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In one of the more curious arguments set forth by a game company we’ve seen yet, CD Projekt Red wants you to know that Cyberpunk 2077 is in fact playable. Why? Because you can at least launch the game.

“We ignored the signals”

To take a step back and provide some context, Adam Kiciński, President and Joint CEO of CD Projekt Red, actually started the team’s December 14 conference call with the company’s management board on the right foot. He opened the discussion by admitting that, after three delays in production, the company rushed the release of Cyberpunk 2077. They ignored signals about the need for additional time, they underestimated the scale and the complexity of the issues on last-gen consoles, and they made a further mistake by mostly showcasing the game on PCs throughout their marketing campaign.

After three delays, we as the Management Board were too focused on releasing the game. We underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues, we ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles. It was the wrong approach and against our business philosophy. On top of that, during the campaign, we showed the game mostly on PCs.

Kiciński noted that the company lost trust with gamers and weakened its reputation, and added that their first steps would be to regain those two things. The immediate focus would be on fixing Cyberpunk 2077 for last-gen consoles. The dev team recently shipped out fixes to get the ball rolling on that, and the company also has plans for major updates to release in January and February.

Michał Nowakowski, Board Member responsible for publishing at CD Projekt Red, gave sort of a lukewarm clarity to those plans. “Come January and February you’re going to see larger improvements,” he began. But, “if your expectation is that the game is going to be equal to, say, next-gen or PC in terms of performance, that definitely isn’t going to happen.” Continuing to temper expectations, he added that old-gen players would never see the quality of visuals or performance that PC or next-gen players would experience. “We’re openly stating that’s not going to be the case. It will be a good, playable, stable game, without glitches and crashes, though. That’s the intention.”

Cyberpunk 2077: Literally playable?

It almost seems hard to believe that someone involved with a game that made it to release with as many glaring and widespread issues as Cyberpunk 2077 has would engage in the act of futility that is trying to combat the battle-hardened and weathered “literally unplayable” meme. We say almost hard to believe, because Nowakowski attempted exactly that later in the call.

When one of the people on the call brought up the playability of the game come February’s optimizations, Nowakowski sort of backpedaled on his earlier comment that it would be a “good, playable, stable game” with the following clarification:

Actually, the game is playable right now; that may be an important thing to state because it’s not like the game does not launch or is unplayable; I fully understand that the experience is far from satisfactory for a lot of people – and we do acknowledge that – but “not playable” sounds like it doesn’t launch at all, which is not the case.

Yikes.

It seems like an odd hill to die on, arguing the semantics of the word “playable” on a call where you’ve admitted that the launch of your game has been disastrous. People playing on every platform have taken to all forms of social media to universally lament the seemingly endless list of issues with the game. From the constant crashing, to the performance instability, to the unexplainable bugs, players have taken CDPR to task over the so-called playability of the game since its release.

It seems that it will take a lot more than a pedantic correction for players to truly be convinced that Cyberpunk 2077 actually provides a playable experience. Hopefully, the contents of this conference call indicate that CD Projekt Red is finally on the right track.

While most console players will have to patiently rely on CDPR to deliver, if you’re looking for a kick on your PC experience, check out out this quick new guide on how to boost FPS while playing Cyberpunk 2077. For tons of other guides and all future updates on the game, check out our Cyberpunk 2077 page.