Cyberpunk 2077 was heavily criticized when it released in late 2020 due to a surprising number of bugs, often game-breaking ones. CD Projekt Red certainly did themselves no favors as they explained that their QA didn’t encounter all the bugs people reported.
Well, a new report from Forbes suggests that the studio may have told the truth, or at least thought they were. It turns out that a whistleblower sent a 72-page document to YouTube channel Upper Echelon Gamers that revealed a very bizarre story.
It turns out that Quantic Labs, the QA company hired to test Cyberpunk 2077, blatantly lied to CD Projekt Red into believing the game was in better shape than it was. Forbes concluded:
- Quantic Lab overstated the size of the team making Cyberpunk 2077 in order to preserve the contract.
- Quantic Lab said the team is made up of senior staff, but the size is that of junior staff with less than six months of QA experience.
- Quantic Lab had a daily quota for reporting bugs, which resulted in CDPR getting thousands of relatively meaningless bug reports from testers, which took up a lot of time and caused game-breaking issues to go undetected or prioritized.
While there must be several reasons behind Cyberpunk 2077’s broken state, this story could actually explain some of them. Cyberpunk 2077 is in much better shape today than when it was announced after several major updates and upgrades – including proper PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X versions.