Cyberpunk Managers Still Win Big Bonuses After Shoddy Game Launch

Hi everyone, it’s Jason. Cyberpunk 2077 was the video game industry's biggest flop of 2020. Its myriad glitches fueled the internet's meme machine, and Sony Corp. still refuses to sell the game through its online store. Yet, the executives who run the Polish studio that made the game will nonetheless receive millions of dollars in bonuses this year.

The rest of the staff will also get bonuses, but some of them expected bigger ones, and may have gotten more if the game's release had been delayed until it was ready, as they'd asked. If developers had more time to work out the kinks and bugs, then CD Projekt SA would likely have sold more games, leading to higher profit. Instead, management pushed the game out anyway.

Pay disparities between executives and their employees is a perennial issue throughout the business world, made more urgent by the coronavirus pandemic during which millions of people lost their jobs. The typical CEO among the 1,000 biggest publicly traded companies in the U.S. receives 144 times more than their median employee, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The games industry has been a common battleground on this topic. For example, Activision Blizzard Inc. shareholders have been agitating for reductions in the CEO's pay since at least early last year. And this week, the company apparently bent to those pressures when it said CEO Bobby Kotick would take a 50% pay cut as part of a contract extension.