Steam broke some huge all-time high records over the weekend

it surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.

Yeah, my first side mission, I spent like 3 min trying to figure out why the person I was supposed to kill was stuck behind a wall I couldn't get to. Finally gave up and started hearing how buggy it was.
Also seeing the exact same model of characters walking around the town was kind of odd.

It is not amusing how much problems Cyberpunk 2077 has on Linux, but it is amusing that it was working from first day!
Thanks you for your great work Valve!

Yeahhhh...I attempted to start Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia. The bugs give me major pause and if it were not for the free stadia premier edition deal for purchasing CP2077 I'd have refunded it. It's not like I don't have a bajillion other games in my backlog to play though first (cough: The witcher 3). Performance on Stadia in either mode is rather impressive all things considered.


Oh well, by the time this game is worth it I will hopefully have a 6900 XT. I'll likely re-buy the game on steam around that time if it improves.

Don't know what it means in absolute numbers but...

https://9to5google.com/2020/12/13/stadia-cyberpunk-premiere-edition-ended/

I was on the fence of taking advantage of this promotion too.. Too bad! Better luck next time!

For get some performance out of Cyberpunk 2077, check this thread:
https://reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kccabx/hey_cd_projekt_red_i_think_you_shipped_the_wrong/

I'll purchase CP2077 the very same day the affirmative reports starts rolling on at protondb in regards to running well on Nivida.

It may take a patch or two, both from CDPR and Nvidia - but that day will come, and I will be ready.

it surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.

There isn't any issue that can't be circumvented by throwing truckloads of cash into marketing (this is the basis of our society) - the hype for this was absurd, there was no doubt it was going to be huge. They delayed just enough that it wasn't unstable enough to spiral out of control in a vicious cycle of bad press, and then tried to overcome any problems by sheer size. Sure, thousands of people will be turned away, but they have millions.

And also, spending money into easily scalable things like high-fidelity 3D graphics (get render farms and more artists, probably contracted from other companies) or more content (story, enemies, places, quests, items, etc). You can't necessarily just solve a bug faster by hiring more and more programmers to look at the same piece of code, or by giving the same programmers more cash, but you can throw money at other things to dazzle people into letting it slide. On a related note, you might get negative press by abusing your workers, but is it cheaper to pay for more marketing/PR or to not abuse the workers?

I'm just a bit disappointed that so many people are buying the game instead of downloading the illegal "Hacker Edition". I mean, it makes sense thematically, doesn't it?

For get some performance out of Cyberpunk 2077, check this thread:
https://reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kccabx/hey_cd_projekt_red_i_think_you_shipped_the_wrong/

This one is actually pretty interesting. It seems to me that these sorts of values should be dynamic and based on the particular PC it runs on. They should also be different for the latest generation consoles. If the game actually does run on very conservative defaults, this says a lot about how badly they ran out of time.

It could be simply their lack of time to fix everything before launch, but it makes you wonder that 2 thing occurred in this launch:

- SMT is disabled when a Ryzen CPU is detected, leading to worse performance compared to their Intel counterparts. Some enterprising gamers managed to re-enable it using a Hex editor on the game executable;
- Ray Tracing is also disabled on AMD GPUs.

Together with the Hardware Unboxed scandal over RT coverage, makes you wonder if it didn't have a Nvidia finger on this wrecked launch, since they sponsored it.


Last edited by M@GOid on 14 December 2020 at 8:32 pm UTC

it surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.

There isn't any issue that can't be circumvented by throwing truckloads of cash into marketing (this is the basis of our society) - the hype for this was absurd, there was no doubt it was going to be huge.

Yes, wasn't it Doom (2016) who got a huge patch, 1 week before the retail copies were out ?

I'm just a bit disappointed that so many people are buying the game instead of downloading the illegal "Hacker Edition". I mean, it makes sense thematically, doesn't it?

But, but... it doesn't look so good on the shelf

For get some performance out of Cyberpunk 2077, check this thread:
https://reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kccabx/hey_cd_projekt_red_i_think_you_shipped_the_wrong/

This one is actually pretty interesting. It seems to me that these sorts of values should be dynamic and based on the particular PC it runs on. They should also be different for the latest generation consoles. If the game actually does run on very conservative defaults, this says a lot about how badly they ran out of time.

I wonder if those were the defaults for the Stadia version?

Edit:
Also, I kinda figured Steam had already broken the 1 million mark. I guess I imagined them to be bigger than they really are, or some games to be much more popular


Last edited by denyasis on 15 December 2020 at 5:19 am UTC

I find it funny that people were absolutely furious that the game was delayed...
Then it releases in a bug ridden state.

This is why I would think it would suck to be a game developer. Pour your heart and soul into something and just have fans rip you a new one. Then again, this is also why we have so many games in early access and they stay there for so long. I had to stop buying games like that, as I have too many games already anyhow, and no time to play unfinished ones!

It could be simply their lack of time to fix everything before launch, but it makes you wonder that 2 thing occurred in this launch:

- SMT is disabled when a Ryzen CPU is detected, leading to worse performance compared to their Intel counterparts. Some enterprising gamers managed to re-enable it using a Hex editor on the game executable;
- Ray Tracing is also disabled on AMD GPUs.

Together with the Hardware Unboxed scandal over RT coverage, makes you wonder if it didn't have a Nvidia finger on this wrecked launch, since they sponsored it.

I'd normally say this is a pretty far fetched assumption... but with what Nvidia has been doing lately (or rather, for a long while), I think it is actually very plausible and I tend to believe it's true.
The Hardware Unboxed scandal was the straw that broke the camel's back and my opinion of them, while already not that great, took a big plunge.

Yeah, I don't know all the details on what happened there, obviously, but it doesn't look great for sure. They have since retracted their stance. Linus's (tech tips, not Torvalds) rant about it was great.

I haven't used an AMD card fir a long time because my experience them was terrible and nvidia's have just worked for me. But I have looked into getting an AMD card this time around. Unfortunately you can't buy them anywhere (either of them). So I will be using my 2080 RTX for a while it seems.

Pour your heart and soul into something and just have fans rip you a new one.

To be fair, this applies much better to tiny indie devs than big business like CDPR. Their billionaire CEO might get grilled by some investors for the bad press, but in the end they'll be all laughing all the way to the bank. If you've already made a nice profit from pre-orders after a successful hype campaign, who cares about some heckling from the peanut gallery.

Pour your heart and soul into something and just have fans rip you a new one.

To be fair, this applies much better to tiny indie devs than big business like CDPR. Their billionaire CEO might get grilled by some investors for the bad press, but in the end they'll be all laughing all the way to the bank. If you've already made a nice profit from pre-orders after a successful hype campaign, who cares about some heckling from the peanut gallery.

Well, if you recall people were sending death threats to them for releasing a buggy Witcher 2 version for Linux!

Indie developers tend to have a much smaller audience and hopefully not as deeply disturbed gamers playing their stuff. The anticipation for games at this level is also much lower. Cyberpunk 2077 has had a HUGE amount of anticipation for it for years, and the delay triggered those same death threat level douche bags.

Pour your heart and soul into something and just have fans rip you a new one.

To be fair, this applies much better to tiny indie devs than big business like CDPR. Their billionaire CEO might get grilled by some investors for the bad press, but in the end they'll be all laughing all the way to the bank. If you've already made a nice profit from pre-orders after a successful hype campaign, who cares about some heckling from the peanut gallery.

Well, if you recall people were sending death threats to them for releasing a buggy Witcher 2 version for Linux!

Indie developers tend to have a much smaller audience and hopefully not as deeply disturbed gamers playing their stuff. The anticipation for games at this level is also much lower. Cyberpunk 2077 has had a HUGE amount of anticipation for it for years, and the delay triggered those same death threat level douche bags.

Hmm... Reading this, you'd almost expect that there's a correlation of some sort between the amount of marketing and hype and the amount of disappointed people if you don't manage to meet all the expectations this hype has created.

No but seriously, of course it's bad that there's an abundance of immature idiots who get all bent out of shape when things don't go their way, but that has little to do with legitimate complaints about a faulty product. You have to admit that at least some of the bad press CDPR are getting is justified. And I just have a hard time seeing how your "heart and soul" comment applies to a corporation known for their punishing crunch time practices.


Last edited by tuubi on 16 December 2020 at 8:33 pm UTC

it surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.

This is nothing new. Many years ago, I read an article in PC Gamer titled "Best and Worst Gaming Trends of 1996", and the top worst trend was games being released in a bug ridden and unfinished state.

Pour your heart and soul into something and just have fans rip you a new one.

To be fair, this applies much better to tiny indie devs than big business like CDPR. Their billionaire CEO might get grilled by some investors for the bad press, but in the end they'll be all laughing all the way to the bank. If you've already made a nice profit from pre-orders after a successful hype campaign, who cares about some heckling from the peanut gallery.

Well, if you recall people were sending death threats to them for releasing a buggy Witcher 2 version for Linux!

Indie developers tend to have a much smaller audience and hopefully not as deeply disturbed gamers playing their stuff. The anticipation for games at this level is also much lower. Cyberpunk 2077 has had a HUGE amount of anticipation for it for years, and the delay triggered those same death threat level douche bags.

Hmm... Reading this, you'd almost expect that there's a correlation of some sort between the amount of marketing and hype and the amount of disappointed people if you don't manage to meet all the expectations this hype has created.

No but seriously, of course it's bad that there's an abundance of immature idiots who get all bent out of shape when things don't go their way, but that has little to do with legitimate complaints about a faulty product. You have to admit that at least some of the bad press CDPR are getting is justified. And I just have a hard time seeing how your "heart and soul" comment applies to a corporation known for their punishing crunch time practices.

Behind every heartless corporation is of course the actual developers who are people who are generally very creative and are creating worlds for us to run around in and find bugs and complain about and mod and overall enjoy. Sure CDPR is a very wealthy corporation that is that way because of some very successful games. So yeah, the heart and soul of the coders is still there. The crunch time is because games that are this huge need deadlines or it would probably never be releases, and you know... people need to get paid.

Look at Croteam, you know there was someone there that had a love of Linux, so they started porting all of their games over to Linux. But then something happened to that employee, and now Serious Sam 4 was not released for Linux. That doesn't mean the programmers didn't necessarily want to not support Linux, they just decided based on time and being able to get it done or not. That still makes some of the more vocal Linux people get all pissed off and claim they'll never bother supporting them again, etc. This is the wrong way to do it. People just need to simply let them know that it's a shame that they're not releasing for Linux, and simply not buy the game. The messed up thing is there is no standard that people follow here, and simply buy Cyberpunk because it's THE game that everyone wants right now.

Can't say I always do that, but more and more I think 'Oh, I would like this game. Is it for Linux? okay, it is not, so I won't buy it because I have enough games.' Or if it IS for Linux, I'll probably buy it and figure I'll eventually play it. Granted sometimes I'll just buy a game because it looks interesting and is on sale.

What it comes down to, new AMD and nVidia cards are hard to come buy, and Cyberpunk 2077 really deserves to be played on a newer GPU. So may as well wait until you can get one, because the damn cards won't be available for a few months, and that'll let CDPR get the bugs ironed out :)

it surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.

This is nothing new. Many years ago, I read an article in PC Gamer titled "Best and Worst Gaming Trends of 1996", and the top worst trend was games being released in a bug ridden and unfinished state.

Yeah, it isn't like the old days pre-Internet when a company couldn't risk the reputation of releasing something buggy as crap, it was too hard to get things patched.

I'm shocked that one of the few games I decided to register, Ultima IX, they actually sent me an update CD to patch in DirectX acceleration!

In this day of digital distribution, they more or less can send out zero day patches to try to fix more obvious things. Granted they also can keep selling DLC to 'warrant that we keep developing the same program'. The problem I usually have with DLC is the pricing model is usually pretty extreme. The only one that suckered me into enough to get it all is Conan Exiles, but my brother and I put in a lot of hours playing that!

Behind every heartless corporation is of course the actual developers who are people who are generally very creative and are creating worlds for us to run around in and find bugs and complain about and mod and overall enjoy. Sure CDPR is a very wealthy corporation that is that way because of some very successful games. So yeah, the heart and soul of the coders is still there. The crunch time is because games that are this huge need deadlines or it would probably never be releases, and you know... people need to get paid.

Do you think the same of every corporation? How about Facebook developers? Or maybe EA and Ubisoft? Should we worry about their "heart and soul" when we complain about their business practices? After a point, there's a clear separation between employees and management, and my criticism was clearly aimed at the people making the business decisions.

I'm not sending hate mail to their technical support, you know, or claiming that their programmers and artists are to blame. I'm not that silly. I simply don't buy stuff I don't want to support. And I do avoid supporting companies who take advantage of their employees and/or customers.

Look at Croteam, you know there was someone there that had a love of Linux, so they started porting all of their games over to Linux. But then something happened to that employee, and now Serious Sam 4 was not released for Linux. That doesn't mean the programmers didn't necessarily want to not support Linux, they just decided based on time and being able to get it done or not. That still makes some of the more vocal Linux people get all pissed off and claim they'll never bother supporting them again, etc. This is the wrong way to do it. People just need to simply let them know that it's a shame that they're not releasing for Linux, and simply not buy the game. The messed up thing is there is no standard that people follow here, and simply buy Cyberpunk because it's THE game that everyone wants right now.

Yeah, I agree with all of this. Doesn't have much to do with what I said before, or with how a larger and more corporate game dev like CDPR works. Or at least it didn't. Don't know how Devolver's recent acquisition of Croteam changes things, but I doubt it's still nearly at the same level. Anyway, I'm not one of the people who gets pissy at developers when they don't support Linux, so you're barking up the wrong tree there. I bought and enjoyed Witcher 2 on Linux BTW, and I'd very much love to see Talos Principle 2 some day.