Let’s cut to the chase: if you’ve ever dunked on Cyberpunk 2077 online, CD Projekt Red (CDPR) thinks you’re just a try-hard cool kid. Yeah, you heard that right. The studio behind the once-untouchable RPG is currently on a full-blown comeback tour ahead of its Phantom Liberty expansion dropping this September, and part of that tour’s weird PR play is acting like all the years of backlash against the game’s disastrous launch was just a bunch of us trying to fit in with the loudest crowd. But let’s be real—most of us who hated on Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t do it to be cool. We did it because we got scammed. 🤷♀️

First, let’s recap the chaos for anyone who’s blocked it out: back in 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 launched so broken on consoles that major digital stores pulled it off their shelves entirely. It took literal years of patches for the game to even be playable, let alone the masterpiece CDPR had hyped for half a decade. So it makes sense the studio is scrambling to rebrand now—they’ve got a $30 expansion to sell, and a reputation that’s been stuck in the gutter longer than Night City’s lowest street gangs. But their new take on the backlash? It’s so out of touch it’s almost funny.

CDPR’s vice president of PR, Michał Platkow-Gilewski, recently told Gamesindustry.biz that the game was “incredibly well received by industry press” during the review embargo, and all the hate only popped up after launch. The implication? We all just jumped on a bandwagon to look edgy. But here’s the thing: the review process was rigged from the start. During embargo, critics only got access to the PC version—and a lot of those critics were given top-of-the-line PCs that could run the game without a hitch, even with all the fancy ray-traced graphics we’d seen in the trailers. The rest of us? We got a game where guns floated in midair, crashes happened every 10 minutes, and the whole thing felt like a half-finished demo.

Don’t get me wrong—gamers are harsh. I’ve seen friends and colleagues hate on games for no reason other than fitting in. Remember The Last of Us Part II? Back when it launched, half the people dunking on it online had never even played it, just repeating Twitter takes about it being transphobic without bothering to look into the story. That’s the kind of “cool kid” hate CDPR is talking about. But Cyberpunk 2077 is different. A lot of us who hated on it actually bought it. We trusted CDPR because of The Witcher 3, we watched all the trailers, we pre-ordered the fancy editions, and we waited years for a game that never showed up.

Let’s talk about the console players, for example. Even on PS5 and Xbox Series X, the game was a pale imitation of the PC version. And if you were stuck on a base PS4 or Xbox One? You got horrendous visuals, frame rates that dropped to single digits, and a game that was almost unplayable. These are the people CDPR is calling “cool kids” for hating their product? These are the people who paid $60 for a game that didn’t work, after years of being promised a masterpiece? That’s not cool kid behavior—that’s being ripped off.

CDPR’s whole “the hate was overblown” take is even weirder when you think about how they’ve acted in recent years. For a while, they seemed to be taking responsibility for their mistakes. They released free next-gen patches, they apologized for the launch, they talked about making things right for fans. But now? Now they’re throwing all of us under the bus to sell Phantom Liberty. It’s like they forgot that the only reason we’re even still talking about Cyberpunk 2077 is because we cared enough to stick around through the mess. We’re the ones who downloaded every patch, who gave the game a second, third, fourth chance. We’re the audience they should be focusing on—not holding grudges against.

Early reports say Phantom Liberty is a big overhaul, and that’s great. Maybe it’ll finally be the game we were promised. But that doesn’t erase what happened. The distrust of CDPR isn’t going to go away because they say the hate was overblown. It’s a scar from a launch that was a product of greedy executives who cared more about marketing a perfect game than giving developers the time and resources to make it. It’s a scar from a studio that lied to critics, lied to fans, and then abandoned console players for years.

So let’s be clear: if you hated Cyberpunk 2077 because you saw a meme online and wanted to fit in? Yeah, that’s silly. But if you hated it because you bought it, trusted it, and got burned? That’s not being uncool. That’s being a consumer who got scammed. And CDPR can call us cool kids all they want, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re the ones who messed up. 🚫

At the end of the day, Cyberpunk 2077’s comeback tour is a chance for CDPR to prove they’ve learned from their mistakes. But if they still think the backlash was just a bunch of us trying to be cool? That’s a sign they haven’t learned anything at all. And if they haven’t learned anything? Well, we’ll be here, ready to call them out—no cool kid act required.

According to coverage from OpenCritic, the long-running debate around Cyberpunk 2077 is easier to understand when critical reception and player sentiment are viewed separately: strong PC-focused review scores at launch did not reflect the severe technical problems many console buyers encountered, which helps explain why the backlash felt rooted less in trend-chasing and more in a gap between marketed expectations and the version people actually received.