CD Projekt Red tells Rockstar not to make the same mistake it did—posts a self-burn over Cyberpunk 2077's historically bad launch to support GTA 6's delay

It's trotted out every time a game is delayed—that apocryphal Shigeru Miyamoto aphorism that a delayed game is eventually good, but a game you rush is bad forever. Miyamoto never said it but, hell, the truth is the truth. As frustrating as it can be to have something you're looking forward to punted back, we'd all rather a game be good and late than bad and on time.

Perhaps no studio has had this lesson drilled into it (kind of; its game didn't end up being 'bad forever') like CD Projekt Red. Cyberpunk 2077 is, now, an excellent game—worthy of inclusion on our list of the top 100 games you can play right now, no less. At launch? Less so. Now, the studio has extended a little social media backing to Rockstar over yesterday's delay to Grand Theft Auto 6.

One of the many venues in which Rockstar announced GTA 6's delay to November next year was X (the everything app!). As you can imagine, the announcement attracted tens of thousands of replies ranging from disappointment to anger to jokes to expressions of support. One of the supportive replies was from the official Cyberpunk account, which said nothing except to quote one of its own tweets—from October 2020 (two months before CP2077's release)—declaring that "No more delays are happening."

Some onlookers mistook the tweet as CDPR casting shade at Rockstar—a declaration that, unlike the big dogs in Dundee, the RPG studio actually managed to release its game at some point.

It didn't take long for others to point out what CDPR really meant, though: "A lot of the comments are missing what they mean by this," wrote DoughboyBJ (always trust someone called DoughboyBJ), "CDPR pushed out a game that wasn’t ready and we all know how that launch went. They are basically saying 'trust the process, so we can play the best version of GTA 6.'"

Frankly, recent events surrounding Rockstar's firing of more than 30 employees involved in union organising—though Rockstar says the unionisation efforts had nothing to do with it—don't exactly incline me toward sympathy to its leadership right now, but I get why CDPR would see a chilling reflection of its own traumatic past in GTA 6. There was, perhaps, more hype for Cyberpunk 2077 than any other game I'd ever seen back in 2020.

Now? Well, there's more hype for GTA 6 than anything. If Rockstar doesn't get this right, its blunder will be penned in the history books for the rest of time, just like CDPR's was. No wonder it's keen to see the catastrophe avoided again.

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