Cyberpunk 2077 - CDProjekt's New Joint

Oh, come on. They were distributing “DRM free” games long before that.

GOG started in 2008 afaik, and their retail distro in 1994. But since I am not 100% sure if their retail boxes were DRM-free, I rounded it to 20 years.

I’m talking about the background of the founders as sellers of cracked illegal software

Technically… CD Projeckt owns GoG, CD Projeckt Red (CDPR) is the game studio also owned by CD Projeckt. :)

Oh, ok, cool. Not exactly relevant, but as a joke, fair enough.

ckt? :)

Ooops! No ‘c’. :)

Pretty sure ‘CD Projeckt’ is a King Crimson album.

I get that marketing send swag to partners they feel can boost their product. It’s a thing back to the Fuller Brush era. This just seems kind of gross.

They send some favored streamers a Cyberpunk chair. Because, I guess this game will miss some iota of hype if they didn’t do this?

I’m not sure I follow what’s particularly gross about it. The local bank has advertisements near the court during basketball games, I’ve never thought of that as gross and I don’t see this as any different?

Because I guarantee these same streamers will be doing previews, reviews, and exhorting their audience to buy the game.

Oh I get you now, thanks.

And I wanna be clear. I’m sure shilling for CDPR is pretty low risk, right? I doubt Cyberpunk is going to be some kind of train wreck product.

I’ve just always felt these kinds of things, including flying reviewers out to racing schools and letting them burn rubber on a test track to “let them compare the experience” with the upcoming racing game, or sending reviewers free gift boxes are all just blech.

I mean, a let’s play that isn’t by Tom Chick and goes more than a few hours is pretty much that, anyway. At least if the person doing the shilling is sitting in a Cyberpunk chair, you know where they’re coming from.

Yeah, I’m not sure this is what I’d call money well spent, but it doesn’t seem vile or anything. They are giving them a product they hope will be on camera for hours a day to lots of people.

I wouldn’t say “vile” either. On the moral scale of issues, I worry about a lot of other things before this. Swag for influencers/reviewers has been a thing forever.

I very much doubt there is any “you will cover our game favourably in exchange for the chair” type of deal there.

But that will be the conclusion anyone watching their steams will land on when they see the chair in the vid.

There never usually is an explicit deal.

In comms/pr across the board this isn’t unusual (except federal government because of gift restrictions). You always want to be building good relations with your contacts, and they want to build it with comms/pr people. It’s not a quid pro quo for either party, typically, it’s about gaining good will, falling somewhere between generousness and transactional. There is a reason a lot of people in comms/pr are friends with journalists and vice versa.

I mean, prior to The Witcher 3 coming out, CDPR flew a bunch of internet streamers (including Gopher, Jesse Cox, Angry Joe among others) to to Poland to hang out at a castle and have a good time and play the game for an extended period of time.

Getting a chair – even a really good one – seems to pale in comparison.

And yeah, pretty much every industry throws swag around, even to those who are paid to be independent reviewers. Not sure why this is any big deal at all.