Lengthy Report Claims That Cyberpunk 2077 QA Testers Were Doomed From The Start [Update]

Update: Thursday, June 30th 2022

After the release of Upper Echelon Gamer’s video, Quantic Lab CEO Stefan Seicarescu told VGC that the situation seems to be a ‘misunderstanding’.

“The video published on social media as mentioned in your article starts with incorrect statements about Quantic Lab’s history,” Seicarescu said. “There seems to be a lack of understanding in the process of how a game is tested before its release to the market.”

Seicarescu also suggests that CD Projekt Red may have recruited multiple QA companies to work on Cyberpunk 2077.

“Quantic Lab supports over 200 projects per year from several global leading publishers and continues to maintain a quality comes first approach to all the work we undertake,” Seicarescu said. “All our customer agreements are confidential but in general, global publishers are working with several QA outsourcing companies, not depending solely on one, in addition to internal QA resources at developer level in most cases. Each project we undertake is unique with regard [to] project requirements. Project direction is agreed and adjusted accordingly as per real time requirements with our clients. Quantic Lab always strives to work with transparency and integrity with our industry partners.”

Original: Monday, June 27th 2022

The general consensus for many when it came to Cyberpunk 2077 seemed to be that it worked splendidly for PC gamers, but was a buggy mess for last-gen gamers and some next-gen gamers.

It’s actually quite sad to think about, as by all accounts of people that had the right tools to play it, it was a great game. I have to admit that I was also a part of the dunkage on the game, but it was less of a dunk on CD Projekt Red and more of an unfortunate misprint to add to the whole mess that seemed to be funny at the time.

Games are incredibly difficult to make, even with a big team and especially if you’re making a game to the scale of Cyberpunk 2077. So if communication between teams isn’t completely transparent, or even just one team isn’t able to work at full capacity, something’s bound to go wrong.

Last year in January, CD Projekt Red released a now-infamous apology video, apologising for the less-than-stellar release and promising that the game will be fixed. In the video, they mention, “Every change and improvement needed to be tested and, as it turned out, our testing did not show a big part of the issues.”

Dear gamers,
Below, you’ll find CD PROJEKT’s co-founder’s personal explanation of what the days leading up to the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 looked like, sharing the studio’s perspective on what happened with the game on old-generation consoles. pic.twitter.com/XjdCKizewq

— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) January 13, 2021

Upon the release of this video, many were quick to say that this was, to put it simply, plain bullshit. You saw many saying that to put the blame on QA testers was unfair, which is absolutely true. In reality, if a QA team is well trained and well equipped, they can get the job done well. Seemingly, that was not the case here.

A new video from Upper Echelon Gamers has revealed a 72-page document sent by a whistleblower who allegedly works at Quantic Lab, a QA company that worked on a lot of the QA testing work for Cyberpunk 2077.

Quite a few allegations regarding Quantic Lab are mentioned in the video, which include (as Forbes reports):

• Quantic Lab overexaggerated the size of the team working on Cyberpunk 2077 in order to keep the contract.

• Quantic Lab said the team was made up of senior staff, but it was instead juniors with under six months experience in QA.

• Quantic Lab had a daily quota of reported bugs, which led to CDPR getting thousands of relatively pointless bug reports from the testers which took up a lot of time, and caused game-breaking issues to not be found or prioritized.

All these allegations mixed with the crunch issues that the CD Projekt Red team was facing in their own right seem to line up to the end result of Cyberpunk 2077.

It’s important to note that the takeaway from this should not be that QA testers are the problem. If these allegations, and this lengthy document, are legitimate, the initial poor release of Cyberpunk 2077 is ultimately a failure of upper management.