Cyberpunk Developer Comments On Rumored Reason For Delay

You've likely heard about the Cyberpunk 2077 delay by now. It was a meteor that left a crater in the Spring schedules of gamers everywhere. What you might not have heard was a little rumor about what caused the delay. Some believed it had to do with Cyberpunk's poor performance on current-gen consoles.

That rumor has apparently been squashed.

In a forum thread where players were discussing the delay, a CD Projekt Red employee using the handle "Benzenzimmern" responded to the idea that the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 might somehow be responsible for Cyberpunk 2077's new release date.

"Of course we're optimizing for the XBox One, and for the Playstation, and for the PC, because that's what you do in the last stretches of game development," they said. "While the game is made, lots of things are unoptimized, because they're all in flux, changing, and still not finished."

Benzenzimmern continued.

"So simple answers like 'They delayed the game because of X' might make for a good rumor, but don't hold a lot of truth. There's always many reasons. Among them, and I can speak for myself, simply fixing bugs, so the game is as polished as possible. No hidden agendas, just working on making the game better."

We're not sure how the rumor originally started or how well-sourced it was, but it's possible it was all a big misunderstanding. Either that, or this is some glorious spin from CD Projekt Red, and the studio might not be letting on that our aging consoles require more optimization work.

Regardless of what caused the delay, you can expect it to hold. Cyberpunk 2077 is now set to release on Sept. 17, 2020, which puts it a few months away from the launches of both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X. You can bet, at least, that if the game comes out for those consoles — and it probably will — it'll run just fine.