CD Projekt Red have taken their share of lumps following the messy launch of Cyberpunk 2077, but Valve head honcho Gabe Newell isn’t joining the chorus of detractors. Of course, the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 arrived in better shape than the console ports, and according to an interview from 1 News from New Zealand, Newell’s mostly seeing “very happy users” on Steam.
I have a lot of sympathy with a situation that every game developer finds themselves in. All I know is that there are a lot of very happy gamers in the PC space, which are the ones that are most visible to us.
Overall, it sounds like Newell quite liked the game, and has confidence CD Projekt Red will bring Cyberpunk 2077 up to snuff with updates…
There are aspects of the game that are just brilliant, and it shows a tremendous amount of work — it’s unfair to throw stones at any other developer, because just getting something as complex and ambitious as that out the door is pretty amazing.
When people have [negative] reactions, my first thought is that this is an opportunity for us, and I assume that the Cyberpunk 2077 developers are similarly just using it to crank through and make improvements that are going to be beneficial to their customers. They have a long history of doing a great job, of continuing to invest in their products over time and I suspect that they’re going to be very good at making their customers happy over time.
Of course, a large portion of the PC copies of Cyberpunk 2077 were bought on Steam, so it wouldn’t make sense for Gabe to trash the game or CD Projekt Red. That said, he went a little further with his praise than he had to. It does seem like he genuinely sympathizes with CDPR.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 (although new digital sales have been suspended), and can be played via backward compatibility on Xbox Series X/S and PS5.
