External QA team allegedly misled CD Projekt Red over ‘Cyberpunk 2077’

Recent reports seem to highlight exactly what went wrong with the Cyberpunk 2077 quality assurance (QA) process, attributing issues with the game’s poor state at launch to issues with the external QA team CD Projekt Red used during development. 

This information came from YouTube channel Upper Echelon Gamers and was later picked up by VGC. The channel was sent a “72 page QA testing file” from external Romanian-based QA company Quantic Lab, alongside “Quantic Lab human resources paperwork” and workflow charts.

Upper Echelon Gamers states that it believes “the source to be real”, claiming “they have provided extensive evidence to support that fact and have made serious claims about the quality of QA activities at Quantic Lab.”

According to the report, CD Projekt Red believed the QA team was comprised of veterans, when in reality the project lead had only a year of experience under their belt. It’s also alleged that Quantic Lab made “false claims around team size to secure or extend contracts.” This included claims that the team had expanded from 30 members to 60 as of summer 2020 (the summer preceding the game’s launch), although it’s claimed that these new members were all new and inexperienced hires with only “weeks” of training.

QA testers were also supposedly required to report a quota of ten bugs per day, which led to CD Projekt Red being bombarded with a plethora of minor issues regarding performance and visuals, with these distracting from more harmful game-breaking issues. Eventually, Quantic Lab was instructed to no longer send through “low priority bug finds and to focus on bigger issues”, although “the damage was already done and CD Projekt Red was already very unhappy.”

Lastly, it’s been stated that upper management at Quantic Lab prevented testers from referencing they worked on the game in their portfolios for potential future projects. In response to these reports, a CD Project Red spokesperson has said they “do not comment on rumours.”

NME has reached out for a statement from Quantic Lab.

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