It’s kinda looking like it’ll be their fall from grace, even though they always had issues with crunch culture if nothing else. But this whole project seemed doomed from the start as a result of the perfect storm of internal mismanagement and misleading PR. If they ever recover, it won’t be soon in any respect and the stain on their rep will likely be permanent. “C” the will be their scarlet letter.I can't say I feel sorry for CDPR as a company. When you brazenly lie to your investors (and customers) and then try to sweep it under the rug with a shrug and some deflective excuses about underestimating the complexity and scope of your ambition, you deserve to get checked hard. In hindsight, it is obvious that pretty much everything CDPR has said to both fans and investors for all of 2020 leading up to release was outright lies. It wasn't glossed over problems, it wasn't polished turds or half-truths about features, but malicious lies about the state of the game. And as a topping of utter shittiness upon all those piles of lies, they only gave out pre-release review codes to PC versions of the game because they knew the game was unplayable on PS4/Xbone but didn't want that cat out of the bag until they had gotten some sweet day one sales to people who would spend their money on an unplayable mess that makes Trespasser seem like a master class in stable releases.
Honestly, I hope CDPR gets hit very hard by this. Not only because they deserve it, but because it will be a great warning to other publishers to stay relatively honest about the states of their games.
The worst part is the game still reviewed well at least on PC by some miracle, considering even these users have had several major criticism to level at it. It all kinda makes the TLoU2 debacle seem pretty trivial by contrast.