Cyberpunk 2077 tragedy: Sony withdraws the game from its digital store and announces money backs

Promotional image of 'Cyberpunk 2077'. Cyberpunk

"It's a terrible game", "disappointing", "fix it!", "Is unacceptable", "scam".

Since it was released on December 10, the comments about what was called to be one of the best video games of the year,

, share a feeling of disappointment and anger —the quotation marks are indiscriminately user comments and reproaches from specialized media—.

Now, after a week of paralysis, releases apologizing from the developer, resounding falls in the stock market and a massive wave of requests for returns, Sony, the company behind PlayStation, has announced that it will return the money to all those who buy the game through their digital store and request it.

This unusual move has been followed by an unheard of: Sony has also announced that it is directly removing

from its PlayStation Store.

For now, Microsoft, the company behind Xbox consoles, has not announced similar measures.

It all started on the 10th when the last and long-awaited game by CD Projekt, a Polish video game company catapulted to world fame with the success of its medieval fantasy saga

, whose third installment, in 2015, was placed by In its own right as one of the best and most appreciated video games of all time.

His next project,

(a game of first -

person shooter set in a dystopian future hyper) had spent years raising expectations and bringing together the community

worldwide.

Its release on the market on the 10th did not come as expected.

The day after the launch, the Polish company announced that it had covered costs.

The game was a bestseller: it reached eight million pre-orders and had reached the record for simultaneous players on the Steam platform;

two data that speak of the enormous expectation that

had generated.

However, the Polish company left 29% of its value on the stock market.

Something was wrong.

The internet was filled with complaints, bad reviews, and negative comments.

The game was broken.

It was turned off, the image was jerky, the textures were loaded badly, the characters acted with errors in their artificial intelligence, the physics did not work.

CD Projekt apologized on December 14 in a statement.

It acknowledged that the game was not ready and announced that it will not be finished until February 2021. In its statement, the company focused on versions of the game on last generation consoles (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, in which the game directly It is unplayable), but the truth is that in the rest of the media (new generation consoles, computers, Google Stadia ...) it also has serious technical problems.

Hitting the market with "unpolished" sets is not unusual.

The fact that games are increasingly connected to the Internet means that developers can launch a title without having it 100% and apply patches on the fly that correct small technical errors.

Sometimes those subsequent face washes (like in

,

or

) are so obvious that they make a game played months after launch differ (for the better) quite a bit from the original, but nothing has ever happened. similar to

, one of the two most anticipated games of the year (the other was

, which came out in June), and the most anticipated of the Christmas season;

a true phenomenon with a budget that, according to analysts, was around 140 million dollars without counting the huge advertising campaign.

Following Sony's announcement of the withdrawal of the game from its store, today the company has lost 15% in its market value, which means a 42% loss of value of CD Projekt since the game landed in stores.

The current context of pandemic, in which digital entertainment has grown as one of the few recreational options without physical interaction, added to the fact that it was the first major launch after the arrival of the new generation of consoles (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X / S last November), heightens the impact such a launch can have on the industry globally.

Speaking in silver: all eyes in the digital world were on a game that in the end has turned a blind eye.

Perhaps in February or March, after correcting the technical errors and solving the problems, we can talk about a good game.

Even from a great game.

But today, the truth is that the reputation of one of the most promising and beloved companies in the world of video games has disappeared at a stroke.