Saving Cyberpunk 2077: How CD Projekt Red recovered from one of video games' most disastrous launches
On 10th January, 2018, Marcin Momot, CD Projekt Red's global community lead, fired up the social media engines and hit "Tweet". This was the first tease of CDPR's marketing push for Cyberpunk 2077, ahead of appearances at E3 that year and again in 2019. A group of CDPR developers, huddled around Momot's computer in the bustling Warsaw office of pre-Covid times, stood and watched as the Cyberpunk 2077 account's following skyrocketed.
It's just a tweet, but Momot, who joined the company as a humble community manager in 2011 and has since risen to the role of global community director today, now describes this moment to me as a "very, very big piece of history" for the studio. Exactly five years after the initial "Bullets" teaser trailer of 2013 (tagline "Coming: when it's ready"), this was the starter cannon for Cyberpunk 2077's proper reintroduction to the world. Preparations ramped up for the pending "re-reveal" that summer. Excitement was "through the roof" at the studio, while here in the outside world hype for the game - already sky-high following CDPR's critically-acclaimed The Witcher 3 and its expansions - began to explode. As Momot puts it to me, "I think people were thinking that this game would be like the second coming of Christ."
The promise was clear: a rich adaptation of a tabletop cult-hit. A true role-playing game, with a mature and branching story and range of character classes, abilities, and approaches to in-game problems. A world full of life and detail, in the kind of grim and gritty mid-future setting that, surprisingly for triple-A video games, at that time still felt somewhat underexplored. In fact that was quite literally the promise CD Projekt Red made. And as The Witcher 3 arrived, with unanimous acclaim, that promise began to look quite special.
