novumZ: I have same exact issue. Something tells me that this game was intended to move more users towards win10.
I don't think that the game being non-functional is an intentional move on CDPR's part to force users to Windows 10. They could have just said they're not supporting it. This honestly just looks like typical games industry technical incompetence.
Game companies have a few major reasons for being terrible at actually making a working, bug-free game Here are a few.
1) Their programmers tend to be low-skilled. Good people cost money, and even if they didn't, good people are hard to keep around in the games industry because the executives aren't shy about making salaried workers work overtime and not paying them extra.
2) Many of their programmers are actually game designers that have been taught how to use a scripting language. There's a big difference between someone who can read the code like a computer would and someone who's taken a class or two on a particular language.
3) Hiring managers at tech companies are infamous for incompetence. You don't have to go far in the software industry to find someone mad at being rejected for not having 5 years of experience in a technology that's only 3 years old. The stereotype of a hiring manager is someone with weak or nonexistent technical skills who hires technically incompetent people who interview well and rejects the actual nerds who have weak people skills but very strong technical skills, and the stereotype is well deserved.
4) Beginner programmers are often giving scripting languages to play with because static languages like C++ or Java won't even run a program if it contains certain fundamental errors in design or implementation. Dynamic languages will start, but all errors are runtime errors and runtime errors are taken less seriously than compilation errors. It "works", in the sense that it creates a program that will start, even if it's unbelievably buggy and often crashes.
5) The tools themselves are often flawed. For a mature compiler like g++, most of the bugs are related to newer language features or really specific combinations of features. For a game engine, important bugs are constantly being discovered and squashed, because so much has to be redone so often that by the time the tool is mature enough to be largely bug-free it's so outdated as to be irrelevant. Example: Godot engine, like many other engines, contains a bunch of premade asset templates to be defined and glued together with a scripting language. You have to deal with the limitations of GDScript, the flaws in the implementation of GDScript, the flaws and quirks in the asset templates, and the flaws and quirks of the engine itself. Now you're still not done, because quirks, bugs, and flaws exist within the host operating system and you have to check those out too and provide mitigation if you can. For example, Windows is infamous for having a strange and buggy API that Microsoft has to keep bug-compatible with older versions. Linux Mint 20 has some issue in the graphics stack (probably inherited from Ubuntu 20.04) where removing a heavy GPU load will lock the system so hard that the only functional button is the power button.
6) The people hired by the HR people from 3), the newbies from 1), and the game designers with weak to moderate scripting skills from 2) and 4) do not have the skillset to quickly and accurately identify the problems arising from 5) and quickly and effectively create a workaround or fix. Large companies will probably have someone who can solve the problem(/s), if only by accident. Small companies just die.
Don't attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. There's more than enough incompetence to go around in the software industry. I wish I could claim to have never contributed to that incompetence, but nobody is 100% blameless and eventually we all write a piece of code we wish we'd spent a little more time considering. We all also eventually write a piece of code that's so messed up that even with comments, we have no idea what we were trying to accomplish or how the statements we typed are supposed to accomplish our goal.
