Like who, looks pretty spot on to me so far.
Here's what i'll say with 5+ years of experience in games QA: the story is absolutely believable. Gamers need a
massive dose of reality when it comes to how QA really works.
Outsourced QA companies are routinely used in the industry. This is nothing new. Sometimes you will even have multiple outsource QA companies assisting, or even working in place of a game developer's internal QA. Just check the credits of most games released nowadays and you will frequently see names like KWS, Quantic Lab, PTW, QLOC etc. Cyberpunk looks like it used both QLOC and Quantic Lab.
These external QA companies often have more responsibility than you'd expect. Senior staff will formulate test plans themselves based on documentation sent over by the game developer. They may also be trusted to make the call on whether the game is in a good enough state to ship. If these people fuck up and miss something, it absolutely can reflect in the quality of the final product. In my own experience, these companies are frequently mismanaged and bleed talent due to shitty working conditions plus poor wages (but gamers are head in sand regarding that point too). So the line about how they had junior people with under 6 months experience working on the game is not surprising at all.
Neither is the revelation of the company lying to cover that up. One company I worked for would often shuttle people from its localization projects within the same office and dump them on the functionality projects, just to get asses on seats - despite it being a different branch of QA testing altogether. Bug quotas are an absolutely terrible practice, because they reinforce a culture of just reporting small shit to make it look like they are doing something, rather than focusing on
important shit. You can have someone who you'd say is a 'great' tester on paper because they reported 100 art bugs, but then if they miss multiple major quest breaking bugs, you can't really same the same about them can you?
Gamers also seem to have this view that programmers magically know everything. Even on a project of CP2077's size, it's just a dozen or so people having to keep this spaghetti code together. You can have literally 100s of thousands of bug reports over the course of a project, so good luck keeping tabs on what still needs to be done without decent QA...
"How did they miss this!?" is also frequently uttered on forums when player's encounter bugs that made it into the final game. Truth is, they likely didn't miss that. If their QA was competent, you might even find the very bug report for that issue sitting as a priority 4 in their JIRA - there were just much more pressing issues for the strained programming team to deal with, like stopping the game from crashing every two minutes.
All of this doesn't exonerate CDPR at all, but it's seriously dumb to suggest it wasn't a major contributor. Outside the outsource issues, the project managers bear the most responsibility. The execs who wanted the game to release on time for Christmas probably even more responsibility. Sony and Microsoft also share responsibility for not gatekeeping like they should have (their TRC/TCR checklists absolutely should have denied this game to release in the state it did). It's just a failure on every level from top-to-bottom.
www.forbes.com
