Free Cyberpunk 2077 DLC promised for early 2021 is delayed

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January 2021 was a hard month for CD Projekt RED. Cyberpunk 2077 had come out on December 10, 2020 with many bugs and poor performance, mainly on the PlayStation 4 and the base Xbox One. The studio was already facing refund requests, the game’s removal from the PlayStation Store and investor lawsuits.

On January 13, co-CEO Marcin Iwiński published a video message apologizing and explaining the fix plan. A day later, the press noticed a detail in the new roadmap: the free DLCs, which had been promised for early 2021, were pushed to the second quarter of the year. The priority became fixing the game on all platforms, with two big patches planned, the first in January and the second in February, as the studio had already announced in December.

Iwiński admitted the company “underestimated the risk” of bringing a PC-optimized game to older consoles, and cited the resource streaming system, which loads the scenery as the player moves through the city, as one of the culprits. He also said the decision to release came from management, not the developers.

You can see the care that was missing at launch, and also the size of the damage to trust: until a few months earlier, CD Projekt was one of the most beloved studios among players, thanks to The Witcher 3.

What came next

The fixes came little by little. The game returned to the PlayStation Store in June 2021, and the native PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions came out on February 15, 2022. In September 2022, update 1.6, tied to the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, brought free DLC and helped warm up sales again. The paid expansion Phantom Liberty, with Idris Elba, came out in September 2023 along with update 2.0, and sold more than 10 million copies. The game later won Best Ongoing Game at The Game Awards 2023.