After the bad experience of many Cyberpunk 2077, the question has been asked if the game should ever have even released on Xbox One and PS4.
We argue as much in an article on the matter here.
But now to add more fuel to the fire a CD Projekt Red Investor call has been released and we may have a glimpse out how the buggy game was allowed to be certified on current-gen consoles.
And the answer could put a strain on future trust in a Day 1 patches.
What Is Console Certification?
Certification is often the last checkbox that has to be filled before a game can launch on a console platform.
A Quality Assurance (QA) team with certified testers go through and make sure that the game works on the platform.
Mostly this is to make sure that the game works with the console and its features correctly i.e. doesn’t crash the console.
It can also involve making sure the game is fit for sale, but in the case of the buggy Cyberpunk 2077, some games can obviously slip through the cracks.
Read More: OPINION: Cyberpunk 2077 Should Never Have Come Out On PS4 and Xbox One
How Did Cyberpunk 2077 Get Certified?
You’d think for being such a high profile game that Cyberpunk 2077 would have had a more strict Certification process, but alas it actually may have gone the other way.
In an investor call, which you can listen to here, or read the full transcript here, it was explained how Cyberpunk 2077 was allowed to launch on consoles.
Michał Nowakowski VP of Business Development at CDPR said in response to a question about the certification process, “I can only assume that they [Microsoft and Sony] trusted that we’re going to fix things upon release, and that obviously did not come together exactly as we had planned.”
The inference here is that it is likely that while the game was certified, it was expected that a Day 1 patch would be able to bring the game up to snuff.
This, unfortunately, didn’t materialise and perhaps may erode faith in this in the future.
Cyberpunk 2077 has been such a high profile failure from a technical standpoint on certain consoles that it’s possible it could have longterm impacts on how games are approved on different platforms.
For now, we will have to wait and see if Microsoft and Sony make any changes to their certification processes, but we for one hope they do.
If they don’t they could find they’ll bein a situation exactly like this one again sometime in the not too distant future.