 All right, folks, this is completely just, wow, this has never happened in the history of gaming. This has never happened in the history of AAA gaming. This has never happened in the history of anything. Yes, we're talking about Cyberpunk 2077, but this time we're talking about a positive move for consumers, but an absolutely horrendous move for CD Projekt Red. So it all started as this post is about 10-12 hours ago when it was announced publicly by Sony. As you see here, this is PlayStation support that they are going to be issuing refunds. As it says, SIE strives to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction, and we're going to be offering a full refund for all gamers who have purchased Cyberpunk 2077 via the PlayStation Store and want to refund. So this won't count people who like bought a digital copy through GameStop and then redeemed to code, but anyone who bought it directly from the store, which is what a majority of digital sales are, will get a full refund and then they even give a link for it. And then they even go on to say we're aware of the somewhere experiencing issues accessing the form available within the provided link where we're going to get it up. Basically their website was crashing the PlayStation Store. You could also go through that to request a refund was crashing during this. I think it was still having issues even as of this morning as people kind of gave up last night and decided we'll try again today. Yeah, they are essentially refunding Cyberpunk 2077. They are probably tired of CD Projekt Red's shit. Let's be honest here. CD Projekt Red stated that you will be able to get refunds from Sony or Microsoft. Sony was initially denying those refunds because they didn't actually get permission or a special circumstance to get refunded. Sony started getting a bunch of backlash from fans being like, Hey, CD Projekt Red, so we could refund this game. You're not letting us refund this game. Stop telling us we can't refund this game. It's a broken mess. We want our money back. Sony not only gave in because Sony kind of had to Sony went a step further. This is insane. This is just unprecedented in industry history. Sony's not just offering refunds to, you know, you could argue to save their own bacon because they were getting chastised pretty hard. Oh boy. This is so big it hit CNBC. This gaming news like this, gaming news in general doesn't hit CNBC that much. Sony has pulled Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and this has caused CD Projekt Red to drop 20% of their market value. Holy crap. Here's the key points. Sony has removed Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and says it will refund players full refunds. Cyberpunk's developer CD Projekt Red has lost $6.6 billion, like $1 billion in market value. This game was supposed to sell 30 plus million copies for CD Projekt Red. They could have delayed it a year. Two years. It still would have sold 30 plus million. Oh boy. So this story is coming from London. It says Sony has removed the video game Cyberpunk 2077 from its PlayStation Store in a move that has shocked industry analysts and added to the woes of its developer. This is... I can't believe I'm reading this right now. The Japanese firms gaming unit Sony Interactive Entertainment said in a brief notice on its site that it strives to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction when offer players full refunds. Shares of Cyberpunk's Polish developer CD Projekt Red tumble this much as 20% Friday. On the back of the news, the company has lost around $6.6 billion in market value since the game's release last Thursday. CD Projekt Red wasn't immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. It's been a little over a week since Cyberpunk launched and the game has attracted scathing criticism from gamers over a multitude of bugs and drops in performance on older consoles like Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One. The sci-fi game was one of the most highly anticipated titles of 2020 fueled by significant hype at industry events and past success from its developer. CD Projekt is a studio behind a role-playing game The Witcher 3, which is thought by critics to be one of the best games of all time. But Cyberpunk's steep graphics requirements mean that the game has suffered on older hardware. People playing the game on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have found that the game often freezes while textures take a while to load in and non-playable characters' faces are sometimes blurred. It's not an easy call, but they've made the right move, says Steve Bailey, principal analyst for games at Tech Research from Omida told CNBC. This title has been removed out of fear of not just consumer upset with the game's quality but potential damage to the console's brand. Guys, this game is so bad on PlayStation 4 that Sony is legitimately worried it affects the overall brand of PlayStation to keep it up. Now yes, Sony was receiving backlash over not doing the refunds. Sony was not happy that this was happening. I think this just boils down to, you know what, Sony was initially looking for the bad guy for not allowing the refunds, even though CD Projekt said you could. CD Projekt was initially applauded for saying hey look, you can get refunds, cool CD Projekt admitting that their game sucks and that they'll let people refund. Sony, within their policy rights, was saying nope, you can't get a refund, Sony started to look bad and not only did Sony look bad and reneged that and said no, you can get refunds. Sony is saying, you know what, CD Projekt Red, you made us look bad. You put us in a difficult situation where we had to offer refunds that are not normally within our policy. You made Sony look bad, so you know what, screw you, we're taking your game out of our market. That's insane. Now I don't think it's been removed from the PlayStation 5 store, but again, people on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X aren't really the ones asking for refunds. It runs decently well on those platforms. Not fantastic, but well enough for a AAA release, not without the normal realm of bugs that you could see in several games that come out, even the Madden's of the world and stuff. So on Monday CD Projekt said it would offer customers refunds if they bought the game on older consoles and were unhappy with it. The firm also apologized for not showing how the game performed on those machines before releasing it, instead of issuing number of updates over the next few months. My big thing here is CD Projekt Red had two things they could have did. One they could have just delayed the game entirely, waited another six months or whatever until all the versions were silky smooth. Or they could have did a staggered release. They could have released this on PC since it obviously was ready to go on PC. They could have released this on PC, Series X and PlayStation 5 first, just did an initial next gen slash PC exclusive launch, and then delay the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One version until it's ready. And I get it, it would feel weird of course if they would have did this because technically on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, the game is running in what's called backwards compatibility mode, which means the game is running natively on the platform, but it's not taking full use of the platform's capabilities. So it doesn't have those crisp ultra 4K textures and all that jazz, but you know what, here's the thing. The game is basically unplayable on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. When people say over the next gen version doesn't exist, well I'm sorry, does the last gen version exist? Because right now the last gen version is crap. And so if the last gen version only really runs decently on next gen platforms, can we be honest, Cyberpunk 2077 is a next gen game, there is no last gen version. Oh, it's backwards compatibility mode, that's great, but look how well it runs on those platforms and look at the old, look at Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and tell me that you're even playing the same game. Like clearly, clearly, even though the code base was originally built for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, clearly the game is not built for last gen anymore. So backwards compatibility mode or not, it's only playable if you have those platforms. So yeah, that's, you know what, it's even crazy, like you wanna know how bad some of the PlayStation optimizations are, while the PlayStation 5 version runs alright, the Xbox Series S version according to the digital foundry, the Xbox Series S, yes the $300 system that's significantly less powerful than a PlayStation 5, runs better than on Sony's platform. Like did they do any optimizations for Sony's platforms? Now CD Projekt Red has come out to state that they will not be offering refunds or they've been, I'm sorry not refunds, but there's been no talks with Microsoft about removing the game from the Microsoft store on Xbox One, however, it should be noted that I'm pretty sure there was no talks with Sony either. I think Sony just did it because they can. I'm pretty sure CD Projekt Red was doing everything they could to keep this game available and Sony's like, no, we're done with your bullshit. And Microsoft is already don't need permission to remove games from their store. So Microsoft hasn't responded or been offering the same refunds and all that. Sony's been at the focus of a lot of this because their reps have been not allowing refunds and obviously PlayStation is a more popular platform, so it's just gonna get more attention. But Microsoft, it's kinda your move, you kinda need to step up here, Phil Spencer probably should walk in lockstep with Sony here. And if they decide to also remove the game and offer refunds, you're basically talking about what is an industry-wide, you know, beyond the high-end consumer blacklisting of CD Projekt Red's game. Think about this, did anyone think months ago it was possible that 7.2077 could basically be delisted and blacklisted by console platforms? CD Projekt Red, the company that had the pristine reputation after three very successful Witcher games that got better and better with each release. Wow. Still, Amita's Bailey says it doesn't think the episode will damage CD Projekt's relationship with Sony. PlayStation will be extremely sympathetic towards the challenges of making a release in a game like 7.2077, which is a boggling undertaking, but they may require that they get it to work more closely with CD Projekt Red in the future. So basically Sony's gonna want. This is unprecedented too. What they're suggesting is for CD Projekt Red to release a game on PlayStation in the future, right? So they're going to need to essentially work with CD Projekt Red so they know more details about a game's release. Sony doesn't do this, by the way. They have a certification thing. The certification thing isn't as complex as people think it is. It just has to pass a series of checklists and then you can put it live. The thing is that series of checklists doesn't include bugs and stuff. So like, this is, wow. So CD Projekt Red came out to respond on their official Cyberpunk account and said, Following our discussion with PlayStation, a decision was made to temporarily suspend the digital distribution of Cyberpunk 2077 on the PlayStation Store. So they're saying this almost a day, you know, the next day after Sony announces, Sony wanted to be like, no, fuck you. But they're trying to be like, oh, but we'll be back. We talked to Sony. We'll be back. You can still buy physical versions of the game in brick and mortar stores and online. So hey, you can't buy digitally anymore, but please go buy our game physically. All purchased digital and physical copies of the game will continue to receive support and updates as we improve your experience. According to our knowledge starting today, everyone who is not willing to wait for updates and wants to refund their digital copy of the game can do so submitting a request and looking into the same thing that Sony linked to. Now we are working hard to bring Cyberpunk 2077 back to PlayStation Store as soon as possible. Yeah, they're going to have to get direct Sony approval for that. So CD Projekt Red had pushed Cyberpunk's release back several times before finally launching the game. It was initially scheduled to be released on April 16th, 2020 before being delayed to the September 17th and then November 19th. And finally, December 10th received much high pop until launch fund. It's released. The game was met with an outcry over a spate of technical glitches. It's also criticized for a scene that included a trigger for people with epilepsy. That was a big thing to at launch. They've since put up warnings and did some reduction on that. But yeah, it's this is unprecedented. This is unprecedented. I like CD Projekt Red, but heads are rolling over this. I'm sorry. This is not a dev issue. You guys want to like chastise the devs. The devs are not at fault for this. The devs do not make these decisions to release fundamentally broken games. The devs knew how bad this game ran on PlayStation and Xbox. You I can guarantee you the developers did not want to release this game and see this kind of backlash. Nobody slaves away works crunch, puts eight plus years of development into a game and says, you know what, release it to the masses so we could see all those negative user reviews and we could see these refunds happening and we could lose our bonuses. Like, yeah, we want to see that happen. No, the devs are not at fault for this. This is an upper management issue. It's been talked about in the past with the crunch. And on some levels, I can understand crunch. You know, working overtime happens. Know what you're signing up for. It's normal in many fields. OK, fine. But that's not an excuse for releasing the game in the state on last gen. As I said, they could have delayed the last gen versions until they were ready. They didn't. They could have delayed the whole game until it was ready in all platforms. They didn't. This is literally the worst possible thing that could have happened with releasing this game. And I know Xbox is likely going to follow suit. It might take, you know, oh, we're not in talks with Microsoft. Microsoft might not be wanting to talk to you about it. They might just drop your ass. This is going to be very interesting to see how this affects the future of games, because this isn't the only broken AAA game to ever release. It's just the only one that millions upon millions of people are buying and then instantly regretting. Maybe instantly, like within a day or so regretting. Because sometimes people are like, oh, wait for a patch. Oh, we got a patch. We got they've had like, by the way, they've had like two hot fixed patches. The game still isn't much better. Like this game is an embarrassment. CD Projekt Red has just embarrassed the entire AAA industry. And we already thought the AAA industry could be bad sometimes and the microtransactions and the other thing. This is this is a mad, maddening, embarrassing. I mean, this is just wow. I'm I can't like, how's it going to roll? Let's just be honest. Someone or multiple people at CD Projekt Red are going to be fired over the decisions that went into not only the development of this game and the development schedule, also the people that approved of its release, the people that rushed it out, the people that kept saying, oh, we have this release date. Now we have this release date. Now we have this release date. Don't give a frickin release date when the game is unplayable on the primary platforms that people are going to be buying the game on because nobody can buy a frickin next gen system. See, delay it until it's ready for all or just say, I'm sorry, we're going to release the next gen and PC version right now. We're going to release the PlayStation 4 Xbox One at a later date. We still have more work to do on those versions. Fine. Customers are understanding as Miyamoto has always stated, it's been quoted many times and it's never been more true than in this moment. A delayed game is forever good, which, by the way, this game was delayed. It needed to be delayed more. A rushed game is forever bad. This isn't always true. Seven point twenty seventy seven will not be forever bad. But you know what that sage advice for Miyamoto can do? Take it to heart when you're developing a game, making your decisions and upper management decide, you know what? It's better that we delay this game, eat the losses, eat the development losses and and. Delay it. But when it does come out, the universal praise, not just from the media who got to play the best versions of the game, media in large got to play the PC version of the game. Very strange media aren't usually sent PC review codes over console review codes, but that's what happened. Hence the high Metacritic rating at the time. But the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Metacritic ratings specifically, not the overall games Metacritic, but like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions are just third in the shed or like 50 percent under a Metacritic. This is. I'm still in shock. Good on you, Sony. Good on you saying, you know what? We're tired of the reputation. We're just going to get rid of your game altogether. I'm sure Microsoft will follow suit eventually. Again, Microsoft doesn't have as many customers. At the, you know, that probably bought the game for it. All those series X might have quite a few, but the people aren't really refunding, requesting refunds on that version. So what a mess. CD Project Red, do better. I hope that this never happens again. You're in general a really good developer that makes really good games, even if you have some shitty business practices and, you know, too much for brunch, probably. But damn, heads better be rolling over this shit. Your company has lost 20 percent of its value and six point six billion dollars in market share. That's not something that you could just overlook. Six point six billion with a B. Jesus. All right, folks, I'm Nathan Robojance from The Tender Prime and I'll catch you guys in the next video.