You can point out the delays are do to incompetence without agreeing that death threats are ok.
You are ascribing intent where there is none. We need to stop framing conversations based upon the extremists in the population.
The root comment is full of hyperbole, but there is no indication he supports death threats, that's just silly.
How did they deliberately mislead them? By saying things like only a natural disaster would stop the latest release date, only for it to slip with less than a month left.
That's an actual lie and false advertising. As someone with project management experience, the people making those claims are either incompetent or lying.
So yeah, customers who paid them money and were lied to have an absolute right to be furious. Death threats is an excuse. 99.99% of the criticism was justified and without intimidation or threats.
Obviously people can feel however they want, but we’re talking about $5–60 and like eight months delay; you’ll forgive me for being a little dismissive of people who are “furious” about this.
(1) the issue would have likely been avoided if the studio did not set a day-definite release date (announcing it more generally as e.g. Q4 2020 instead);
(2) there is a general problem with how game pre-orders work: people put their money down but it isn't really clear what they are getting for it in return, or when they will be getting it; many pre-orderers make certain assumptions to this effect, and when promises fail to materialize later, the disappointment runs deep.
Expecting not to be lied to as a customer is a very justifiable stance.
And it seems pretty clear to me that they met the standards of lying in the more recent announcements. They didn't just make bad predictions early on.
> more generally as e.g. Q4 2020
The first release date was Q2 and the second release date was Q3, so I'm skeptical that would have helped.
As for my personal interest: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." - Shigeru Miyamoto
They were still promising there would be no more delays with less than a month to go, even saying only a natural disaster would stop them. Now we know that's a lie, and they were deliberately misleading customers.
Oh, so building something that was never done before and not meeting the deadline exactly is sheer incompetence? I hope you never have to build anything new.
No, you can't really make that claim. There are thousands of clones of more popular games out there, it's not like the game production is massively original to begin with.
And yes, Cyberpunk 2077 pushes the boundaries of what we expect from games in many ways - it's going to be one of the most complex games we have on the market to date when it releases.
I don't know people bother to defend billion dollar corporations in the habit of lying and misrepresenting their products. People paid them money for a product that was misrepresented in false advertising, I don't know it could be clearer than that as to why they're justifiably outraged.
99.99% of the criticism did not include intimidation, death threats or anything along those lines. CDPR used it as a deflectionary tactic from their own business practices.
And no, delays like this are not common. Games get delayed when they're many months away from release (it's obvious then that it's not done). Less than a month? They're either lying or so incompetent they don't know their own progress. Neither excuse the false claims.
It's a billion dollar publicly listed corporation. This isn't some indie studio.
This indicates that nobody even knew how bad it was. There's also rumors developers found out about the delays from social media.
CDPR execs are just incompetent and unable to set realistic timelines. When big AAA releases are delayed, they're usually delayed once and it's done 6+ months from release (because it's obvious then you won't make it).
Delaying when it's less than a month out? Absolute incompetence. You lose millions and millions of dollars doing this, by burning marketing dollars and screwing over your retail partners.