You hear that Mr Anderson, that's the sound of inevitability.... US law firm lookining into class action against CDPR

[Master Disaster]

I'll cut out the recap of what happened, I'm sure we all know the story by now.

 

US law firm Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP is by all accounts looking at setting up a class action suit against CDPR on behalf of the companies shareholders, the reason cited in the proposal is that CDPR may have issued false information to shareholders/investors that had a material impact on their investment portfolio

Quote

However, consumers are just one side of a publicly-traded company like CD Projekt. A press release appeared late on Friday night that outlined Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP's intention to investigate the possibility of a class-action lawsuit against CD Projekt (CDPR's parent company) on behalf of shareholders in the US. The firm states that CD Projekt, "may have issued materially misleading information to their shareholders and investing public."

This suit stems from the fact CDPR withheld review keys to the console version of the game until less than 24 hours before launch as pointed out by review aggregator OpenCritic. It's alleged that CDPR deliberately withheld these keys to hide the state of the game from shareholders and now CDPR stocks have taken a dive of a cliff many investors have lost lots of money, something which they might have avoided had they known about the state of the game in advance.

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Earlier in the week, we reported that Opencritic, a review aggregating site, issued a warning to readers which reads in part, "The OpenCritic team and several critics suspect that the developer, CD Projekt Red, intentionally sought to hide the true state of the game on Xbox One and PS4, with requirements such as only allowing pre-rendered game footage in reviews and not issuing review copies for PS4 and Xbox One versions."

 

Additionally, it came to light that critics were given review keys for the PS4 and Xbox One just one day before the game was released.

CDPR's own co CEO is on the record as saying the company ignored all the warning signs that the game simply was not ready for release.

Quote

Similarly, the company's co-CEO, Adam Kicinski, is on record saying that CDPR, "ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles."

While fans of CDPR have been trying to defend them and the game, critics of the companies management are claiming the dev team were forced to release the game before they thought it was ready.

Quote

CDPR's defenders have taken to claiming that nobody should have expected the game to run well on last-gen consoles, given the age of the PS4 and Xbox One hardware. The other popular opinion is that the developers were forced to release the game too early, resulting in the performance we now see.

To date CDPR's stock price has fallen by around 30%.

Quote

To date, CD Projekt's stock has fallen nearly 30% since the game's release just a week ago, resulting in the loss of more than $1 billion for the company's founders alone.

Source - https://www.thegamer.com/us-law-firm-class-action-lawsuit-cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-red/

 

The vultures are circling the dying corpse, you know a company screwed the pooch when the lawyers smell free money.

 

Now I don't wish to defend CDPR but I had heard that Poland has ULTRA strict laws (stricter than most other countries) about insider information that can affect the price of the companies stocks. Apparently they are not allowed to share this information with anybody outside of senior management, anybody else privvy to it must sign an NDA to say they won't share it. Now to be clear, I'm not Polish and I have no idea if this is even true or just some nonsense made up by a defendist, if anyone who is Polish wants to chime in I'd appreciate the clarification.

[WereCatf]

6 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

CDPR's defenders have taken to claiming that nobody should have expected the game to run well on last-gen consoles, given the age of the PS4 and Xbox One hardware. The other popular opinion is that the developers were forced to release the game too early, resulting in the performance we now see.

The funny thing is, I don't see how either of these is a defense: if they literally cannot make the game run acceptably with reasonable visuals on previous-gen consoles, they should've come out and said so and pulled the prev-gen versions. As for the management...well, they do run the company, so that only works as a defense for the developers themselves, not the company; the company, by way of their management's incompetence, screwed the pooch and, as far as I know, the company is still under the same management, so all such criticism is entirely valid.

 

My opinion of CDPR has gone down drastically over the years -- broken promises and lies about no crunch, the gamification of bonuses in an effort to get the devs to put their health and sanity on even shakier grounds just for the sakes of reaching a deadline the management entirely arbitrarily imposed on them and so on -- and none of this bullshit has helped.

[Master Disaster]

12 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

The funny thing is, I don't see how either of these is a defense: if they literally cannot make the game run acceptably with reasonable visuals on previous-gen consoles, they should've come out and said so and pulled the prev-gen versions. As for the management...well, they do run the company, so that only works as a defense for the developers themselves, not the company; the company, by way of their management's incompetence, screwed the pooch and, as far as I know, the company is still under the same management, so all such criticism is entirely valid.

 

My opinion of CDPR has gone down drastically over the years -- broken promises and lies about no crunch, the gamification of bonuses in an effort to get the devs to put their health and sanity on even shakier grounds just for the sakes of reaching a deadline the management entirely arbitrarily imposed on them and so on -- and none of this bullshit has helped.

I have my suspicions that the original target for Cyberpunk was PS4/XB1 then at some point during development they switched focus over to PS5/XBS and basically ignored the "last gen" version until it was too late to do anything about it.

 

At that point they couldn't realistically scrap the last gen version since the next gen version was only being released on PC. If they had scrapped it they would have either had to do a PC only launch or delay again until after the huge holiday sales window. IMO it was a deliberate bait & switch, release the broken version first with a promise of a free upgrade to the next gen version in February, deal with the fallout in PR mode and know that lots of people will simply keep the broken version until they get the free upgrade. They must have calculated that was better than either launching only on PC or delaying again.

[Kroon]

CD Projekt RED is traded as OTC in US, so the share in not listed in any US trading markets and is even traded in PLN (Polska Zloty) and not USD.

 

So my question is how can someone that bought a share in Poland sue the company in US (or any other country for that matter)? I have tried to google for more information but its a wall of information, anyone have a good reliable source of information on this?

 

Whole thing just feel strange.

[kakik09]

37 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

CDPR's defenders have taken to claiming that nobody should have expected the game to run well on last-gen consoles, given the age of the PS4 and Xbox One hardware. The other popular opinion is that the developers were forced to release the game too early, resulting in the performance we now see.

They've mispelled "fanboys" as defenders 

[Bananasplit_00]

Management gets pressured by investors to release the game so they do and as its not ready the investors are mad the management released the game

 

Ait

[D13H4RD]

Call me cynical, but sounds like lawyers wanting to cash in on the next controversy 

[TetraSky]

Console review keys is vital info to shareholders??? They can suck a dick. They've shown the games in its best state, as any other studio would do and is essentially standard. You don't show your subpar product to the masses before your best one.

Buying shares is basically the same as gambling, if you're not ready to lose anything just because a company didn't give you advance information on the state of their product across all generations, that's on you. Even more so as shareholders were likely the ones pressuring management to push for an early release when its not ready, after 7 or 8 years of development.

Investing in a company just because of the hype surrounding it, is foolish. There's always two version of a story, one told to the public and one to the investors. The ones who truly had a lot ridding on this ship, likely knew a lot more about the real state of the game than the ones at the bottom.

[Doobeedoo]

This is funny, because how come other companies don't get sued which are some US based and had actually worse releases multiple times. Also few posts above me are right too.

The whole shareholders in gaming industry is just complete nonsense how much weight they can have. 

[ARikozuM]

On one hand, I would also blame the gamers for being hasty in wanting the release. They did let us know on more than one occasion that the release needed more time. Also, f#ck shareholders. 

[bit]

3 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Console review keys is vital info to shareholders??? They can suck a dick. They've shown the games in its best state, as any other studio would do and is essentially standard. You don't show your subpar product to the masses before your best one.

Buying shares is basically the same as gambling, if you're not ready to lose anything just because a company didn't give you advance information on the state of their product across all generations, that's on you. Even more so as shareholders were likely the ones pressuring management to push for an early release when its not ready, after 7 or 8 years of development.

Investing in a company just because of the hype surrounding it, is foolish. There's always two version of a story, one told to the public and one to the investors. The ones who truly had a lot ridding on this ship, likely knew a lot more about the real state of the game than the ones at the bottom.

This is no different than a corporation preparing financial reports that are wrong to entice new shareholders. CDPR held back console previews because they knew it was bad and was a bad investment for a possible shareholder. And because of this the shareholders do have protections for them. This fraud also extends to everyone that bought the game for consoles.

 

 

Anyways, there's also apparently a polish law firm looking into the same thing as reported by PCGamer. https://www.pcgamer.com/cd-projekt-may-face-class-action-lawsuits-over-cyberpunk-2077/

[Zodiark1593]

Me: is concerned for the potential future of GoG, as there’s not many places with DRM-free games. 

[TimeOmnivore]

6 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

On one hand, I would also blame the gamers for being hasty in wanting the release.

Why? People wanted Cyberpunk 2077, not the broken, buggy mess we got that happens to have the same name. It's entirely on CDPR for making the decision to release the game in an unacceptable state. If they didn't want public pressure to release the game, they shouldn't have announced a release date until the game was actually functional. And aside from the technical issues, looking at past marketing for the game, I'm surprised there aren't more people calling them out for what seems like blatant false advertising and fraud given that many features they advertised are seemingly nowhere to be found. I find it interesting how the gaming industry is allowed get away with so much shit that other industries would be legally raked over the coals for.

[ARikozuM]

7 minutes ago, TimeOmnivore said:

Why? People wanted Cyberpunk 2077, not the broken, buggy mess we got that happens to have the same name. It's entirely on CDPR for making the decision to release the game in an unacceptable state. If they didn't want public pressure to release the game, they shouldn't have announced a release date until the game was actually functional. And aside from the technical issues, looking at past marketing for the game, I'm surprised there aren't more people calling them out for what seems like blatant false advertising and fraud given that many features they advertised are seemingly nowhere to be found. I find it interesting how the gaming industry is allowed get away with so much shit that other industries would be legally raked over the coals for.

That's what I'm saying. There was "writing in the stars" regarding the issues that were going to pop up and investors and gamers just wanted the game. The developers should have pushed it farther back. 

[Jet_ski]

These lawyers are the stock market equivalents of ambulance chasers. The outcome of these lawsuits only benefit the lawyers. Their fees usually end up being 30-40% of the entire payout. And the shareholders get literally a few cents on the dollar. Meanwhile the company has to payout lots of cash and it benefits nobody but the lawyers.

 

I’ve been through this with a couple of them.

[Kisai]

15 hours ago, WereCatf said:

The funny thing is, I don't see how either of these is a defense: if they literally cannot make the game run acceptably with reasonable visuals on previous-gen consoles, they should've come out and said so and pulled the prev-gen versions. As for the management...well, they do run the company, so that only works as a defense for the developers themselves, not the company; the company, by way of their management's incompetence, screwed the pooch and, as far as I know, the company is still under the same management, so all such criticism is entirely valid.

They really should have just withdrawn it from PS4/Xbox One. I suppose maybe it worked on these platforms "pro" versions but not the standard versions, since the pro versions are basically "SLI" versions of the regular model.

 

15 hours ago, WereCatf said:

My opinion of CDPR has gone down drastically over the years -- broken promises and lies about no crunch, the gamification of bonuses in an effort to get the devs to put their health and sanity on even shakier grounds just for the sakes of reaching a deadline the management entirely arbitrarily imposed on them and so on -- and none of this bullshit has helped.

Three years ago, a friend of the family was trying to convince me to apply to work there and I didn' t know anything about the company. You know the typical family stuff where it's like "you know computers, you should work for (company they like)"

 

In hindsight, I have to wonder how much QA went into CP2077.

 

[Mark Kaine]

15 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Console review keys is vital info to shareholders???

I agree that sounds like a whole lot of horse shit... 

 

I didn't like CDPR and their practices before this disaster but they're completely dead to me now, deader than Hellogames lol.

4 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

The developers should have pushed it farther back. 

aren't developers just mundane employees? have you ever tried to "push anything back" with your boss? 

 

(hint: usually you'll be let go few weeks / months after you tried pulling that stunt...) 

[Shreyas1]

Quote

class action

Can't wait for the people who bought the game on the old console to get a grand total of 3 cents.

[soldier_ph]

They may as well have never launched this game in the first place but rather just postpone the launch every 3 Months until the year 2077.

 

/s

 

 

No but jokes aside the year is 2020 of course this was gonna go bad in many ways unfortunately.

[yian88]

Good the downfall of CDPR, when you get greedy you become stupid.

[ravenshrike]

On 12/20/2020 at 4:28 AM, Master Disaster said:

I have my suspicions that the original target for Cyberpunk was PS4/XB1 then at some point during development they switched focus over to PS5/XBS and basically ignored the "last gen" version until it was too late to do anything about it.

The original target was always PC which can get away with a HDD because of on average double the available memory. They then tried to make it work on last gen consoles. Which it mostly does at this point on team green consoles. Team blue has a memory leak issue because Sony got lazy in how they designed the PS4 gen memory handling.

 

Though in fairness when they designed it they probably weren't considering a massive, extremely detailed cityscape with fast transportation and few loading screens to be on the list of things games were likely to attempt. The closest game type to it was GTA which is about as detailed interior wise as the fake city in Blazing Saddles.

[pas008]

This is funny 

Games release all the time with bugs and shitty graphics

Paid Early access/beta is the new norm

But wish it would change 

This is the problem with gaming today

Be happy you are can get a refund which is great that they are even doing this

Can you get refund for bad movie or album or concert or show?

 

But issue here is between shareholders and cdpr possibly withholding info of it being unfinished unplayable on certain platforms

That were publicly advertised to do so

[Monkey Dust]

5 hours ago, pas008 said:

This is funny 

Games release all the time with bugs and shitty graphics

Paid Early access/beta is the new norm

But wish it would change 

This is the problem with gaming today

Be happy you are can get a refund which is great that they are even doing this

Can you get refund for bad movie or album or concert or show?

 

But issue here is between shareholders and cdpr possibly withholding info of it being unfinished unplayable on certain platforms

That were publicly advertised to do so

I'm also in the 'they should have caned the PS4 and Xbone version in favour of a PS5 and Xbox series X version' camp, They should have also pushed the release date back another year. They would have taken half a ton of shit for it, but not as much as they are doing now, and they could have escaped with their reputation mostly intact. 

 

I'm not sure why they pushed for the December 2020 release when they must have known within the company the console version didn't work on the base consoles. I wonder if it's a corporate culture problem where problems aren't listened to? Or just generally piss poor communication? I note it has been released on Stadia. I wonder if they had a release date they had agreed to meet, and wanted to avoid being sued by Google? 

 

Games being a bit broken at launch is a symptom of how large and complicated they have got. You can realistically only put in a tiny fraction of play testing relative to the amount of play testing by customers that will happen in the first 24 hours of release. Even in ye olden days bugs made it release day, and they couldn't be patched... They still should have done much better with Cyberpunk, even on PC where the game is mostly ok, but perfection would have been an unreasonable expectation.  

 

Something that could change however is 'The crunch'. No one putting in 100 hours a week is doing a good job. You're going to be tired, running on energy drinks (or something harder), your concentration will be shot, and you're also going to be past the point of giving a shit. It's a corporate culture problem that results in buggy games, and will ultimately force hoards of talented devs out of the industry.      

[Mark Kaine]

On 12/20/2020 at 4:53 PM, ARikozuM said:

On one hand, I would also blame the gamers for being hasty in wanting the release

this is funny, while there was some ridicule, mostly what everyone said was "I don't mind if it takes longer as long the game is good and finished when it releases..." 

 

Seems more like they tried their hardest to release this before the holidays knowing full well how unfinished and buggy it was going to be. 

[Luxzio22]

I think this is a result of to much mainstream attention. Games have released in much worse states and have been sold shamelessly despite having much more egregious problems. The huge hype, the blatant admission of guilt and the PR disasters of encouraging refunds and Sony pulling it off the playstation store has more to do with this than it being the worst launch ever. Everyone likes a good scapegoat and for the people who don't understand the actual state games are released in, CP2077 is much more of a trainwreck than it is us who know that this stuff par for the course. Basically CP2077 was just unlucky enough to get caught in the torn net that is frivolous litigation.