That was 100% it’s downfall. I don’t know what executive said “But it Haaaass to run on them” - I guarantee every engineer there knew it would be a disaster on the older gen. I know they said at the beginning that it would, but they should have just sucked it up and said “Look, folks, we’re sorry, it just can’t run and you won’t have a good time, so it’s next gen only. We’ll see you in Night City when you can”
It was quite literally the reason why it hit 70k players, NVIDIA. cdpr, allegedly, got wads of money to become the tech demo for the green team, which made the red engine require an overhaul that killed its performance on old gen consoles. Nowadays it’s used as a benchmark. If you look at the player chart it peaked during CES and cratered back down to almost half of the 70k Tassi (aka mouthpiece) is touting. What really is a team worth exploring is how CDPR knowingly deceived millions of people, and thanks to the short memory of the Internet and (likely paid) puff pieces like this, has regenerated its image (and stock price) to a point that quite literally they got away with what they did and saw no consequences. It’s appalling that companies no longer pay when they cheat customers.
This is also a strong message on media literacy. There’s two main types of bait, rage and circlejerk, Tassi enacted the second with this puff piece. A real journalist, would have looked at the average player count of the last few months and used that, but no, “journalist” Paul Tassi chose to make a point from a blip caused by an event that EVERYONE could be aware of and, “journalist” Paul Tassi, should be aware of. This is so disingenuous that it becomes a master class on how media influences people with distorting information.
Edit: As another point, “journalist” Paul Tassi purposefully omits the genial Stardew Valley which usually clocks in close to double the playerbase of Cyberpunk (among over 10 single player games that overtake or compare, like FM, Don’t Starve, Terraria, RDR2, HoIIV, et al).
so, the point about shitty journalism stands, and is actually a good point.
the point about calling CP2077 basically a scam and deceptive is not that good of a point.
afaik, the major problem player in the botched release wasn’t CDPR themselves, although they do deserve some of the blame, but Sony:
Cyberpunk was supposed to be one of the flagship/tech-demo titles of PC (Nvidia), PS4 (later PS5), and XBOX (whatever stupid ass designation it had at the time…xXxBoXOnExXx or some shit? …whatever).
development started on the PS4, then it was decided that PC release should happen at the same time as console release, so the PS4 version got ported to PC.
then the PS5 released, so development moved to PS5, which came with a bunch of upgrades and updates to the engine and other components. as one would expect.
same thing happened with PC hardware: new specs, new features, better performance, etc.
then, about 2-ish years (?) before release, along comes Sony and notices that “hey! the original contract said you’d release on PS4!” and CDPR obviously said “well… that’s kinda not possible anymore. the game can’t run on outdated hardware due to its performance requirements.” and Sony threatened with lawsuits and insisted on a last-gen release.
and THAT’S where all the (major) problems started: CDPR was forced (by Sony!) to backport the MUCH more advanced version that was expected to run on MUCH more powerful hardware, which proved borderline impossible.
this proved to be such an enormous undertaking that development on the actual game basically stopped, as they pretty much had to develop an entirely new game for the old console.
given the recent news about Sony, is it really any surprise they made a completely ridiculous decision regarding software they obviously don’t understand the ramifications of?
like i said, CDPR definitely deserves some of the blame here, but most of the blame lies with Sony for enforcing such a ridiculous, and technologically unfeasible, requirement without any understanding (or rather, wilfull ignorance) of the scope of said requirement.
Sony literally would have rather not sold ANY game than adjust their contract. they were being completely unreasonable, yet CDPR commonly gets ALL of the blame, which again, they only deserve a small part of.
The game looks absolutely amazing on an AMD GPU, without realtime raytracing.
Several years ago now, I managed to get it to 4k90fps on a 6900XT, with basically all settings on ultra/psycho via some ini tweaks, custom FSR values, just no ray tracing, using ‘old school’ cube maps and light sources and what not.
And that was all running in Proton, on linux, as well.
Nvidia absolutely barged in and said hey guys guess what, we completely obliteraterated the entire history of how lighting works in game engines, here’s our new extremely pretty but extremely, astoundingly inefficient lighting engine, rewrite your entire game engine and game to make it work on your custom engine that’s been cooking for 10 years without any notion of this new lighting paradigm.
EDIT: I should add that that is 90 ‘real’ fps, no frame gen, just early FSR.
That was 100% it’s downfall. I don’t know what executive said “But it Haaaass to run on them” - I guarantee every engineer there knew it would be a disaster on the older gen. I know they said at the beginning that it would, but they should have just sucked it up and said “Look, folks, we’re sorry, it just can’t run and you won’t have a good time, so it’s next gen only. We’ll see you in Night City when you can”
I bet many of the engineers did and then their management told them that they have to do it anyway.
It was quite literally the reason why it hit 70k players, NVIDIA. cdpr, allegedly, got wads of money to become the tech demo for the green team, which made the red engine require an overhaul that killed its performance on old gen consoles. Nowadays it’s used as a benchmark. If you look at the player chart it peaked during CES and cratered back down to almost half of the 70k Tassi (aka mouthpiece) is touting. What really is a team worth exploring is how CDPR knowingly deceived millions of people, and thanks to the short memory of the Internet and (likely paid) puff pieces like this, has regenerated its image (and stock price) to a point that quite literally they got away with what they did and saw no consequences. It’s appalling that companies no longer pay when they cheat customers.
This is also a strong message on media literacy. There’s two main types of bait, rage and circlejerk, Tassi enacted the second with this puff piece. A real journalist, would have looked at the average player count of the last few months and used that, but no, “journalist” Paul Tassi chose to make a point from a blip caused by an event that EVERYONE could be aware of and, “journalist” Paul Tassi, should be aware of. This is so disingenuous that it becomes a master class on how media influences people with distorting information.
Edit: As another point, “journalist” Paul Tassi purposefully omits the genial Stardew Valley which usually clocks in close to double the playerbase of Cyberpunk (among over 10 single player games that overtake or compare, like FM, Don’t Starve, Terraria, RDR2, HoIIV, et al).
so, the point about shitty journalism stands, and is actually a good point.
the point about calling CP2077 basically a scam and deceptive is not that good of a point.
afaik, the major problem player in the botched release wasn’t CDPR themselves, although they do deserve some of the blame, but Sony:
Cyberpunk was supposed to be one of the flagship/tech-demo titles of PC (Nvidia), PS4 (later PS5), and XBOX (whatever stupid ass designation it had at the time…xXxBoXOnExXx or some shit? …whatever).
development started on the PS4, then it was decided that PC release should happen at the same time as console release, so the PS4 version got ported to PC.
then the PS5 released, so development moved to PS5, which came with a bunch of upgrades and updates to the engine and other components. as one would expect.
same thing happened with PC hardware: new specs, new features, better performance, etc.
then, about 2-ish years (?) before release, along comes Sony and notices that “hey! the original contract said you’d release on PS4!” and CDPR obviously said “well… that’s kinda not possible anymore. the game can’t run on outdated hardware due to its performance requirements.” and Sony threatened with lawsuits and insisted on a last-gen release.
and THAT’S where all the (major) problems started: CDPR was forced (by Sony!) to backport the MUCH more advanced version that was expected to run on MUCH more powerful hardware, which proved borderline impossible.
this proved to be such an enormous undertaking that development on the actual game basically stopped, as they pretty much had to develop an entirely new game for the old console.
given the recent news about Sony, is it really any surprise they made a completely ridiculous decision regarding software they obviously don’t understand the ramifications of?
like i said, CDPR definitely deserves some of the blame here, but most of the blame lies with Sony for enforcing such a ridiculous, and technologically unfeasible, requirement without any understanding (or rather, wilfull ignorance) of the scope of said requirement.
Sony literally would have rather not sold ANY game than adjust their contract. they were being completely unreasonable, yet CDPR commonly gets ALL of the blame, which again, they only deserve a small part of.
The game looks absolutely amazing on an AMD GPU, without realtime raytracing.
Several years ago now, I managed to get it to 4k90fps on a 6900XT, with basically all settings on ultra/psycho via some ini tweaks, custom FSR values, just no ray tracing, using ‘old school’ cube maps and light sources and what not.
And that was all running in Proton, on linux, as well.
Nvidia absolutely barged in and said hey guys guess what, we completely obliteraterated the entire history of how lighting works in game engines, here’s our new extremely pretty but extremely, astoundingly inefficient lighting engine, rewrite your entire game engine and game to make it work on your custom engine that’s been cooking for 10 years without any notion of this new lighting paradigm.
EDIT: I should add that that is 90 ‘real’ fps, no frame gen, just early FSR.
It always cracks me up, the dudebros buying 2k GPUs because MUH PCMR and then use framegen to play with console input latencies…
FML, we’re breeding intelligence out of the gene pool at speeds that threaten the survival of the species.
It would have saved an absolute mountain of bad press. And upset customers.
Good thing they avoided that.