Cyberpunk 2077 has finally gone gold: what does this mean for the developers crunching?

Last week we wrote about the fact that the Cyberpunk 2077 devs were going to be crunching their way through the upcoming weeks to get the game completed in time for the launch on November 19th.

Well, as it turns out, Cyberpunk 2077 has actually now gone gold as was announced in a tweet today.

That's great news for the staff who no longer have to crunch, right? Surely if everything is ready to go then the staff can finally take a well-deserved break.

Well, it's never that simple when it comes to game development.

What does Cyberpunk 2077 going gold mean?

In case you're unsure about the terminology here, going gold means that Cyberpunk 2077 is now complete.

Well, it's complete enough to be off to be mass-produced in physical media and then eventually be sold.

That should be good news for the staff working at the company who found out they had to crunch for a bit to make sure everything was ship-shape before the game actually launched.

However, in modern-day gaming, going gold and being finished aren't the same thing.

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What about all of the crunch from last week?

Now then, depending on how much you pay attention to this kind of stuff, you may recall this tweet from the head of CDProjektRed, Adam Badowski:

This is a big old u-turn on what the company has said previously about crunch, and while not everybody cares about the health of the people making the games they like, plenty of normal people do actually want the developers to be looked after.

Unfortunately, going gold isn't the end of development anymore, and it hasn't been for a long time thanks to things like updates and the good old day one patch.

That means that despite the fact that the game has gone gold now, it's likely that the staff will still be crunching away to make sure that everything works as well as possible when the game launches. We'd still rather see the game delayed than the devs having to crunch, but that's not the reality here it seems.

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