![]() ![]() A last-second delay from November to December should’ve rung alarm bells, but with the pandemic causing all kinds of disruptions last year it wasn’t a huge shock. I couldn’t have known then, of course, how bad Cyberpunk 2077 was lining up to be. I wrote this article back in October 2020 – before the game’s disastrous launch. ![]() By allowing prospective players to set incredibly high expectations and refusing to lift a finger to rein in those expectations, the game’s publisher was setting up players for disappointment – as well as setting up the game for negative reviews. No matter how good the game might ultimately be, I argued, CD Projekt Red had allowed the game’s hype bubble to get far too big. In October 2020, a couple of months before the game’s launch, I wrote an article here on the website titled Cyberpunk 2077 and the dangers of hype in which I expressed exactly this opinion. I could see this hype bubble inflating, growing ever larger and slipping far out of CD Projekt Red’s control. At the end of the day, it’s just another video game. Cyberpunk 2077 was never going to live up to the hype that had been built up, no matter how good it might’ve been. In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red’s marketing team seemed incapable of saying “no” – they weren’t doing a good job of managing players’ expectations, and the result was that many players built up a vision in their minds of a once-in-a-lifetime experience a “perfect” video game. While it’s natural for a publisher to want to see excitement around a title, care must be taken at an early stage not to allow the hype to get out of control. For a bit of background, I worked for a time in the video games industry, specifically on the marketing side of things. ![]()
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