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Comment by wmichelin | Hacker News Reader

I think they'd care about sales rather than their stock price. The stock price will bounce back, and with the game being on sale, I'd imagine many players will just hold off until patches come through. They probably made more money launching as is than they would have if they had just waited.

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A sign that Investors in this company are not looking to build long term fundamental business. They are there only to rip off immediate profit. Too bad.

Christmas, new console releases, new graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, and a pandemic. Take the pandemic out of the equation and it is still extraordinarily rare to have all of those events at the same time.

Weigh the costs of having a bad release against the costs of missing these extraordinary circumstances. It’s not hard to see why they made the decision they did.

And just so 2020 can give you a kick in the teeth on the way out the door, you can't buy any of these technological wonders unless you pay a scalper on eBay a 100% premium.

Alas, can't buy neither a new 3080 nor a new PS5. Imagine the sales numbers if supply wasn't so badly constrained

Supply is artificially constrained by bot-wielding cartels of middlemen with the aim only to “flip” them for profit.

If people would stop buying the middlemen’s supply, their exclusivity premium would evaporate, and the rest of the supply chain would be able to catch up and serve the real demand.

That bot-wielding only works on products where supply is limited. Otherwise they’d be scalping every single sector of PC hardware, not just the new GPUs.

History shows that great games will be successful no matter what. Something like World of Warcraft is successful simply because product is great, not because it was released at the right moment. May be CDP had reasons to do what they did - I'm not questioning that. But what it shows - CDP is just another game studio. I would like to see some company to go Apple-way, price their games accordingly, take their time and earn some reputation, but release games that are great time after time. CDP gave this hope after Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk PR but failed to deliver. The game is still good, so they might be still on the path. We will see in the next iteration. May be Blizzard makes comeback and releases something epic again. It takes someone like Steve Jobs to pull this off and may be in game industry it is tricky.

Anyway, this is how I think about it.

Is this not a fundamental truth of shareholder value theory? No one should be surprised when a duck quacks.

No it isn't. Shareholders have no interest in owning a failing company, it is in their best interests for the company to be sucessful and profitable because they are the ones with skin in the game.

Oh so then shareholders do not care about quarterly dividends and constant growth forever?

Publicly owned companies are all inherently sick.

Shareholders demonstratably don’t care about dividends since many large companies like Amazon/Uber don’t have any, aren’t even ever going to be profitable, but just have a really cool story.

But theoretically shareholders don’t care about these things as long as the company will grow a lot in the next 30 years. There are some alternative stock markets set up to encourage this.

And stockholders hardly exercise their powers. CEOs tend to not get fired.

Investors don't make money from sales. They just lost 30% of their investment. Literally no one benefited from this.

I feel like I did. Playing on a 3080, minor bugs I've experienced aside it has been a true taste of the next generation of games. Mostly in a visual sense though.

Ah yes. You can see the global illumination ray traced lighting specular reflections off of the face of a T-posed one-line-of-dialog hooker.

The game looks way better than pre-release marketing footage [0], which gets zero recognition and only a bunch of hate.

Meanwhile when Ubisoft releases yet another "Doesn't look anything like the marketing footage", usually also crunched into existence, people just shrug it off.

In that context it's really weird how everybody seems to be dog-piling on CDPR right now for the most weird reasons, when otherwise they have a pretty pro-consumer track-record, particularly compared to the bigger AAA publishing fishes in the pond.

[0] https://youtu.be/Ogihi-OewPQ

People want unicorns, they thought they were going to get a unicorn, and instead they got an old, beaten-down horse.

That “horse” is what anyone who is familiar with CDPR games would expect. Also, I hope you’re being sarcastic (seeing the silly takes from some critics about how Cyberpunk is not the “future of gaming” they were expecting, I’m not sure anymore).

I was talking about perception, rather than reality.

I'd say that it feels like someone in the media has an axe to grind here. CDPR's policies seem like above average for the admittedly dismal field of game development, but they're drawing particular flack, especially when other companies with worse treatment conditions (naughty dog) instead get lionized.

> I'd say that it feels like someone in the media has an axe to grind here.

Most definitely when looking at some of the not so technical complaints, like about "representation" or how the studio is allegedly all kinds of phobic and the general tone not being PC enough.

Particularly cynical to complain about the commodification of trans-people, in a setting where even peoples memories and individual body-party are just another commodity. When that's very big part of that dystopian worlds settings, always has been, and not some specific dig against trans people.

Makes me wonder how much of that is simply a pile-on effect from the general situation in Poland with LGTBQ+ issues and CDPR getting drawn into that as some kind of scapegoat.

Some of the criticism has been unmerited, but no more than expected. That doesn’t invalidate the valid, merited criticism though, of which there is much.

Sony has pulled the game from the Playstation Store. This is a historically bad release. CDPR might actually implode from this.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/17/22188007/sony-cyberpunk-...

The world is completely dead, though.

It looks very impressive, but I still boot up assassin's creed Odyssey (of all games) just to wander around (i.e. an OK game but an excellent world), Cyberpunk so far feels like what people who don't like games feel games are like.

Oh I meant no one benefited from them releasing on old-gen consoles. I wonder if perhaps they were contractually not allowed to release only PC + next-gen consoles, and delay old-gen consoles?

And you think the stock price wouldn't have gone down if they'd announced a delay until March? The stock price went up 20% since beginning of November to early December, I somehow doubt that'd have happened if they'd postponed.

> They just lost 30% of their investment.

They only lost money if they bought on the peak and then sold the stock after the 30% fall. Otherwise, they're just stil holding a piece of CDPR, whose market value fluctuates and is not that relevant until you decide to sell.

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