After the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, people were quick to blame the developer and the corporate culture. Many believed that shareholders expectations and executive mismanagement lead to unrealistic expectations resulting into a messy launch. Since Cyberpunk 2077’s release in 2020, the developer has been busy in fixing the game and still, there is a lot of room for improvement.
Now, another report has surfaced online putting the blame on a quality assurance company, Quantic Lab for the buggy and messy launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
According to Youtube channel, Upper Echelon Gamers, they have received documents from an apparent whistleblower that highlight the mismanagements of the Quality Assurance process related to Cyberpunk 2077 at Quantic Lab.
Quantic Lab (owned by Embracer Group) is basically a services company that provides different services including Video Games QA, Support, User Experience and Localization. On their portfolio page, we can see Cyberpunk 2077 along with The Witcher 3. According to the documents received by the Youtuber, Quantic Lab apparently lied to CD Projekt Red on different fronts for their QA services which lead to overlooking of major bugs in the games.
Quantic Lab team wasn’t apparently equipped to handle such a large project and they did not update CD Projekt Red about Quantic Lab’s internal issues. CD Project Red had apparently set a quota for the number of reported bugs. And since Quantic Lab was understaffed and they didn’t had much experienced people, they focused on reporting smaller and quick bugs to meet the quota. This apparently caused the major, game-breaking bugs went unnoticed.
At Launch CD Projekt Red did mention that they had problems with Quality Assurance however, no one believed them as it was hard to believe that bugs of such scale can go unnoticed. Now, with this report, it has become more believable.
Regardless, we can’t put the whole blame on Quantic Lab. Misreporting of bugs can be a major issue however, the weight of other issues like missing features still lies on developer’s shoulders. Third-party studio handling is still the responsibility of the main company as outsourcing development work is nothing new.
For now, while CD Projekt Red is working on fixing and updating Cyberpunk 2077, they have already announce that the next The Witcher game is in the works. Let’s just hope that they will learn from Cyberpunk 2077 and we won’t get the same experience with the next The Witcher game.
