Things have not been going well for Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red since the game’s disastrous launch last month. And those problems are about to get worse, as Polish regulators have started taking an interest.
According to Benchmark, Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKIK), whose job involves ensuring consumer interests are protected, is taking an interest in the situation. Which is not a good look.
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While Cyberpunk runs well enough on next-gen consoles and sufficiently powerful gaming PCs, albeit with plenty of bugs, the same is not true for launch editions of last-gen consoles. Despite promises that the game runs “surprisingly well” on the original PS4 and Xbox Ones, the reality was quite the opposite.
The game turned out to be so unplayable that Sony pulled Cyberpunk 2077 from its digital store, with both it and Microsoft offering refunds to disgruntled customers.
CDPR’s woes didn’t end there either, since investors launched a class action lawsuit against the company due to its “false and/or misleading” statements about the game. And now UOKIK is involved.
The good news is that UOKIK’s investigation is not related to the state of the game when it launched, Instead, a spokesperson stated that the regulator is more interested in the progress of the many fixes CDPR has promised and how that will address the issues players have experienced on last-gen consoles. They also mentioned that the returns policy will be under scrutiny.
So far UOKIK hasn’t handed out any fines to CDPR, but that may change if its investigation rules the developer was unfair to consumers, or that fixes won’t be enough to deal with their complaints. If that’s the case, then CDPR could be forced to pay out up to 10% of its annual income.
While that’s not going to do well for company morale, or the pressure its staff are under to fix the game, it does mean they have an even bigger incentive to do it properly this time. It's just a shame it had to come to this.
