There are a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 players out there who are pissed at how CD PROJEKT RED handled the game, but despite all of its performance issues (on consoles, anyway) and other criticisms such as generic gameplay, the leader of Valve isn’t one of them. In a recent interview with New Zealand’s TVNZ, industry icon Gabe Newell gave his thoughts on the Cyberpunk 2077 controversy and suggested that the amount of hate and vitriol that CD PROJEKT RED is getting might be uncalled for.
“I have a lot of sympathy with a situation that every game developer finds themselves in,” said Newell, who has reportedly played Cyberpunk 2077 through its entirety. “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.”
“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.”
Newell goes on to call Sony’s decision to pull Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store an “unusual” move. He also points out that he’s no stranger to having his own games criticized, having received an undisclosed amount of abusive emails over the years, but that all you can do as a developer is to learn from it.
“When people have those kinds of 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 an make improvements that are going to be beneficial to their customers,” Newell said.
“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.”
“Everybody knows that if you’re in this business, expectations are high, and if you do it well people are going to let you know and if you failed to meet those expectations they’re are going to let you know — that’s part of why it’s a fun industry.”