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We were tempted to just republish the last Cyberpunk 2077 delay news, like The Onion’s famous “only country where this happens” news story.

OK, here’s the news: Cyberpunk 2077 is delayed again.

In a statement on Twitter, CD Projekt Red founders Marcin Iwiński and Adam Kicinski announced that Cyberpunk 2077 would be delayed by a further 21 days, to December 10, 2020.

Citing the difficulties of releasing a game across nine platforms – PC, PS4, PS4 Pro, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and Stadia – and further challenges of remote working due to COVID 19, they also acknowledged that fans may be surprised given the game has already “gone gold” several weeks ago.

And if all you care about is the game’s release date, you’ll probably stop reading there. That’s fine. That’s your call. But I’m not going to stop there.

This obviously isn’t the first time Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed – we’ve lost count of the number of times, to be honest – but don’t think that a delay at this stage will take pressure off the already-beleaguered development team, buried deep in mandatory crunch. CD Projekt Red’s development team will now be going into what some in the industry refer to as the “death march”, where the crunch continues at a relentless pace to make sure the game meets its new deadline without further delays.

And that’s to say nothing of the game’s other issues, which include serious problems with transgender representation, cultural appropriation and racial stereotypes.

Cyberpunk 2077 will release, eventually, and it will no doubt be a massive critical and commercial success. The labour issues will likely abate when that happens – at least, until the next thing that causes CD Projekt Red to pick up the whip – but the game’s problematic representation will remain, a minor footnote on a Metacritic score in the 90s.

They’ll probably just trot out another video of Keanu Reeves to distract us.

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