The head of Polish games studio CD Projekt RED Adam Badowski (pictured) has said that staff will still receive their bonuses for work done on Cyberpunk 2077.
That's according to Bloomberg, which reports that the developer is changing how bonuses work for employees at the studio. Initially, managers would give out tokens to staff that they felt deserved reward. These could be converted into bonus payments if Cyberpunk 2077 met certain critical milestones.
It's been argued that such a system encourages staff to work long hours – with CD Projekt already under fire for crunch on Cyberpunk 2077 – but the initiative has been criticised for tying bonus payments to scores from critics. In the past, developers like Obsidian missed out on bonuses as their games fell short of Metacritic targets. In that studio's case, this was for 2011's Fallout: New Vegas.
Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10th after a number of delays. The game has been met with a mixed critical reception; the title performs well on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, but the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One editions are well below the standard most people expected. This, no doubt, will not help the game's average review score.
In a tweet yesterday, CD Projekt committed itself to fixing the major problems these versions of the game faced and said that consumers could refund the game. Of course, they could do that anyways.
“We initially had a bonus system that was focused on the game’s ratings and the release date, but after consideration, we believe that measure is simply not fair under the circumstances,” Badowski wrote in an email to staff.
“We underestimated the lengths and complexity involved to make this a reality, and still you did everything you could to deliver an ambitious, special game.”
The title was pre-ordered eight million times – representing around $500 million in revenue – and hit one million concurrent players on Steam within hours of launch. The fact that the game could potentially cause seizures in epileptics didn't help, either. The firm has added a seizure warning to Cyberpunk 2077's launch screen since.
