Monday, December 21, 2020

Cyberpunk 2077

It's been hyped for years. 

Other developers moved their launch dates to avoid being anywhere near its release. 

It was repeatedly delayed. 

Now it's released, and it's in shambles. It's in such shoddy shape that Sony has removed it from the Playstation Store. 

There is such an endless list of bugs, many of them game-breaking, that I'm not even going to spend time discussing them. 

The more interesting question: how could this happen?

The answer: much easier than you think. 

Like many of you, I have a fair amount of experience with technology companies. And I think I can describe for you, very closely, what happened. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is a huge project involving roughly 400-500 people at CD Projekt Red. Their internal structure, almost certainly, looks something like this:
Front line workers (artists, designers, developers, etc.)
Group Leaders (for each front line worker group
Managers
Middle Managers
Directors
Vice Presidents
CFO/CTO 
CEO

Some of these roles have different names in different companies, but they do roughly the same thing. That may not be the exact structure of CD Projekt Red, but I bet it's close. 

Now, add in that the development studio is a subsidiary of CD Projekt S.A. So even if you don't have VP's and Presidents in CD Projekt Red, you do in CD Projekt S.A.

That's a lot of layers. 

I ran the program manager office for an Oracle installation, and my job was to manage a project plan that had thousands of tasks. Each week, I checked on every task that was coming due and asked for updates with the responsible parties.

From all of those updates, I would try to understand the current state of the project versus its timeline projections. 

It was hard. With dependencies between tasks, it was easy for significant delays to exist even if 98% of the tasks were being done on time. 

I would present this information once a week to the person leading the project (who was a Director in the company). He would then make a presentation to a Vice-President, who would report to the CFO, who then reported to the CEO. Inevitably, he tended to be more optimistic than I was. 

Now, imagine that each management layer in a project is over-optimistic by just 5%. Oh, except that past the third level, make everyone 10% more optimistic, because higher up the management chain, executives are increasingly disconnected from the reality on the ground.

Stack six of those (three at 5%, and three at 10%), and suddenly, the executive assessment of the project is in error by almost 40%. 

Plus, there's always that asswipe who's never actually been successful at anything but cozying up to everyone above him. THAT guy is going to be optimistic by 15% or even 20% every time. Homewrecker.

That's not even mentioning the financial and reporting pressure on a publicly traded company. CD Projekt S.A.'s market cap had quadrupled from two to eight billion in the last four years. 

Report bad news to investors? That means the stock price will be affected, perhaps substantially, and everyone in the company who has stock options is going to lose money as a result. So there is enormous pressure to report as little bad news as possible (there are exceptions when a company needs to lower expectations, but they're not worth discussing today). 

So we have a company with an exploding market cap developing one of the most-anticipated games of all time. After repeated delays, there is enormous financial pressure to release as soon as possible. Because of that, there is also enormous pressure for each layer of management to be optimistic in their projections. 

That's how you release an alpha.

TOMORROW: the good old days of Front Page Sports: Football and its catastrophic end.

Site Meter