Whether you can blame the testers depends very much on how they reported.
Complete nonsense. As if using a bug hunter clears you of your own responsibilities as a publisher. You can’t release something that you haven’t actually shot in-house and passed judgment on. You may have heard that games go gold. That’s when you say “We’ve seen this version of the code running and we agree that we’re going to release it in this form”. So the ultimate check happens in front of publishing and the publisher then approves the version being checked at that time. Arriving with such messages a year and a half later is the greatest possible nonsense.
Even if there were issues with Quantic Labs, CDPR should have noticed early on and taken action. This testing is done iteratively. The developers are in a feedback loop together with the testers, so the devs know very well what the state of the software is. You can’t fix some bugs and then not see how the result turns out. That is not the case with such projects. And with the amount of bugs that were still there in the release (including ps4 version that turned out to be unplayable) it can’t be otherwise than that CDPR knew exactly what they were going to release. Not only that, they should have known this long before publishing unless they failed to take their responsibility.
So the blame lies 100% with CDPR because they are 100% responsible for what they spend. They hire the testers and they specify which tests take place and how.
CDPR has played the final version and have come to the decision to release it. They also had time throughout the entire publishing process to adjust the testers or even switch test companies. But none of that happened.
If they communicate to CP PR that there are a few minor bugs here and there and have only reported it but it turns out to be full of bugs you can certainly do it.
Nonsense. This is not how things like this work. First, the developers at CDPR must have known what quality the code was. More importantly, no company will blindly rely on testers’ reports. As a developer/publisher you regularly have to evaluate the state of the work yourself (which is what happens in practice). As a publisher (and CDPR knows this very well) you have your own responsibility with regard to what you publish. So you have to follow the route yourself and test whether it is what you want to deliver. A test company does not change that. They might as well have blamed this on their internal testers and it was still bullshit. Even though the testers say it’s all peachy, you have to get it from the start yourself real world testing and throughout the project stay to test. Testers are just a tool in the bigger picture of a game development and you as a user of that tool have to configure that tool properly so that it comes out with information that you need. The problems surrounding cyberpunk 2077 all seem to be of an organizational nature and seem to have nothing to do with testers but with how CDPR handled this large project at management level.
All in all, you can’t blame the testers. It was, is and remains a management problem at CDPR.
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