CD Project Red, the developer of Cyberpunk 2077, has not fared well since the game was released last month to much fanfare. That's because Polish regulators have begun to take an interest.
According to Benchmark, Poland's Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKIK), whose job it is to ensure that consumers' interests are protected, is interested in the situation. This is not a good thing.
While Cyberpunk runs well, albeit buggy, on next-generation consoles and sufficiently powerful gaming PCs, the same is not true for the launch editions of last-generation consoles. Despite promises that the original PS4 and Xbox One would "run amazingly well," the reality was quite the opposite.
The game proved so unplayable that Sony removed Cyberpunk 2077 from its digital store, and both Sony and Microsoft offered refunds to dissatisfied customers.
CDPR's woes did not end there, as investors filed a class action lawsuit against the company for "false and/or misleading" statements about the game. And now UOKIK is involved.
The good news is that UOKIK's investigation has nothing to do with the state of the game when it was released. Instead, a spokesperson said that regulators are interested in the progress of the many fixes promised by the CDPR and how they address the problems players experienced with the previous generation of consoles. They also noted that return policies will be scrutinized.
So far, UOKIK has not fined the CDPR, but that could change if an investigation determines that developers have been unfair to consumers or that fixes alone are not enough to address complaints. In that case, CDPR could be forced to pay up to 10% of its annual revenue.
This would not help the morale of the company or the pressure on the staff to fix the game, but it would mean that they would be even more motivated to fix it properly this time around. It's just a shame that it had to come to this.
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