Despite its historically disappointing launch state, a new report reveals that Cyberpunk 2077's high sales has secured huge bonuses for CD Projekt executives, while alleging that lower-level CD Projekt Red staff expected their own smaller bonuses to be larger. Although the more stable PC version was the only one provided for early reviews, the unpolished PS4 and Xbox One versions were slammed by critics for their broken state. Despite this being what some have called false advertising (having even driven PlayStation to pull the game from its digital store), CD Projekt rush to release the game in its launch state quickly made the publisher millions despite all of the bad publicity.
Although Cyberpunk 2077 sold over 13 million copies by the end of 2020, the actual state of the game remains barely acceptable on consoles and still underbaked on the better-performing PC and Stadia releases in April 2021. The game was launched despite its developers reportedly asking for more time to ensure it was more complete. As a result, the game shipped with an inordinate amount of bugs, mistakes, and technical issues that caused many to regard it as unplayable. Refund guarantees were made by CD Projekt Red and Sony delisted the game from the PlayStation Store, where it still has yet to return. Despite this, CD Projekt is still rewarding those responsible for pushing the game out before it was market-ready.
According to a Bloomberg report, CD Projekt will pay out $6.3 million to its two CEOs. CD Projekt Red's Adam Badowski, board member and director of Cyberpunk 2077, will get a whopping $4.2 million. These vast sums comes through profit sharing, as the game sold very well at launch. Employees will also be subject to bonuses between $5,000 to $20,000, depending on seniority. CDPR noted that it had allocated $29.8 million for bonuses to 865 employees, which is on top of other bonuses that were paid out after release. Some employees noted that bonuses ought to have been higher and presumably would have been had the game been delayed a fourth time.
Given it's contractual and CD Projekt did manage to make boatloads of cash off of the game at launch, it comes as little surprise, but should be a wake-up call to the industry. The upper management that laid the path for Cyberpunk 2077 to release in the state that it did made millions while their underlings made far, far less, despite the latter group doing the vast majority of the groundwork to fix the game after working on it for potentially years. It reflects that these executives are rewarded for bad decisions, a common thread that rings true at many more publishers than just CD Projekt.
It's not clear when Cyberpunk 2077 will be "fixed" exactly, as the game's worst issues run deeper than bugs (though it doesn't help that even the latest patch caused more of those to crop up). It doesn't exactly seem right that a group of executives are collecting such excessive sums despite the general consensus that CD Projekt's mistakes with this game were many and egregious. Even though there's an active plan in place to fix Cyberpunk 2077, the damage has been done. Faith in the company has been severely lessened, DLCs and features like multiplayer have been delayed or potentially canceled, and developers who have shared in a only tiny fraction of the game's profits are still toiling away on a project whose bonuses have already been divvied up.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available on PS4 (retail), Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia, and it will launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2021.
Source: Bloomberg