Look, perhaps every gamer around the world knows it at this point: Cyberpunk 2077's launch was one of the most disastrous ones in history (if not the most disastrous). Developer CD Projekt Red's reputation as "the Chosen One" was soiled almost overnight due to the game's broken state at launch, and they haven't really recovered since.
So many people have assumed that it was the fault of CDPR's upper management. "It's still just all about money," they say. However, a certain "whistleblower" may have outed what could be the biggest reason for the terrible launch of Cyberpunk 2077: faulty QA testing by a third-party studio with apparently horrible business practices.
The Alleged 'Truth' Behind The Lies
The YouTube channel Upper Echelon Gamers recently made a video saying that they were emailed by someone who claimed to work for the studio Quantic Lab. CDPR hired this specific studio to do a bulk of the testing work for Cyberpunk starting in 2019.
According to the video, the whistleblower sent them a host of confidential documents indicating the problematic testing process for the game, and the revelations were quite simply hard to accept - especially if you're a game industry professional yourself:
For the unaware, QA (quality assurance) testing is a process where a certain game, software, or anything similar is tested for bugs and other software-breaking glitches that need to be fixed before the software ships out. That's basically it.
For a lot of studios, however (even big AAA size ones like CD Projekt Red), QA can be a very rigorous process that can eat into development time. As such, these studios will often outsource their QA to a third party, which is where a studio like Quantic Lab comes in. But the problems in how the studio conducts business then reared its ugly head.
According to the whistleblower, Quantic Lab apparently oversold the experience of their team when they took on the contract with CDPR. Instead of being comprised of veteran QA testers, the team that was supposed to test out Cyberpunk 2077 was made up almost entirely of junior testers - people with less than 1 year of experience. It is said that even the project leader was also inexperienced.
Photo taken from Cyberpunk 2077 Steam page
What's even worse is that the whistleblower said that CDPR wasn't aware of this. The studio being under the impression that the QA testing team was full of veterans, not rookies - veterans who they assumed were also the same folks who worked on The Witcher 3 (Quantic Lab has tested that game too). But these veterans have already resigned way before all of this happened.
Now, imagine a team full of inexperienced people trying to handle a game as big and technically ambitious as Cyberpunk, and the whole situation is basically a ticking time bomb.
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Quantity Over Quality
If there's one thing you should know about QA, it's that it should never be quantity over quality. That's the basic gist of the process. But Quantic Lab wasn't having any of that, says the whistleblower.
According to a 72-page QA testing document sent to the YouTube channel, the studio instituted bug quotas. Those who were testing Cyberpunk's free-roaming, for example, had to find at least 10 bugs a day in the false sense that the quota will drive up productivity and lead to a polished game. Obviously, that never happened for simple reasons.
With the quota, testers were limited to finding surface-level bugs. A little clipping of assets there, a texture not loading here, an animation not playing out right there. These are all low-priority bugs that are quite easy to find. But in their focus to just meet quota, the testers were never able to find the truly game-breaking bugs. Broken main quests, unbalanced items, police spawning behind you in seconds even if you're on a rooftop, everything.
cyberpunk 2077 steam
Eventually, CD Projekt Red would tell Quantic Lab to stop sending them low-priority bugs and instead focus on finding the big ones. But by the time they did, the damage was already done - and things would only get worse from there.
In a feeble attempt to further increase the "quality" of their QA work, Quantic doubled the size of the team. But the problem is that their new hires were even more inexperienced than the current employees - some of them having absolutely no experience in QA.
More Problems
To cap things off, the whistleblower alleged that Quantic tends to exaggerate their capabilities in order to retain or extend contracts. And in order to keep things under wraps, they instituted downright Orwellian NDA rules. Anybody who leaked confidential info would be fined €10,000. The studio's definition of "confidential" was a little loose, too.
Here's how "loose" it was: employees are not allowed under any circumstance to talk about what projects they're working on. Full stop.
You can't use it as part of your portfolio/experience if you look for another job. Upper management would even allegedly threaten legal action against employees who so much as include their projects at Quantic in their resume. Anybody who dared speak up will be reprimanded, or worse, "coerced into resignation." Yikes.
Cyber-Punked
If these allegations turned out to be accurate, then perhaps there could be a new legal battle of epic proportions at hand. But whatever happens, these allegations of sheer corporate malpractice would see several people fired, companies disgraced and out of business, and people left without a job.
To all game developers out there: never, ever neglect your QA process.
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This article is posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce
