It’s not sad at all. It’s is a quite common, that looks popular, let’s all jump on the bandwagon. Witcher 3 was not fantastic, it was improved over time with dlc and patches. From a personal standpoint, and over three or four attempts to play, it was very average lacking in a lot of areas over all its competitors. That being said popular opinion is with it being the best thing ever. Again from a personal experience I could see CDPR appeasing certain groups with patches, and other things, but I think they have shown their true colours, be it from a commercial standpoint of online only microtransaction market, to the way they conduct business with the lying and review buying and such like. They have smashed their way onto my most unwanted list with a force not known since EA, even beamdog did less.

Well, I differ. I think it is quite sad. And I don't understand what "common" has to do with anything.

As for Witcher 3...

... it sounds like it just wasn't your game. That's fine. There was a lot I didn't care for in it as well, but IMO ... the things it did well, it did very well.

I would said is something I agree and disagree at the same time, the CEO is an asshole, he doesn't has waht it needs to rule a company, but at the same time he make GOG what it is, if the investors replace it we can say goodbye to the GOG that we know and that wpuld be a real shame... :/

This is all they have.... fixing CP2077 to which they have made ZERO movement on and the silence is deafaing and the Witcher 3 engine upgrade. Its not a remaster they are just porting to the 2077 engine for RTX and all the other fancy stuff so they can do a proper nexgen release. If they even upscale the textures i would be impressed... maybe run them though gigapixel and toss on a de-noise and maybe sharpen layer... but thats hoping for to much ;)

This is why u don't look for investors (greedy little fckers some of them) if u can help it.

I read on some local game news that a notable Witcher 3 modder who created more detailed textures was contacted by CD Project with a job offer. So you have all the chances to be impressed.

Some source:
https://kotaku.com/the-witcher-3s-next-gen-update-might-be-using-some-fan-1846842040

The promo is almost always bigger/better than the game itself. I stopped taking the hype seriously long ago.

Remember when the artist's conception on the cover of the magazine/case/disk/tape was exciting and attractive, but the game was a turd? It's industry standard. You have to take it with a pinch of salt, or you're going to be disappointed. It's the same now as it was in the early 80s, when 'graphics' was anything that didn't look like ASCII. Now instead of an artists' impression, it's a CGI movie, but it's exactly the same thing.

I never intended to risk any money until it had been released, and we could all see what it was really like. Fools rush in...

The fact that it failed to live up to expectations is in no way surprising or unexpected. Pre-ordering is a new thing, but under-delivering is as old as the hills. A mechanic that could easily be exploited by immoral investors.

Did we learn a lesson children?

Pretty much this.

"I don't want to hear what does not work" "Shall I look for someone else?" etc. Typical I want to will it into reality sayings of top tier management that is completely oblivious of the daily work routine of their companies. And in case that was the thing in CP2077 in the end they had to see what they refused to hear.

Those old console versions really screwed them. The game was never gonna live up to the hype, but if it weren't for the old console versions being basically unplayable it never would have blown up like this. The PC version wasn't perfect but it was more stable than a day one Bethesda game.

The gall! How dare they?!?

It is like if I wouldn't want to be fired from the company which I own and created! How dare I?

Investing is a risky business. If you can't take the risk, just stay out of it. Maybe they should invest on bitcoin, and then sue... someone... if the price drops significantly.

Now, hoaxes are a different thing, but I don't think CP2077 can be called a hoax.

Naturally the shareholders can try to get rid of the CEO or board members or whatever, I guess that is their right too, if they feel they benefit from that. But if they are unable to do it (due to e.g. having too few shares to do that), they shouldn't cry either.

Auto type must have corrected. It is quite a common practice to jump on the next big thing.

W3, have tried it several times and got 20hours or so in last time. It’s not a bad game, but I just got bored. W1 I have played all through a couple of times. W2 I brought hard copy collectors, but never really played as it didn’t work for quite some time.

I have no problem with game companies selling optional aesthetics for games to people who like to collect such things but which have no material impact on the game play. The problem I have, is with game companies that do pay-to-win loot crates where it is geared to coerce people into gambling for mystery prizes in hopes they get that sweet loot item that is either impossible to get in the game otherwise or extremely difficult to get - and writing their game around this mechanic entirely as a way to drive revenue through coercion.

I've played Gwent, and I don't see the monetization in the game as being either of these things so I have no problem with it, however I also recognize and acknowledge that some other people have a problem with it and that's fine too.

While I'm not convinced either way yet, I have to admit that I've started to question things myself, in particular with respect to the game being launched obviously far before it was ready and with a lot of content cut as well. It certainly made them look quite bad whether there was any hanky panky or not. They're now certainly on a sort of probation in many people's eyes and time will definitely reveal what direction things are going in I believe. I don't think it is yet a foregone conclusion though, we just have to wait and see how it pans out.

Yeah, I think what really happened is that they made all of the right moves with The Witcher 3, and then executed it very solid, it was a massive success and got endless praise and they made boatloads of money from it and felt great about that. This in turn gave them even greater ambition "The sky's the limit" on what they could do next to impress everyone and they set out with overly ambitious goals for Cyberpunk without having experience making a game of that nature but thinking "We made Witcher 3, we'll figure it out". Except the timelines they put on themselves to "figure it out" were totally unrealistic for the massive vision they had, and they never pared down that vision to something realistic to achieve in the given time frame.

What further complicated things for them is publicly hyping the hell out of the game over time with all kinds of visuals and presentations of what you would be able to do in the game before that game was actually able to do half of it. What we saw in a lot of presented materials is more "This is our grand vision of what we want to make this game do." than it was "This is what the game is currently capable of doing or likely to be able to actually do by the time we are ready to release it." I think their vision was totally legit, and that everything they said or showed that they wanted the game to do was legit. They just were not realistic with how long it would take, nor took other unexpected things into account either.

By pre-announcing everything as they did they backed themselves into a hype wall they could not live up to in the end and probably realized that it would take so much longer to finish the game that maybe they'd run out of money along the way or something and so it was more prudent to put it out during a time of year to get max sales and hope for the best then fix things later, but also saving themselves from financial problems along the way. I dunno, just some speculation on my part.

I can't imagine that they did all of this WITHOUT some "We made Witcher 3" ego though, but they definitely have to have been humbled to some degree by everything that has occurred since the game's release, and it's current lack of popularity at the moment.

My biggest fear is that it continues to decline in popularity despite them fixing it with patches every month or so and eventually they pull the plug due to lackluster sales and repeatedly missing financial forecasts, and then never complete the game to what it should have been.

IMHO it's all about whether they decide to chase short term gains for the bean counters, or long term gains by doing the right thing and repairing their damaged brand. People forgive ... when companies screw up and then do the right thing. Right Sean Murray? Yup.

In actuality, The Witcher 3 was a close disaster carried away from it on the shoulders of the devs who passionately worked non-stop to get it in shape. Initial versions were also bug ridden messes (though not on the scale of CP2077), had cut content (some of which was never added back) and oversights that carried over into the GOTY edition, which the modding community have mostly tried to address. The main thing was that the story and most of the mechanics were spot on, so these mishaps went mostly unnoticed.

While this was a good thing for the company as a whole, it was IMHO a bad thing for the developers. They became victims of their own success and management now expected them to pull off a second miracle. Which they tried to do with CP2077, but ultimately failed.