Is it just me, or are we having a "biggest disappointment ever" game release every single year now? No Man's Sky, Battlefront II, Fallout 76, Anthem, Cyberpunk 2077... You'd think companies would've been more careful with how they handle hype after each crash, but they are instead pushing it harder and harder. Though to be fair, at some point you have to admit it's a shared problem: if people didn't preorder as much and fell for the manufactured hype this cases would be much damaging for the companies pulling them off, scaring them away from doing this. Also, has there been a succesful lawsuit of false advertisement against any of this big releases?

Why would it change? CP2077 is still the biggest release of last year. As long as people keep buying the hype and don't really care how it ends up, the industry will keep on selling hype instead of finished games. Star Citizen is showing the way how you never even have to release a game to keep raking in the dough. Hype as a service is the new model HAAS :)

The lawsuit against KZ: Shadowfall was settled out of court, sort of successful I guess.

Ouch! Anyhow, things like this happened 20 or more years ago too (although it was really rare that respected devs and publishers botched so bad big games so hyped), that's why I almost always wait some time before buying.

Yup, ET ended up in the landfill and was partly blamed for the video game crash of 1983...

A community poll? On a middling youtube channel? I'll take this at least a bit seriously if CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, or Colliers Magazine give it some coverage.

What happened with driveclub? I never recall a problem with it. Also with skyrim on ps3, I was annoyed with the burden going overweight and restriction on travel, and loading times, but I don't recall anything near as dramatic as whathappened with cyberpunk.

It is an interesting thought experiment. However, I think you may have a premise wrong. The issue was not so much that they overhyped the game. The issue is that they under delivered. It looks like they probably could have delivered on their promises, had they simply taken the time needed to do it. So, let's say they lost 2 million sales of the game right now, but they gained 3 million with their big hype machine. That would seem to be a net positive of 1 million sales. The thing is though, had they simply delayed the game, let's say one year, they would have just gotten all of those sales. So, in this hypothetical, there is no way for them to have been better off by releasing the game at this point.

It's not so simple in the real world, of course.  There are costs to delaying the game a year.  But, seeing as they're paying all those same developers to fix the game right now, post launch, rather than paying the developers to fix the game before launch, it would seem that the net cost of a delay was probably not that high. 

Beyond that, you have the lost sales going forward, because the game has shit reviews and a bad reputation. You also have lost sales on their next title, because of damage to their reputation. So, I don't see any way that they are better off for having over hyped and under delivered.  The extent to which they have harmed themselves probably cannot be calculated. But, I don't think there's any doubt that they have done real harm

In the real world the new generation was rushing along.

What choices did they have:
- Scrap the old gen versions, which would mean all console versions as there is no current gen console version yet, 46% less sales.
- Delay the game, new gen is coming, current gen version will sell less and less, more competition is coming, less sales.

Also a split release (first on PC) would have undermined the hype build up for the current gen versions. Those nearly 4 million console pre-orders would have slowly evaporated the longer it would take to get a current gen version out, the more got known about the true version of the game.

True, they will have lost sales going forward, yet they had 8 million sales in their pocket and all it took to cash in on them was release the game. A bird in the hand... CP2077 still had the status of first next gen looking game (in trailers and mind share anyway), any more delays would diminish that, as well as any more information coming out about the real game.

So no, delaying one year would most likely mot have gotten them all those sales. Delaying one year is not enough to deliver what was marketed, just enough to deliver a stable game on all platforms, yet now releasing in the middle of a bunch of new next gen games. Also the pandemic drove sales and pre-orders, next year that's hopefully gone, plus the economic fallout, less time and money to waste on games.

It was a get rich quick gamble, sacrificing their reputation, but banking probably more money out of the game than delaying more while the hype slowly deflates.

The game had multiple delays just like CP2077 than launched incomplete. The servers buckled on release and it took two weeks for online racing to even work properly. The clubs were added later as well as the rain (that was intended for release). Also a bit of a victim of hype, the forza killer etc. People expected more cars at launch and a bigger campaign (it was meant for online competition, yet since online and the clubs didn't work at release the focus shifted onto the bare bones campaign) Then you had reviewers disappointed with it not being another openworld racer.

It all got fixed and the game had a ton of free content added monthly, tons of tracks and cars (although the cars were part of a seasonal pass I think), a whole extra country, that lovely weather and an optional more realistic driving model. The free content (tracks and campaign) more than doubled in the year after release. It was all in vain though, Evolution studios did not survive and got canned before properly finishing the PSVR version.


Skyrim had memory issues on PS3 that didn't really crop up until 20-30 hours into the game depending on the size of your save game. Everything you touch / move in the game gets stored as a difference in the save game. At some point the PS3 runs into serious problems managing all the changes and started to slow down to unplayable fps and eventually crash. It was a memory leak or fragmentation since turning off auto save and restarting every 15 minutes did allow me to finish the game. Riding a horse on ps3 was practically impossible though.

It also depended on your play style. If you blow everything up, throw everything on the ground etc, the more likely you were to run into game crippling problems later on. However a fresh save from the beginning did run perfectly fine. (Apart from a couple glitches like getting knocked 100ft into the air by giants)



Cyberpunk is pretty much a sum total of all the stuff that has gone wrong with games before it.

There was also a third option: not to overreach. Seriously, aiming way higher than what they were going to be capable of delivering was the problem with Cyberpunk 2077. Noone asked for a game this big with so many features until they promised they could pull it off. Noone would've complained if they had released a more modest game if they hadn't promised the world.

It was more about the choice they had in November, after already manoevering themselves into a corner.

Of course, had they managed the project and expectations better (which is the whole reason it ended up like this) they would have never had to make that choice. They wouldn't have had 8 million pre-orders either.