Left For Dead, Cyberpunk 2077 Reawakens Through Phantom Liberty DLC

Cyberpunk 2077's redemption arc has been nothing short of amazing and CDPR deserves kudos for all its efforts. Naysayers may claim that CDPR should've never launched the game in the state that it did in the first place, but there's a lot more to be said about owning up to your mistakes and correcting them.

Video game history is full of examples of video game developers who went up and left their games mid-cycle, either by closing them down or just abandoning them entirely after it flopped immediately when it came out.

Of course, it certainly didn't hurt that the core aspect of Cyberpunk 2077 - the promise of a bustling neon-lit futuristic cyberpunk setting will always get audiences hooked - wasn't bad.

Between Edgerunner's release on Netflix to the 1.5 update and eventually, the next-gen-exclusive improvements, which was capped off by Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk 2077 eventually overcame all the horror stories. The power of the word of mouth then took care of everything as the narrative went from "avoid Cyberpunk 2077 at all costs" to "Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best games of the current generation."

To top it all off, the Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition came out to end 2023, with the perfect discount for the holiday season to boot.

While there are wrong lessons to be picked up from Cyberpunk 2077's success story - like launching a game in a bad state on purpose only to fix it later - the rest of the industry will do well to remember what Nowakowski said, which, in a nutshell, is just a variation of the age-old saying, "a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."

CDPR is currently neck deep on several projects at the moment, including the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, work on the follow-up isn't expected to start until after it's wrapped up The Witcher 4, which won't be anytime soon.