Quick one today, partly because I've got family stuff going on and partly because half the tech internet is still digging through the SolarWinds mess (Treasury, Commerce, and apparently a growing list of federal agencies) and I don't have anything to add to that pile that a dozen other sites haven't already said better. So instead, let's talk about something pettier and, honestly, more fun to be annoyed about: Sony pulled Cyberpunk 2077 off the PlayStation Store last Friday.
I want to say I saw this coming, but I didn't, not really. I preordered the digital PS4 version back in August, mostly because the trailers looked incredible and I hadn't taken a proper day off work in what felt like forever, and December seemed like a good month to disappear into Night City for a while. I've got a launch PS4 Pro that's been sitting under my TV since 2017, not exactly cutting edge but it ran The Witcher 3 and Red Dead 2 just fine, so I figured I was safe.
I was not safe. First hour in, the game crashed twice. Textures took actual seconds to pop in during a car chase. NPCs would freeze mid-sentence, or just not render at all until I was standing right next to them. None of that is exaggerated for the post, that's just what December 10th through 17th looked like for a huge number of PS4 and Xbox One owners, and CD Projekt Red knew it, because the only pre-release copies critics got before launch were PC copies. Nobody outside the studio saw the base console version running until the review embargo lifted, which in hindsight tells you basically everything.
So on the 18th, Sony did something I genuinely can't remember them doing before: pulled a major, high-profile game entirely off the PlayStation Store and started offering full refunds, no questions asked, digital or physical, didn't matter how many hours you'd already put in. I requested mine Saturday and had the money back by Monday. Microsoft didn't go quite that far. They kept the listing up but slapped a warning on it and are handling refunds case by case, which honestly feels like the more normal corporate response. Sony just yanking the whole storefront listing is the part that's stuck with me all week.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not really about the bugs themselves, because bugs happen, especially in something this ambitious. It's that CDPR spent close to two years telling everyone the game was in great shape. There were three delays that I can count, first from April to September, then to November, then finally to December 10th, and every time the messaging was some version of "we need more polish, thanks for your patience." Fans defended those delays constantly, myself included if I'm honest, on the logic that a studio pushing a release date is a studio that cares about quality over hitting a ship date. Turns out that wasn't quite what was happening, or at least not evenly across every platform the game shipped on. You don't yank a title off a storefront and offer blanket refunds because of a few rough edges. You do it because the base console version was, by a lot of accounts including mine, nowhere near finished.
I still like the game on a mechanical level, for what it's worth. The writing in the main quests is sharp, V's voice acting carries scenes that would otherwise fall flat (I went with the female VA, Cherami Leigh, and thought she was genuinely great), and Night City itself is one of the more interesting open worlds I've walked around in years. I just can't play any of that on the hardware I actually own without it falling apart every twenty minutes, so I took the refund and I'm waiting on a PS5, which four days before Christmas is basically impossible to find anywhere near retail price. That's its own rant for another post.
Small thing I noticed while all this was unfolding: Tesla officially joined the S&P 500 this past Monday, and it barely made a dent in the news cycle compared to a video game refund story. Says something about where attention goes in December of a year like this one, though I couldn't tell you exactly what.