Fans and journalists were wowed by cyberpunk 2077 to ambition and scale. What they didn't know was that the demo was almost entirely fake.

It's hard for a trade show game demo two years before the game ships, but that doesn't mean it's fake. Compare the demo with the game. Look it that Dumdum scene or the car chase, or the many other things. What the people reading your article may not know is that games are not made in a linear fashion and start looking like the final product only a few months before launch. If you look at that demo now, it's different yes, but that's what the "work in progress" watermark is for. Our final game looks and plays way better than what that demo ever was.

As for missing features, that's part of the creation process. Features, and go as we see if they will work or not. Also, Karin bush's exist in the final game almost verbatim to what we showed in the demo.

And if we get a bit more granular about our release, the vision we presented in this demo evolved into something that got multiple 9/10s and 10/10s on PC from many renown gaming outlets in the world.

As for the old-gen consoles, yes that is another case, but we've owned up to that and are working super hard to eliminate bugs (on PC two we know that's not a perfect version either) and we're proud of Cyberpunk 2077 as a game and artistic vision. This all is not what I'd call disastrous.

Most of the staff knew and openly said it wouldn't be ready for release in 2020.

You've talked with 20 people, some being ex employees, only 1 of whom is not anonymous. I would not call that most of the over 500-people staff openly said what you claim.

A few non-Polish staffers shared stories about coworkers using Polish in front of them, which violated company rules. Made them feel ostracized, they said... were their coworkers talking shit about them?

Everyone here speaks English during meetings, every company-wide e-mail and announcement is in English - all that is mandatory. Rule of thumb is to switch to a English when there's a person not speaking a given language in a casual conversation.

It is, however, pretty normal for Germans speaking German, Poles speaking Polish, Spaniards speaking Spanish etc. (there are 44 nationalities at the studio you get the point) when there's no one else around.

If the question is if it's hard to move to another country, sometimes culture, and work and live there, then the answer is yes. But that's universal to every company all over the world and we're doing what we can to ease the transition.