Photo author, cdprojektred
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Cyberpunk 2077 is the best-selling video game in Russia over the past 20 years and at the same time a disappointing year for gamers. We spoke to one of the authors of the original Cyberpunk board game about what he wanted to say when he created this universe in 1988.
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Even before the release of the game, scandals began to arise around Cyberpunk 2077. At first, the Russians did not like the localized version of the voice acting with YouTube stars and musicians, and the video with it received the largest number of dislikes on the Russian-language channel of the Polish studio CD Projekt Red.
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Representatives of the trans-community also complained, who believe that in the creation of the Polish studio transgender people are shown with a share of inappropriate irony.
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Nevertheless, the release turned out to be super successful: worldwide, only by pre-orders, sales of the game on PC exceeded 4.7 million copies. Development costs and a significant part of the marketing paid off already on the day of release. It was the most successful selling launch of PC gaming ever.
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In Russia, sales of the first weekend turned out to be a record in 20 years, said on Monday the M.Video-Eldorado network, which accounts for 60% of the retail games market in Russia.
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And yet, just four days after the release, CD Projekt’s shares plummeted, and she herself had to apologize to the gamers and offer to return the money to everyone.
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We spoke with Mike Pondsmith, co-creator of the original Cyberpunk 2013 board game, about why its modern iteration has garnered so much attention.
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Photo author, MIKE PONDSMITH
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Mike Pondsmith created the universe of the original Cyberpunk board games in the 1980s
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“All this is already today”
When Mike Pondsmith created his first game in the world of Cyberpunk in the 1980s, he didn’t think he would be able to guess so many things.
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“From cybernetic progress to instant communication and total corporate power – we now have it all,” he says in an interview with the BBC.
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“The only thing that is not there are flying cars. I was really hoping for them,” he adds.
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“But there is really a lot of cyberpunk in the world today, and therefore, I think this genre is popular again today,” adds the creator of this gaming universe.
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Mike worked on the game as a consultant – he helped a team of writers and designers turn the world that he dreamed more than 40 years ago as a board game with a pen and paper into one of the most anticipated game releases of recent years.
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He says that his main concern was to maintain the austere realism of the original project.
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“It’s very easy for a universe of this type to slide towards pure science fiction, we didn’t need that. Cyberpunk is a dystopia five minutes from the current state of humanity,” says Pondsmith.
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Photo author, cdprojektred
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The game takes place in the fictional city of Knight City.
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“Technology is several levels higher, but in this particular case, technology has not benefited humanity. We see environmental pollution, crime, and social and economic inequality is taken for granted,” he adds.
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Pondsmith says that he created the imaginary world primarily as a kind of attraction. But his work must also be taken as a warning.
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“We shouldn’t hope that the world will be like this,” he says. “At some point, the player looks at his character’s hands and thinks:“ What, my hands are made of metal? It’s creepy, something’s not right. “
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“The storytelling is structured so that you live in this world and use its technology, but you constantly have to feel that everything is somehow wrong,” explains Pondsmith.
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Photo author, CDPROJEKTRED
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The game came out with a big delay. The release planned for the spring was postponed to December
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Pondsmith talks a lot about the concentration of power in the hands of large corporations and about the growth of inequality in the world. In all his games, this is one of the main themes.
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“I thought that by 2020 we would have not only progress in cyber technology, but also common sense. Until that happened,” he complains.
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“A better future will not come unless we sit down and organize ourselves to make it happen. But I am optimistic about the future and I see signs that people are mobilizing somehow,” he says.
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Incredible Success and Disappointment of the Year
Photo author, CDPROJEKTRED
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For about 160 million gamers around the world, the game as it stands was a disappointment.
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Cyberpunk 2077 paid off immediately upon release. Eight million pre-orders around the world at a price of about 50 pounds (5,000 rubles) for a copy of the game, according to analysts, more than offset the costs of its development – they are estimated at about 83 million pounds.
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Analysts explain the success of the game in about the same way: there was a successful previous project (The Witcher 3: Wild Rush, 40 million sales at the end of 2019) and eight years of hype: the development of Cyberpunk was announced back in 2012.
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The game briefly made the founder of the CD Projekt Red development studio, Marcin Ivinsky, a billionaire – according to Forbes, the cost of his 13% stake in the company reached $ 1.5 billion at the beginning of December. By industry standards, this was an incredible success. Billionaires among game developers can be counted on one hand.
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However, CD Projekt’s share price has been steadily falling since the release of Cyberpunk 2077. By Monday, Ivinsky is back turned into a millionaire, The media began to write about the failure, and the company offered to return the money to everyone who bought the game on consoles.
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The problem is that the game plays very poorly on all but the newest consoles.
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Among the problems that gamers are talking about are general sluggishness up to “screen tearing”, poor optimization and bugs.
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Thus, about 160 million gamers who own the PlayStation 4 and XBox ONE consoles were essentially unable to play what they bought.
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“CD Projekt RED has until now been considered one of the most respected studios in the video game industry. All of this is sure to upset the team that worked so hard to get the game ready for Christmas,” says Newsbeat game reporter Stephen Powell.
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“The gamers are upset and angry too. They think the studio let them down by not giving them enough information about how the game they are buying will play on conventional consoles,” he adds.
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It’s hard to say how much this will affect the company’s reputation in the long term, he says.
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The developers promise to fix all the problems, the first patches were released on Monday. There are no statistics yet on how many people decided to return the game.
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“I would like to ask why the company did not go on another release delay to solve these problems,” Powell asks.
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