or you can forget about a release on the consoles
and the second most important rule being:
Your PR department shall not speak openly about any of this, and in case you have to, come up with something about Youtube's crappy compression being the root of all teh evil
Now let's look back a few months to the announcement of the Xbone CE being bolstered with a cloth map and a physical version of the ingame card game which name escapes me. Apparently this was some kind of concession CDPR was fortunately able to force through for not having to make any Xbone-exclusive ingame content.
But what if this deal with M$ involves other, non-disclosable terms CDPR has to follow as well? Like, for instance rule no. 1?
And it's probably the same with the Sony deal. Except that the PS4 CE apparently doesn't need any additional incentives to compensate for technical inferiority.
And now for the Elder Blood promo.
It was obviously rushed, and contains footage of widely varyingly quality, ranging from the good, the bad to the fugly. Albeit good intentions CDPR fucked up and now reap what they have sown. Which in my opinion is entirely justified for having the audacity (or balls rather) to release something like the Elder Blood video 2-3 months prior to release. I'm sorry if this sounds entitled or arrogant, but there's hardly any excuse for not making sure that ALL of the footage looks consistent and like from a game to be released in February(!) with "genre-defining, truly next generation audio-visual fidelity". Some of the footage certainly looked the part (Ciri, Yennefer, Eredin) while others (Caranthir, Eredin, some of the textures, some of the lighting) certainly do not. Again, despite good intentions, they brought this unto themselves and now have to deal with the backlash, and rightfully so.
And especially if you then have a representative of the company coming forward and claim that it was just a problem with CDPR's inhouse video compression and youtube's compression on top of that, which fucked up the footage in some parts. I'm sorry but everyone with just the basic knowledge of compression and artifacting knows that this is complete and utter bullshit. Compression can't decrease polygon count and directly fuck up textures to look like they're from 1999.
This is basically rule no. 2 right here.
Was there ever a case since the inception of multiplatform developement where a PR representative or otherwise company affiliated came out openly and said , "hey guys, don't worry about the quality of some of the footage, this was just coming from the 6 months old non-optimised build of the version for the consoles"? If there ever was such a case I honestly can't remember.
There would be much less shitstorming without a doubt if developers would be more transparent and specific about the promotional stuff they make public. But for some reason (rule no. 2) they simply cannot, and just let the shitstorms go by mostly uncommentated and without addressing specific gripes in fear of pissing off other parties. Apparently it's already too confidential and dangerous to properly tag screenshots with the platform and build they were taken from.
The bottom line is that CDPR might have been rebels once but if you become a multiplatform developer you unfortunately have to play ball with M$ and Sony which involves all sorts of shady business (rule no. 1 and 2) you don't always can wriggle yourself out of.
I don't see CDPR going the way of Crytek (yet) but they're the perfect warning example for a once mighty PC centric cutting edge developer fallen low because of getting into the multiplatform development business and the concessions to the consoles this entails.