The Seedy PR of CDPR: How A Video Game Company Should Have Remained Silent

Cyberpunk 2077 has been out for a month now, after what has been labeled one of the most disastrous video game product launches in the history of the medium. Despite selling over 10 million copies since its December 17 release last year, the backlash to the rushed and buggy quality of the title resulted in a $2 billion loss in valuation to parent company CD Projekt S. A (the development studio goes under the name CD Projekt Red, or CDPR for short). With a class action lawsuit from investors in the pipeline, the Polish developer, once the most valuable company in the country, finds themselves in an unenviable service recovery situation.

A Chronology of Relevant Post-Launch Events

1. On January 13, 2021, CEO Marcin Iwinski put out a statement on Twitter, accompanied with a video. In the statement, he addressed the responsibility behind the poor launch, the quality of the title, as well as offered customers and fans the reassurance that the company would eventually deliver on pre-release promises. To that end, a tentative roadmap of fixes and updates was also included in the statement.
2. On January 16, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg released an insider expose on Cyberpunk 2077, showcasing the myriad of problems within CDPR that culminated in the failure. This account, largely provided by anonymous developers within the company (this is common practice in the game industry, since speaking out publicly results in being blacklisted) contradicted some elements of the Iwinski statement.
3. On January 17, CD Projekt Red's Head of Studio Adam Badowski made a statement in response to the Bloomberg article, citing certain specific statements within the article as factually incorrect, and offering corrections. The statement also included dismissive comments about how the sample size of the developer interviews for the article was too small to be necessarily reflective of the studio as a whole.

The Reaction

The public perception of the CEO's statement was divided. Long time fans of the studio's work came out in support, believing the studio to be capable of delivering on their promises, while the general demographic was more ambivalent, tending towards cynical. Industry media was equally pessimistic, given the company's track record during the release itself, which included behavior such as delayed review copies and preventing original footage to be included as part of the reviews. All in all, the general perception of the statement was negative.

This negativity was further exacerbated by the Bloomberg article, with commentators calling out the original statement as a canned corporate response attempting to control the narrative rather than provide concrete solutions to the problems faced by customers. Jason Schreier's track record with exposing the institutional problems behind failed video game launches, most notably with BioWare's Anthem in 2019, as well as the similarities in the problems reported in this article and the Anthem one, did not paint the company in a positive light either.

Badowski's statement was gasoline on the fire, with its disjointed tone and aura of nitpicking minor details while ignoring the thesis of the Schreier piece resulting in widespread backlash, including from series fans and those evangelizing for the studio. It was at this point that many in the know were wishing that the studio had just remained silent, if this was the best they could say at this time. In this article, however, I propose that the company shouldn't have said anything at all, post launch.

Why Silence is Golden

The following are a series of sentiment graphs on the nature of the discourse around the terms CD Projekt, CDPR, Cyberpunk, and Cyberpunk 2077. All numbers are percentage values. An analysis, and proposed narrative explaining the trends, follows below.

One month into the release of the game, most of the negative sentiment had in fact washed away. People who don't like a product tend to complain about it for a bit and then move on with their lives, with the conversation then being dominated either by those who are otherwise ambivalent, or fans. The data shows that before the first official statement, the sentiment around the company and the game was more positive than negative, reflective of the above theory.

The statement resulted in a massive leap in negative sentiment, as discussion of the product and the quality and content of the statement was brought back into public discourse. Everything from the way the statement was worded to throw the CDPR testing department under the bus to the vagueness of the roadmap of fixes was complained about, since the tone of the conversation was still largely being governed by the quality of the product, which had not seen any improvements at the time.

The uptick in positive sentiment at the time of the Bloomberg article, unfortunately for the studio, is largely targeted at the article itself, citing the quality of journalism (good investigative journalism is rare in the video game industry) and Schreier's tenacity in bringing the issues within the company to light. Negative sentiment grows steadily at the rate commensurate with bringing the title back into public discourse.

The second CDPR statement was the worst offender, causing a drop in positive sentiment and bringing it lower than the negative sentiment, meaning that the end result of all this public engagement was an objective decrease in sentiment around the product and company. If the goal was controlling the narrative and reassuring customers, it has achieved the exact opposite, as things are worse off than when they started out.

Analytic Limitations, Or How Things Might Be Worse

Given the nature of the analytics tools, as well as the nature of natural language, the false positives are more common than false negatives, meaning that the overall sentiment could in fact be far worse than the numbers currently indicate. In the analysis, it was found that tweets that criticized the game but praised another in the same vein would be classified as positive, along with sarcastic tweets. This analysis is, therefore, an understatement of how bad the sentiment change actually was.

Also limiting was the sample size. A subjective analysis of social media response to the game, the fallout, the statements, and articles would indicate similar trends, but there is no way to say so with any certainty at time of writing.

Come On Now, Surely They Had To Say Something

Video games with disastrous launches are not always a lost cause. Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIV was notable for its poor initial reception, with the company making a public apology a year after its release, and eventually going on to completely overhaul the game. This is usually hailed as an example of good post-launch PR, where the developers acknowledged their faults and worked to build a title that would be well received.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hello Games went into complete radio silence upon the rushed and disastrous release of No Man's Sky, at the time one of the most anticipated video games. They would go on to add and refine content within the game over the next several years at no cost to the consumer, and is celebrated as one of the greatest turnarounds of fortune in video game history.

Many in the Cyberpunk fandom are hoping that the development studio would pull off something similar, but the tone and content of the messaging indicates neither an understanding and admission of fault (as seen in the FFXIV failure) nor a concrete plan of what to do next (as seen in both above examples).

While one may argue that a better crafted PR statement would have been the solution here, I would assume that there was a fair bit of thought put into what they said. PR statements are carefully crafted with brainstorming and analyses, and one can safely assume this was CD Projekt's best foot forward. With that in consideration, and noting the 10% drop in positive sentiment, if this is the best they could do, they were better off saying nothing at all.