The long-awaited video game, Cyberpunk 2077, was released recently on December 10. By Monday, Dec. 14, the game developers already came out on Twitter to apologize for selling their broken product and lying to 8 million people.
The half-assed apology starts by admitting that developers misled everyone into thinking the game was finished and promising to patch up the bugs up to TWO MONTHS after releasing it, but more importantly that this “won’t make the game on last-gen look like it’s running on a high-spec PC or next-gen console, but it will be closer to that experience than it is now.”
That doesn’t sound like fixing a problem. That sounds like CDPR, the colonial game developers, are covering up the fact that they intentionally released a piece of trash to 8 million people.
What’s worse is the fact that this “apology”, alongside the countless online reviews and criticisms, reads less like criticism and more like an advertisement for the new PS5 console.
I smell a larger trick at play here.
You only get to be a billionaire by stealing.
This is the full trick at work: as of April 2019, the CEO for CD Projekt Red, Marcin Iwinski, officially became a billionaire in April of this year. His net worth skyrocketed because of the rising value of stocks for his game — a game he knew would be trash.
What do you do when you’re about to release something you’ve known for months was broken? You strategize how to walk away with the money.
After people discovered that they had been tricked, CDPR’s stock value dropped by A THIRD, costing Marcin Iwinski approximately 600 million dollars and his billionaire status. After publishing an apology, which conveniently offered people a refund, stocks bounced back up again, and he had resecured his billionaire status.
The catch? The refund part of the apology was also a lie!
The lie goes so deep that Cyberpunk 2077 might not be playable for anyone with an old generation of game consoles (which is a vast majority of people, especially colonized people).
Assuming developers bother to patch their bootleg game, the only way to overcome the bugs in the system is to buy a $3,000 PC or the ever-elusive PS5.
Theft is a feature, not a bug.
The lack of transparency is not a bug. It’s a feature of colonial-capitalist industries to jack up prices for everything, even if what’s being sold is garbage.
This strategy by CDPR exposes how Colonialism is a two-tiered system, with colonizers on top and colonized people on the bottom. The strategy to trick people into buying more products to correct the developers’ mistakes (a mistake they made on purpose) doesn’t apply to poor and working-class colonized people who don’t have the extra cash lying around to fix the thing that was sold to us broken.
In fact, for poor and working-class colonized people who find themselves in situations like this — be it with video games, cars, or medicine — the money we spend the FIRST time was the money we had been saving up for weeks or months. We aren’t given the option to correct a broken system that we did not consent to have in the first place.
Colonizers aren’t just the ones with more access to the game; they are the ones sitting on stolen resources they can use to buy the real product or soften the loss — resources they only have because of white power Colonialism. Colonized people don’t just get less under this system, we get it slower, with more effort, and we get it worse because we don’t have a dictatorship over the resources being stolen from us.
Get the gift of Anti-colonialism!
Black Hammer categorically rejects Colonialism and ALL of its symptomatic offspring. We are building the kind of dual contending power that gives us full dictatorship over our lands, lives, labor, and resources, where no one lives at the expense of another!
While Colonialism is tricking you with one holiday to spend all your money, even as millions of colonized people are dying, Black Hammer is making its own holiday! One that reflects our anti-colonial values, where we can honor the lives lost to COVID-19.
Join Black Hammer, and help us bring our communities together this winter. We know that a new world is possible because we are building it right now!
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