This article was updated on January 16 and includes a response from Adam Budowski, head of studios at CD Projekt Red. Click here to read the response.

Earlier this week, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwiński apologized again for the buggy state of "Cyberpunk 2077" on PC and very buggy on last-gen consoles. In his apology, Iwiński suggested that the extent of Cyberpunk 2077's problems were not fully known prior to its release. We were skeptical of this claim, but in a new report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, studio employees deny the claim.

Schreier interviewed "more than 20 current and former CD Projekt staff" for the report, and while COVID-19 caused communication and production difficulties (for example, developers could not work on console development kits in the office could not be done), the employees he spoke to said that external testing showed problems and that the bugs did not surprise them when Iwiński said that the testing did not show "most" of Cyberpunk's problems.

"As the release date approached, everyone in the studio knew the game was in rough shape and needed more time," Schreier wrote. The release date for Cyberpunk 2077 had been November 19, but a final postponement pushed it to December 10. During that three-week postponement, he says, "exhausted programmers scrambled to fix as much as they could," but a smooth launch would have been impossible at that point.

Schreier previously reported on the crunch at CD Projekt Red (mandatory overtime until the game launched), but this report includes another story about overwork in the studio.

"I used to work overtime up to 13 hours a day. A little over that was my record, and I worked like that five days a week," said Adrian Jakubiak, a former audio programmer at CD Projekt Red. Some of my friends have lost family members because of these shenanigans."

The report also discusses troubles that began much earlier in the development of Cyberpunk 2077, such as the challenge of building a new engine at the same time the game was being built on it, and the fact that in late 2016, when development was reportedly in full swing, game director The impact of the overhaul requested by Adam Badowski (even though the game was released in 2012) is briefly described. Former "Witcher 3" developers apparently left the project due to conflicts with Badowski's vision, most notably the camera being changed from third person to first person. Employees also said that CD Projekt Red was struggling to manage a team of over 500 people, twice as many as the development team for The Witcher 3

, and that the team had to be reorganized and renamed to "The Witcher 3"

.

There is more detail in the full report, which can be read on Bloomberg; Schreier also tweeted about details omitted in the report, saying, for example, that the police system was "all completed at the last minute."

CD Projekt's management did not respond to Bloomberg's report, but Badowski commented in a post-tweet (embedded below), in which Badowski described Bloomberg's E3 2018 demo as "fake." He denied that, and said it reflected the non-linear process of game development and was labeled as work-in-progress. Our final game, he wrote, "looks and plays much better than its demo ever did."

Budowsky also disputed the notion that the majority of the staff felt the game was not ready for release in 2020, suggesting that the sample group of 20 employees was too small to make that claim. He also implies that his sources are unreliable because all but one are anonymous, but it is common practice in these types of reports to withhold the identity of sources.

Finally, Budowski refutes the article's comment that some of the non-Polish staff members felt uncomfortable because they were left out of the conversation because they spoke Polish. As noted in the article, English is required for official company communications, but when speaking casually with people who speak the same language, it is normal to use one's native language, something that is bound to happen in a company that employs people from 44 different nationalities, Badowski says.

"If the question is whether it is difficult to move to another country, sometimes culture, and work and live there, the answer is yes," Badowski wrote.

"But it's the same for every company in the world, and we do what we can to make that transition easier."

Now that Cyberpunk 2077 is out of the way, CD Projekt says it is focused on patching the game. As a result, the promised free DLC will appear in 2021, a little later than expected.

A standalone multiplayer component will also appear at some point, but there is almost no chance we will see that this year. Even before the launch issues, multiplayer was likely to be in 2022.