Quantic Lab, the QA (quality assurance) studio, has issued a statement after it was alleged to have lied to CD Projekt Red about bugs in Cyberpunk 2077.

 

 

While Cyberpunk 2077 has evolved a lot since its release, and CDPR has shifted its focus to the first significant expansion to CP2077, the release will not be forgotten. According to a recent video report/rumour that we reported on a few days ago, the QA testing company Quantic Lab, which worked with CDPR, lied about the status of Cyberpunk 2077.

Allegations have come to light that Quantic Lab worked with a more minor team than the contract required, lied about senior staff and hired juniors with less than six months’ experience, and followed a quantity-not-quality quota where they reported a lot of pointless bugs instead of the more necessary ones.

Now, Quantic Lab CEO Stefan Seicarescu has issued a statement about these accusations to Forbes, which we are publishing in full.

The complete statement below summarizes that the original video misrepresents Quantic Lab’s story, misunderstands the QA process, that Quantic Lab was not the only QA company CDPR worked with, etc. It seems notable that the allegations about Cyberpunk 2077 are not refuted, and while the whole situation is odd, at worst, it could be symptomatic of an even more significant, systemic problem.

The statement from Quantic Lab:

“Concerning the article published in Forbes on June 26th, Quantic Lab’s would like to clarify the following:

The video published on social media as mentioned in your article starts with incorrect statements about Quantic Lab’s history. There seems to be a lack of understanding in the process of how a game is tested before its release to the market.

Quantic Lab was founded in 2006 with a team of twelve, fully focused on Quality Assurance, and has since then grown into a leading QA company with more than 60 active clients, and more than 400 employees in 3 office locations in Romania. Quantic Lab supports over 200 projects per year from several global leading publishers and continues to maintain a quality comes first approach to all the work we undertake.

All our customer agreements are confidential but in general, global publishers are working with several QA outsourcing companies, not depending solely on one, in addition to internal QA resources at developer level in most cases. Each project we undertake is unique with regard project requirements. Project direction is agreed and adjusted accordingly as per real time requirements with our clients.”

“Quantic Lab always strives to work with transparency and integrity with our industry partners.”

All too often, QA is blamed for the shortcomings of the game when in fact, it is the QA people who are most likely to be hunting down the bugs. It wasn’t Quantic Lab’s or any other QA’s decision to launch Cyberpunk 2077 in the state it was in; it was CDPR management’s – that’s their responsibility. Some have seen this, even if not understood as such, as an attempt to exonerate CD Projekt Red, but the idea that the company responsible for the game is unaware of the state of the game is laughable at best.

It will be interesting to know more about the situation, as a lot could still come out about the release of Cyberpunk 2077. However, let’s not forget that’s all in the past. CDPR has certainly learned its lesson, and many other developers remain aware of the backlash. We can’t change the past, but as CDPR moves forward with a new Witcher game and an expansion to Cyberpunk 2077, the important thing is that lessons have been learned, and hopefully, they don’t make the same mistakes again in the future.

Source: Forbes