Valve CEO Gabe Newell has made a few interesting comments regarding the recent release of Cyberpunk 2077 and its developer CD Projekt Red.
Interviewed by New Zealand’s TVNZ, the games industry vet has some words of wisdom towards the Polish studio, while also opening up about the tough reality of developing games in the pandemic on any scale.
“I have a lot of sympathy with a situation that every game developer finds themselves in,” he said. “All I know is that there are a lot of very happy gamers in the PC space, which are the ones that are most visible to us. It’s unfair to throw stones at any other developer, because just getting something as complex and ambitious as that out the door is pretty amazing,” Newell says.
He also remarked on the fallout following Cyberpunk 2077’s release, such as Sony pulling the title from the PlayStation Store and offering direct refunds alongside Microsoft.
“People get mad because they care,” Newell said. “When people have those kinds of reactions, my first thought is that this is an opportunity for us, and I assume that the Cyberpunk 2077 developers are similarly just using it to crank through and make improvements that are going to be beneficial to their customers. They have a long history of doing a great job, of continuing to invest in their products over time and I suspect that they’re going to be very good at making their customers happy over time.”
CD Projekt Red has already committed itself to making big changes to the game in the upcoming months, and this will begin with a trio of massive updates for the console versions, which aim to address a slew of performance and technical problems with the game.
