Gamers Are In A Toxic Relationship With The Gaming Industry

Long ago, in the golden age of gaming, video game developers were looked up to as venerable champions of creativity, innovation, and above all—faith to their consumers. After all, video game studios were staffed by nerds who were just like us, right? 

In this honeymoon phase of our relationship with the industry, we were spoiled with some truly earth-shattering video game titles: Blizzard's World of Warcraft, Bungee Studio's Halo, Bethesda's Fallout 3, and BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy. These titles graced us with incredibly detailed, lovingly crafted stories, captivating worlds, and above all: fun.

That said—in this post-No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, and Mass Effect: Andromeda reality—what happened to the loving industry we once knew? Why doesn't the industry love us the way we love them? 

The short answer is, as it is with most of these questions, money. Why spend the time and resources to make a game that delivers on all of its lofty (and expensive) promises when gamers will buy it even if it doesn't? It's long past the time to end things—so why do we keep getting back together?

The goodwill and loyalty built in the last decades of gaming have been used and abused by the industry for several years now. The most recent (and devastating) example of this abuse is the aforementioned release of CD Projekt Red's (CDPR) Cyberpunk 2077. 

Polish video game developer CD Projekt Red (CDPR) was one of the last darlings of the video game industry. Building their fame on the release of 2015's wildly popular The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CDPR promised even greater heights of success with the announcement of a release date for Cyberpunk 2077. 

Announced officially in 2012, Cyberpunk 2077's development didn't actually begin until 2016. For the last four years, the talent at CDPR was hard at work creating a gritty, dystopian future set in a city as real as any New York or Hong Kong—or so we thought. 

The disastrous release of Cyberpunk 2077 is a story for the ages. The first rumblings of bad news came when the game was delayed three times. After each delay, gamers kept getting more and more impatient with CDPR. Some especially unhinged individuals went so far as to send death threats to employees of CDPR.

Our next warning came from the proverbial canaries in the CDPR coalmine: the creatives at the studio. Contractors and developers complained about unreasonable, bordering on illegal, levels of crunch they went through to finish the game. Employee crunch could only mean one thing: the game was being rushed to completion to meet its holiday season deadline.

We really should have known something was wrong when the first reviews of the game by rolled out. Usually, reviewers are given access to a game ahead of release to publish reviews of their initial impression of the game. These reviews typically include gameplay footage to accurately represent the experience of the reviewer. In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, however, reviewers were forbidden by CDPR to use their own gameplay footage. Instead, only B-roll provided by CDPR was allowed to be featured in reviews. This B-roll was created largely in-engine on a high end PC.

Like a boyfriend or girlfriend hiding their text messages, we should have realized something wasn’t quite right. Instead, players were treated to the full scope of the Cyberpunk 2077 experience after being parted from 59.99$. 

Players were greeted to the world of Cyberpunk 2077 by frequent game crashes, character models reminiscent of PS2-era Play-Doh people, and enough bugs to put a Bethesda game to shame. The game performed worst of all on the PlayStation 4, one of the consoles it was initially developed for. 

In a scramble to keep customers happy, CDPR released a letter shortly after the release informing dissatisfied gamers that they could refund their copies of Cyberpunk with no questions asked. What they neglected to do was clear this initiative with Sony and Microsoft.

The response from Sony to CDPR's idea of a fun surprise was one of the most brutal actions that a platform can take. Sony outright pulled the digital version of Cyberpunk from the PlayStation Network store, effectively hobbling any hopes of success for the game on the PlayStation. As of now, the game is still unavailable for digital sale from Sony. 

The final blow(s) to CDPR's reputation arrived in the form of multiple lawsuits from two law firms. The class-action suits asserted that CDPR defrauded investors through their marketing of Cyberpunk compared to the state of completion it released in. News of the lawsuits caused CDPR's company stock to plummet by nearly 29%.

With all the negative reception to Cyberpunk 2077, one would have expected a devastating financial loss for CDPR--and one would be proven wrong. The game has sold 13 million copies worldwide even after refunds, with more than enough money to recuperate development costs and net the studio a tidy profit. CDPR has remained largely silent in response to the criticisms lobbed at Cyberpunk.

Why does this keep happening? When will we learn our lesson? For all the video game bloggers and journalists who write scathing indictments of the industry's cost-cutting, money-grubbing habits, why do companies like CDPR get away with abusing our loyalty and shattering our expectations?  

For all this hopeless questioning, there is a small glimmer of hope.

Before Cyberpunk 2077, the title of biggest disaster in the history of over-promising and under-delivering belonged to Hello Games' No Man's Sky.

Gamers will remember those first sweet promises of infinite space exploration of bizarre alien planets and interaction with millions of other players. What we got was, of course, none of those things--at first. 

Determined to make amends for releasing an incomplete, unsatisfying experience, Hello Games has worked tirelessly to roll out consistently massive content and quality of life updates to No Man's Sky at no extra cost. Finally, years after its underwhelming release, we got the game we were promised. 

Unfortunately, Hello Games' approach is the exception and not the rule in the video game industry. Most developers will continue to keep up the lucrative practice of hoodwinking gamers as long as we keep enabling them.