Recently you probably heard about a number of lawsuits being leveled at CD Projekt Red over Cyberpunk 2077. You may also know that four of those lawsuits have combined together, and have been consolidated into some sort of super lawsuit against the studio. The lawsuits come from a variety of people, including consumers who feel like they were lied to, and even shareholders who saw a big drop in the company’s share price at the time of the game’s launch. If you’re not aware, this all stems from Cyberpunk 2077 being a broken mess at launch. That’s not an exaggeration either, it was very broken. On PS4 and Xbox One, it barely ran, and when it did it wasn’t good. On Xbox Series X, I played the game and experienced bugs all over the place. These don’t usually ruin my experience, but here, I’m sad to say that they did.
Within the lawsuits are a few issues being cited. First, the fact that the game was unplayable made consumers angry with the company. This then led to Sony pulling the game from its store, which shareholders say ruined the company’s reputation. This is the focus of two of the lawsuits. However, there is an argument that the game is no longer in this state, so the lawsuits don’t actually count.
Here’s the problem. Game developers and publishers have shareholders who rely on games selling well at launch and getting good reviews. It’s all about the numbers. When a game like Cyberpunk 2077 does badly at launch, it costs shareholders a lot of money in net worth. Now that might not actually damage their income, but the principle of the money that they’ve “lost” still stands. Sadly, these people are usually always angry when that mythical form of money disappears.
At the end of the day, this lawsuit should only force CD Projekt Red to get Cyberpunk 2077 into a playable state and back on the PlayStation Store. However, I think the reality is that people are out to get money from the developer in lieu of the poor reception it had. What happens from here remains to be seen.
