Worried about CDPR going into full corpo mode

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I've read this somewhere else, too, but just to have a reference: CDPR is planning to grow as a company and be able to produce two triple-A games in parallel.


How do you feel about that?

Well, I like CPDR and how it came to be with just three good games. But since they have become a company with shareholders and the whole deal, they are following the obvious business choices, which can be summarized like this: Grow, grow, grow.
To my mind, growth is great if it happens as a natural byproduct of creative and enthusiastic work – as it did with the Witcher Trilogy.
Now every business decision seems to be made with Growth as a primary objective. Creativity and enthusiasm are the byproducts now. If the devs deliver (and work themselves to exhaustion) that's great for growth. If they don't, they have to go (or go by themselves) and there are always new enthusiastic young ones who think, they can prove themselves by working hard and believing in the "company spirit" – capitalistic exploitation 101.

I know I'm reducing the complexity of big businesses here, but to me it seemed like Cyberpunk 2077 started (to the average CDPR-developer) as a project full of hope and a groundbreaking step in games development. Those ideas were incorporated into a big marketing machine that looks great, but feels pale: You feel the possible greatness of the game somewhere, in some moments. When I see the City as a backdrop in videos, it's still a great promise lurking somewhere. But the promise is just never resolved when actually playing.

In some way, maybe that IS how Night City should be depicted – a shiny hollow promise – but I still would like to see CDPR's management making decisions based on player feedback and not investors' insatiable hunger for growth.
 
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If the divisions responsible for their respective IP are largely independent, it probably won't be a problem. It would make business sense to grow, given their profits on Cyberpunk. But if they are bottlenecked by the same management oversight, then I would expect similar issues going forward as plagued Cyberpunk development initially, except now spread out over multiple games. Even if Cyberpunk can be judged as a "good" game, the development process was clearly dysfunctional.
 
CDPR is planning to grow as a company and be able to produce two triple-A games in parallel.

utopi - if they cant even get one at a time on the road...
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If the divisions responsible for their respective IP are largely independent, it probably won't be a problem. It would make business sense to grow, given their profits on Cyberpunk. But if they are bottlenecked by the same management oversight, then I would expect similar issues going forward as plagued Cyberpunk development initially, except now spread out over multiple games. Even if Cyberpunk can be judged as a "good" game, the development process was clearly dysfunctional.

word.
 
Nice choice of words. Not what they promised in 2019-2020?
There's a big misconception that the work being done right now is to make the game the way it should've been, when actually these last six months have been entirely about getting the game back in store for Playstation.
 
I've read this somewhere else, too, but just to have a reference: CDPR is planning to grow as a company and be able to produce two triple-A games in parallel.


How do you feel about that?

Well, I like CPDR and how it came to be with just three good games. But since they have become a company with shareholders and the whole deal, they are following the obvious business choices, which can be summarized like this: Grow, grow, grow.
To my mind, growth is great if it happens as a natural byproduct of creative and enthusiastic work – as it did with the Witcher Trilogy.
Now every business decision seems to be made with Growth as a primary objective. Creativity and enthusiasm are the byproducts now. If the devs deliver (and work themselves to exhaustion) that's great for growth. If they don't, they have to go (or go by themselves) and there are always new enthusiastic young ones who think, they can prove themselves by working hard and believing in the "company spirit" – capitalistic exploitation 101.

I know I'm reducing the complexity of big businesses here, but to me it seemed like Cyberpunk 2077 started (to the average CDPR-developer) as a project full of hope and a groundbreaking step in games development. Those ideas were incorporated into a big marketing machine that looks great, but feels pale: You feel the possible greatness of the game somewhere, in some moments. When I see the City as a backdrop in videos, it's still a great promise lurking somewhere. But the promise is just never resolved when actually playing.

In some way, maybe that IS how Night City should be depicted – a shiny hollow promise – but I still would like to see CDPR's management making decisions based on player feedback and not investors' insatiable hunger for growth.
The thing is, developing (AAA) videogames costs millions, and in order to stay able to develop them, you need to grow.
It's called, progress. Look to the gaming industry in general. Games of old, were maybe 255 byte? Today, there are some that exceed 150 gigabyte. That's growth. The next project should always exceed it's predecessor. CDPR is just doing what it should do to stay in the game.
 
If the divisions responsible for their respective IP are largely independent, it probably won't be a problem. It would make business sense to grow, given their profits on Cyberpunk. But if they are bottlenecked by the same management oversight, then I would expect similar issues going forward as plagued Cyberpunk development initially, except now spread out over multiple games. Even if Cyberpunk can be judged as a "good" game, the development process was clearly dysfunctional.

An absolutely great point. To add, diven the new roadmap they just released that coincides with this, I'm losing a bit more hope for new DLC as well as fixes coming later in the year. CP2077 is a good game with almost limitless potential, but was squandered by managerial politics and overall greed. Its really disappointing to see that the extra stuff they're gonna add is going to be hindered by dang near the same thing.
 
Forget Cyberpunk improvements, patches will only fix bugs, they are already working on new games, if a Ubisoft was bad, now unfortunately we have another one
 
it's a joke but it borders on reality. 🦖
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There's a big misconception that the work being done right now is to make the game the way it should've been, when actually these last six months have been entirely about getting the game back in store for Playstation.
If there's a misconception, it is that fixed bugs will make the game sell for years like CDPR expects it to. They need to create shitton of content for the game for it to stay afloat. If it's not too late.
 
That ship has very, very obviously already sailed.

If you invest in this, then all you can hope for is that whatever the suits will deem financially worth pursuing in the future will, somehow, line up with what you want from the games in question. I wouldn't get my hopes up for that, though.
 
If there's a misconception, it is that fixed bugs will make the game sell for years like CDPR expects it to. They need to create shitton of content for the game for it to stay afloat. If it's not too late.
If they expect me to pay for Expansion if they don't give us what they promised throughout the marketing campaign along with some form of tangible apology for the absolutely horrible launch especially on console then they can do one. If they think they can just go the TW3 launch road and fix the many bugs give out the already planned small free DLC and then hit us with paid expansion then they can pull the other one. Their marketing [...] hid the state of the game on PS4 and Xbox One based systems a simple sorry doesn't cut it.
 
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Surely parallel development is a good thing, if they had started it after witcher 3 then you might have been looking at witcher 4 as a next gen launch title and cp2077(the new technology challenge) could have stayed in the studio until they finished it?

Rather than what happened, "we've got to finish cp2077 for next gen launch". "We've got to finish cp2077 so we can start development of witcher 4"

Plus, probably 5 years between titles for each ip rather than 10?

They're not talking about becoming a major global development house with 20 studios and pumping out filler to pay the bills, they're talking about working on two main titles, and some side projects based on them.
 
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The thing is, developing (AAA) videogames costs millions, and in order to stay able to develop them, you need to grow.
It's called, progress. Look to the gaming industry in general. Games of old, were maybe 255 byte? Today, there are some that exceed 150 gigabyte. That's growth. The next project should always exceed it's predecessor. CDPR is just doing what it should do to stay in the game.

I'm not against growth per se. But as I said in the first post, creativity shouldn't be just the means to this end.
There are game developers who make great games and stay creative: Santa Monica Studios or Supergiant Games – although some of you might say, Hades isn't Triple AAA (if you define AAA by graphics too much).
 
You're not the only one feeling this.

Even the most hardcore fans of CDPR have to admit their communication with both community and investors has been very quiet.


Then again, it's people in gaming communities who told them to do exactly that: "Stop apologizing, stay quiet, and get to work", obviously they don't want to create some craze over the investors calls where news outlets will report "CD Projekt has announced one third of their staff is now working on Witcher 4 and are about to tease Cyberpunk 2077 expansion and multiplayer in E3", you would get a lot of bad negative press by these angry critics in YouTube if perception is still that game is not yet finished and they are just going to abandon these missing features. And of course a lot of companies are trying to stay silent before E3, where you're going to get hyped no matter what is shown.

I can only wish we would hear a lot of positive spin in E3 about what's to come and what's at least shown to be fixed in the game in their test servers, how would the game be changed for the better, what fan feedback have they started to work on implementing, like car customization and barbers, gang favor, etc.

I mean they've demoed the game on far worse state years before release, so it wouldn't be that hard to show few new features that they're planning to implement in 6 months.

The lack of transparency is on one hand helping since there's a ton of toxicity toward the game, especially festered by the YouTube gaming community, and on one hand it's really irritating to not hear anything for half a year.
 
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Without creativity/artistic freedoms -> boring game -> low sales -> not satisfied shareholders.

The customers are always right, and the shareholders can shut their trap and take a backseat.

Because without customers, there's no sales and no money. Priorities.

Well, that was still true I believe a few decades ago ? But now the economy along with the business strategy has changed as it seems.

Today's successful marketing plan is based upon the promise of a great art piece / journey / something-something "beyond expectations". And it's working very, very well unfortunately. Create and grow the Demand instead of working on the quality of a respectful Supply.

Note that I'm aware that the most successful gaming companies didn't make their profit out of just "good and passionate games", there always been a big mediatic fight around the consoles/hardware, and note that few of the hardware products were either disappointing or plain fraud, they were delivered, functioning, enjoyable for what they were ; and so were the game. Most of videogames were ready to play on RELEASE, no DAY 1-2-3 patches at that time, you get what you pay for and it was the norm. Does someone remembers that we could try the game beforehand, and that was called a DEMO ? How many companies does that now, are they too afraid of disappointing the gamers ? (I know about the "alternative" to demos but for obvious reasons I won't mention it).

We can see how the trick isn't even disguised anymore. Lots of successful campaigns that rely on the promise of something great and that desperately needs the customer to keep on giving money for. You name it : Early Access frauds, Game as services, Hype-rich projects that turn into crapwares / vaporwares, Kickstarters frauds, Sequels that are plain copy-paste of the last game, an so on... It appears that fewer of these companies even attempt at deliver a decent product anymore. And as I said, they don't hide it either, it's the same strategy for 10+ years. Selling hopes & dreams.

I'm not throwing a boulder on every company / indie dev that work their product based on these methods. Some of them are fine, some of them are being honest and transparent about the development process. But fewer each year...

I agree about what you're saying : we should keep our wallets CLOSED until something's out. Advertisement has been a magic show for too long now. Let's get back to the fundamentals. Decent games made by decent people.
 
Most of videogames were ready to play on RELEASE, no DAY 1-2-3 patches at that time, you get what you pay for and it was the norm.
Just a little detail who can explain that, I think :)
If I remember, this was clearly the case, when our consoles/pc had no or a "very" bad internet connection. Obviously, no digital version of a game either. It was impossible to consider any fix/patch after a game was released.
So for me, at the time, it was more because there was no choice, rather than the studios/Devs were more serious/decents. But maybe I'm wrong :)
 

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The game is done, they may fix some more bugs and improve performance somewhat but that's it.

To me they just want to move on and once they have chucked out some free cosmetic dlc and two story dlc that will not be anywhere near as big as the Witcher 3 and some rudimentary multiplayer it will be forgotten.

If one does not like the game the way it is now and does not use mods then tough luck, CDPR don't care, that seems obvious.

I'm lucky I suppose as I love the game and mods have come out that do what I want so I don't expect anymore than what it is and never expected much in the first place.
 
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