The Glithed Missteps of Cyberpunk 2077: A Post-Mortem on Delivery Failure
How effective delivery management could have prevented the damage caused by one of the most expensive games in history
It’s May 2025, one year after Cyberpunk 2077 finally reached an Overwhelmingly Positive review score on Steam.
The game has earned the recognition many believed it always deserved. Players and critics now call it “a must-play experience,” praising its visual polish, narrative depth, and hard-earned redemption arc. With the Phantom Liberty expansion, a steady stream of updates, and upcoming ports to Nintendo Switch 2 and macOS, CD Projekt Red has managed to claw back some of the trust it lost.
Roll back the clock to December 2020, and the picture was very different. One of the most hyped video game launches in history, from a studio revered for The Witcher 3 and beloved by a dedicated fanbase, was met with an avalanche of disappointment, refunds, and memes. What should’ve been a generational triumph turned into one of gaming’s most infamous launch disasters.
It’s inspiring to see Cyberpunk 2077 join games like Final Fantasy XIV and No Man’s Sky in the rare group that managed to bounce back from catastrophic launches. However, as it occured with its peers, this game presents a cautionary tale that deserves to be remembered by anyone working in or around game development. Yes, many articles have dissected what went wrong, but while most post-mortems focus on crunch culture, platform bloat, or misaligned expectations, I want to approach the story from a more technical and operational angle so we can draw lessons from it. In my opinion, this wasn’t a creative or cultural failure. It was a delivery failure, and a textbook case worth studying.
In the next few sections, I’ll break down what went wrong from a program and platform management perspective, and how stronger delivery leadership, SRE support, and DevTools alignment might have mitigated the most disastrous issues witnessed post-launch.
But before we dive into what went wrong from a delivery standpoint, let’s set the stage by going back a little further, when Cyberpunk 2077 was first announced.
Setting the Stage: A Perfect Storm in the Making
Cyberpunk 2077 was first announced in 2012, in a stylized teaser that instantly electrified fans of the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG. Little did we know that reveal was more aspiration than roadmap.
At the time, CD Projekt Red was still a studio in transition, fresh off the success of The Witcher 2, earning praise for its no-DRM policy through GOG.com, and still deep in development on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which wouldn’t ship until 2015. So when they announced Cyberpunk, it was more of a promise than a product.
Full development didn’t begin until late 2016, and by then, the stakes were enormous. The Witcher 3 had made CDPR a household name, winning Game of the Year awards and setting a new bar for open-world RPGs. The follow-up had to be bigger, bolder, and more technically ambitious: a first-person shooter-RPG hybrid, with massive vertical environments, reactive NPC behavior, branching storylines, and immersive sim elements layered on top.
Early internal documentation, according to developer interviews and Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg exposé, envisioned Cyberpunk primarily for high-end PCs and next-gen hardware. The idea was to build something bleeding-edge, not necessarily cross-gen, but that changed in 2016, when one of CDPR’s co-CEOs, Adam Badowski, took over the project.
Under Adam’s leadership, the vision pivoted: the game had to run on current-gen consoles, namely PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which were already showing their age. That shift forced the team to scale down or reengineer much of what had been prototyped, which led to frustration and resignations from key developers, many of whom had joined to work on a next-gen passion project, not a technical compromise.
In the years that followed, the pressure only mounted:
CDPR had gone public in 2009, but Cyberpunk was its first tentpole release under intense shareholder scrutiny. Investor expectations escalated with every passing delay.
The scope continued to grow, with custom systems built from scratch for AI behavior, animation, and crowd logic. CDPR didn’t license tools like Unreal or Unity; everything was proprietary, adding engineering load across the board.
Nine platforms were now part of the delivery matrix: PS4, Xbox One, PS4 Pro, Xbox One X, PS5, Xbox Series X|S (via backward compatibility), Stadia, and PC. QA complexity spiked as a result.
And then came COVID-19.
The 2020 pandemic hit just as the game was approaching its original release window. Overnight, the team had to shift to remote work, with limited access to dev kits and increasingly fragmented communication. According to post-release interviews, many developers working from home never saw the game running on base consoles until the final weeks, a situation made worse by internal reporting structures that filtered QA data and prioritized PC performance over console realities.
And yet, the game shipped on December 10, 2020.
What followed was one of the most visible collapses of a high-profile launch in recent memory: game-breaking bugs, crashing consoles, performance issues so severe Sony pulled the title from PSN, and a refund process that hit CDPR’s bottom line and reputation hard. However, what happened in those last few months was less a surprise than a system failure in slow motion.
You had:
A project with no single platform of focus.
A team rebuilding tech on the fly.
QA bottlenecks and crunched timelines.
Rising pressure from boardroom leadership to hit end-of-year financial targets.
A lack of real-time infrastructure to reflect platform-specific issues before they became customer-facing crises.
In other words, a perfect storm created by a delivery environment full of unacknowledged risk.
Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s move on to what exactly went wrong, and what we can learn from it from a program and delivery management perspective.
Scope vs. Stability: The Tipping Point
Every ambitious game project wrestles with a fundamental trade-off: scope versus stability. You have two choices: build a bigger, bolder experience, or focus on performance and reliability across platforms. Doing both at scale is rare. Doing both well? Even rarer, but not impossible. All relies in your ability to control your scope in terms of creative ambition and the number of platforms you plan to tackle.
In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, the team tried to do both without setting those important boundaries.
When CD Projekt Red first announced the game, expectations were already sky-high. But over time, the ambition ballooned: a massive open world, complex AI systems, first-person combat layered over deep RPG mechanics, branching storylines, and simultaneous delivery across console generations, PC, and Stadia. That’s not just scope creep. That’s risk exposure on a massive scale.
To be fair, we’re talking about the same studio that pulled off the incredibly content-rich The Witcher 3. And the original plan made sense: build Cyberpunk 2077 for high-end PCs first, with next-gen consoles like PS5 and Xbox Series X as the target console experience. However, somewhere along the way, the Cyberpunk project pivoted — or more accurately, expanded beyond manageable.
Compounding the challenge, CDPR opted for custom-built systems across core features like animation, crowd behavior, and driving AI instead of using proven third-party tools. That’s a creative risk that can pay dividends when executed well, but from a delivery standpoint, every custom system adds complexity, unknowns, and long-term technical debt.
At some point, ambition outpaced architecture. Worse yet, internal reports later revealed that CDPR leadership was well aware of performance issues, especially on last-gen consoles. However, with mounting shareholder pressure, the decision was made to push ahead with the launch anyway.
It’s easy to judge in hindsight, but as someone who has worked under similar executive pressure in past roles, I know how difficult that position is. Delivery leaders are often caught between a rock and a hard place, trying to maintain delivery integrity while board members are watching the share price. But that’s precisely why transparency, influence, and escalation frameworks matter.
With stronger internal sponsorship and clearer program-level governance, a Delivery Manager or Platform Lead might have been able to:
Flag the escalating platform risk earlier
Advocate for a staggered or tiered release strategy
Pressure-test scenarios using velocity modeling and platform QA insights
Communicate technical trade-offs to leadership in a way that reframed the launch as a reputational risk, not just a missed revenue quarter
Even if a full delay wasn’t possible, structured risk mitigation could have reduced the blast radius. Instead of a broken launch and public backlash, we might have seen a rough release, but one with less damage to players, developers, and the company’s long-term reputation.
💡 Bottom Line: In multi-platform development, every platform is its own product. Managing scope is just about feature sets as it’s about protecting stability. And when in doubt, ship the game that works. You can always expand later, but you can’t always repair trust.
Where Was the Technical Source of Truth?
One of the most telling failures in Cyberpunk 2077’s delivery wasn’t the scale of its ambition, but the misalignment between creative vision and technical reality, a gap that only widened as the project scaled across teams, platforms, and pandemic-era remote environments.
In complex software and game development, this is where a strong technical source of truth becomes critical. Whether it’s a consolidated backlog, a shared dashboard, or a well-maintained release plan, high-stakes projects need a single system of alignment, something that integrates engineering progress, QA signals, platform status, and creative milestones into a coherent view of delivery readiness.
From what we know post-launch, CD Projekt Red lacked that visibility. Multiple reports cited poor communication between departments. QA teams flagged critical bugs that never reached executive reporting. Build versions weren’t always aligned across testing teams. And with limited access to development kits during lockdown, visibility into platform performance (especially on PS4 and Xbox One) became fragmented and, in some cases, dangerously optimistic.
The real red flag? The surprise many developers felt when they saw the final shipped version running on base consoles. That should never happen.
A mature delivery organization ensures that no major decision-maker — whether creative, executive, or technical — is operating from outdated or filtered information. That kind of clarity comes from infrastructure, governance, and well-structured feedback loops.
This is where SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) principles and strong DevTools support could have made a difference:
CI/CD visibility across builds: For those unfamiliar with the term, CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment) is the backbone of modern software delivery. It ensures that code changes are integrated and tested frequently, reliably, and across all target environments. In Cyberpunk’s case, each platform should have had automated build pipelines with telemetry embedded into every commit, giving QA, engineers, and leadership real-time insights into platform-specific regressions. If PS4 builds consistently failed performance benchmarks, those signals should’ve reached delivery leads promptly. And if they did reach leadership, they either got ignored or translated into crunch — both damaging outcomes.
Stability monitoring per platform: Crashes, memory leaks, and performance bottlenecks can be continuously tracked using instrumentation tools. Even during internal playtests, observability layers can flag issues like GPU/CPU strain or framerate drops. A strong SRE team should treat each platform like a unique deployment environment, with its own thresholds, SLAs, and test harnesses to measure readiness.
Tooling feedback loops between devs and ops: When teams develop custom systems (like crowd AI or driving mechanics), those systems need visibility into how they behave downstream. If, for instance, the crowd behavior engine caused FPS drops on lower-end consoles, it should have triggered early warnings, not surfaced as player complaints on launch day.
And most importantly:
Consolidated release engineering dashboards: Instead of relying on fragmented documentation or Slack threads, a unified, accessible dashboard across code health, platform performance, and test coverage would’ve enabled everyone, from tech leads to PMs, to speak the same language when assessing launch readiness.
In the end, CDPR fell back on crunch, reactive hotfixes, and manual patching. Not due to lack of effort, but because the delivery infrastructure wasn’t set up to surface and mitigate issues at the right time.
💡 Bottom Line: If your delivery plan lives in five places and none of them talk to each other, you don’t have a delivery plan. You have a wishlist. High-stakes releases need a technical source of truth that bridges teams, tools, and timelines… or risk discovering the truth too late.
Lessons for Delivery Managers and Platform Leads
What happened with Cyberpunk 2077 could be summarized as a technical failure caused by a faulty delivery strategy, deficient cross-platform governance, and lacking risk communication. That’s why it offers valuable takeaways for those tasked with leading complex creative programs under pressure.
If you’re in a Delivery Manager or Platform Lead role, especially in a high-visibility, multi-stakeholder AAA game production, here are some summarized lessons worth carrying forward.
1. Plan Platform Readiness Individually
In a multi-platform game, every console or hardware configuration is a product in itself. Treating PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC as just “outputs” of a single dev cycle is a recipe for blind spots. Instead, define readiness criteria and test plans per platform from day one.
Build timelines and capacity around platform-specific risks.
Define platform SLAs (e.g., framerate, load time) and validate early.
Track technical debt and QA findings by platform, not globally.
2. Scope Creep Can’t Be Solved by Crunch
As I learned during my formative years in project management, “nine pregnant moms can’t deliver a child in one single month”. Adding more people, more features, or more time pressure won’t fix a delivery plan already underwater. Cyberpunk's expanding scope and late-stage pivots eroded platform stability. When scope grows, take a step back and replan to reframe expectations.
Map creative ambition to technical capacity early.
Maintain a rolling prioritization framework tied to delivery constraints.
Have the courage to cut or defer features that threaten stability.
3. Transparency Beats Optimism Every Time
Cyberpunk’s leadership reportedly had access to internal warnings about performance, but they weren’t acted on, or weren’t escalated effectively. As a Delivery Manager, your job isn’t to present perfect progress, but to represent the risk, clearly and early.
Escalate truth, not just status.
Normalize bad news when the time is right (late news is fatal).
Use data to support difficult conversations with execs and shareholders.
4. Infrastructure Is a Leadership Responsibility
CI/CD, telemetry, dashboarding, and build visibility aren’t just tools. They’re how trust is built between engineering and delivery. A leader’s job is to ensure these systems aren’t just sitting in a wiki and be used to scale, and inform decision-making,
Make observability part of the delivery lifecycle.
Align tools with decision windows, not just dev cycles.
Invest in developer experience (DevEx) to reduce friction across teams.
5. A Delayed Success Beats an On-Time Disaster
The old Shigeru Miyamoto quote still holds weight: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” Cyberpunk 2077 eventually redeemed itself, but the reputational damage was long-lasting and expensive to developers, shareholders, and the brand.
Delays are hard. But mismanaging a launch is harder.
Wrapping Up
If we can take a final lesson from Cyberpunk’s tumultuous development cycle is this: in high-stakes creative environments like AAA game development, how you deliver is often just as important as what you deliver.
Delivery isn’t just about hitting dates. It’s about orchestrating complexity, protecting quality, and advocating for feasibility. That requires systems, communication, and the courage to trade scope for stability when it counts.
Cyberpunk 2077 will likely be remembered not just for its redemption arc, but for how dramatically it fell short of its promise and how long it took to recover. But if you strip away the headlines, what you see isn’t just a “bad launch.” You see a cautionary tale about what happens when ambition outpaces alignment. When technical risks get buried beneath hype. When delivery infrastructure is treated as an afterthought, rather than the foundation it needs to be.
This was far from a failure of talent or creativity. It was, in fact, a failure of structure.
And that’s where Delivery Managers, Program Leads, SREs, and DevTools teams have a critical role to play. Because in an industry where scope is fluid, platforms are fragmented, and stakeholder pressure never sleeps, it’s our job to create the systems, the transparency, and the safeguards that let ambitious visions ship without self-destructing.
If you found this breakdown insightful or if you’re navigating similar challenges on your own projects, I’d love to connect. Whether you’re a fellow delivery leader, developer, or producer, let’s keep the conversation going on how we can ship bold ideas without burning down the roadmap.
After all, success is a combination of vision and strategy, with good delivery as the key ingredient that keep this mix together.
Let’s keep leveling up, one boss level at a time.
Why do I feel you're describing every software project I've worked on? 🤔😂
In all seriousness, this was great to read and totally on point. In more retro console generations, it was common to have lower spec consoles get reduced features, or fewer levels, for example, to match what the console was capable of. Scope creep is the enemy here too - you don't suddenly plan to aim for high spec machines, then also include low spec machines aiming for the same performance/features. Unless you have extremely clever engineering involved to back port it, which of course takes additional time like you've pointed out.
What I will give CPRD credit for though is admitting that they made huge mistakes and then rectifying it. If a game's sales don't immediately take of these days, it flops and is left for dead. You can count on one hand the number of companies who would invest in turning that around into a success, and doing the things you've pointed out to make it happen.