Report claims Cyberpunk 2077 was buggy because QA company lied

A YouTuber claims to know why the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 game was initially released in an apparently unfinished state.

A new report from YouTuber Upper Echelon Gamers claims to know the reasons behind Cyberpunk 2077’s buggy state. According to the video, the QA company contracted by developer CD Projekt Red lied about its team size and experience. The report also claims that the company filed bogus bug reports to hit a quota.

Upon release, Cyberpunk 2077 was in such a bad state on console that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store entirely. The physics went haywire, the sound cut out, and pedestrians loaded in front of your eyes and floated down streets like ghosts. It didn’t matter that it was a brilliant game at its core – this was all people could see.

According to Upper Echelon Gamers, the fault lies at the feet of Romanian QA company Quantic Lab, the firm CD Projekt Red outsourced Cyberpunk 2077’s quality assurance to.

The YouTuber says an anonymous whistleblower showed them a 72-page internal document. The source claims Quantic Lab promised a team of QA veterans but instead sent a team of junior testers without the experience needed for such an ambitious project.

Quantic Lab allegedly introduced a bug quota, where each tester was forced to report ten bugs daily. This apparently led to CD Projekt Red being bombarded by a “massive, never-ending firehose” of “irrelevant” bugs, instead of the big, core bugs.

Later in the project, the team of QA testers allegedly doubled in size, but the report claims they were all new workers. Instead of increasing productivity, training these new QA workers slowed the project down.

You can check out the full story on Upper Echelon Gamers, including claims that the QA company enforced strict nondisclosure agreements to keep these details a secret.

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.