BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Report Claims ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Bugs Weren’t Caught Because A QA Company Lied To CDPR

Following

Back when Cyberpunk 2077 launched, among the few apologies CDPR offered at the time was an infamous one in which it was claimed the QA simply didn’t catch all the bugs people were experiencing in the game.

It sounded laughable at the time, given the scale and scope of the bugs, but it turns out there…could be some truth to that. And it’s a potentially wild story.

A 72 page document was sent by a whistleblower to YouTuber Upper Echelon Gamers, who has reported on Cyberpunk issues in the past. It focuses on Quantic Labs, a QA company who did a lot of testing work on Cyberpunk 2077. Among the allegations made:

  • Quantic Lab overexaggerated the size of the team working on Cyberpunk 2077 in order to keep the contract.
  • Quantic Lab said the team was made up of senior staff, but it was instead juniors with under six months experience in QA.
  • Quantic Lab had a daily quota of reported bugs, which led to CDPR getting thousands of relatively pointless bug reports from the testers which took up a lot of time, and caused gamebreaking issues to not be found or prioritized.

This would align with the original claim that QA did not find many gamebreaking bugs by launch. You can watch the full UEG video below for more, but the document is very detailed, including names, production schedules and a lot of seemingly internal information.

I’ve reached out to both Quantic Lab and CDPR for comment about the situation, and will update if I hear back. If true, this certainly would explain at least some component of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch issues, albeit of course it ultimately falls on CDPR to decide whether a product should be released in a given state. And I still remember CDPR saying the game performed “surprisingly well” on last-gen consoles, which was demonstrably untrue, and I don’t think there’s a “QA contractors tricked us” explanation for that one.

Still, if true, this is a story and could be at least a partial explanation for what happened with Cyberpunk at launch, if CDPR was flooded with pointless bug reports to fix from junior staffers attempting to meet quotas. And if this was the problem, it certainly seems like something that can be rectified in the future as I doubt CDPR would work with Quantic Lab again. I’m going to keep looking into this to see if I can dig anything else out of whatever the hell happened here.

Update: LegacyKilla, speaking to his own CDPR sources, says Quantic Labs’ role in the game’s state at launch is being overstated here, and much of it falls to CDPR mismanagement, the prevailing idea before all this:

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.