Cyberpunk 2077 now is one of the best RPGs money can buy. But Cyberpunk 2077 then, which is to say when it was new, was not. It was pretty okay on PC, aside from a horde of bugs, but it was such a performance catastrophe on the PlayStation 4 that Sony literally booted it off the PlayStation Store. Even when it was allowed back in the building six months later, Sony slapped a notice on it warning people that it was still potentially dodgy.

Speaking to Game Developer, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said that failure arose from the studio's ambitions for the game, which led it to develop on PC first. "We want[ed] to push the boundaries of what is doable in terms of cinematic feeling and whatnot [in Cyberpunk 2077], and PC was just the best suited rig for that," Nowakowski said. "There was this, as it turned out, false belief that toning it down to whatever was the current gen is not going to be that much of a challenge."

There was also a little bit of belief in a Polish take on the ol' Bioware magic: Nowakowski said the studio "got a bit lucky here and there" with The Witcher 3, leading it to believe that Cyberpunk would ultimately be fine too.

Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 was most definitely not fine, and with that humiliation firmly burned into its collective consciousness, CD Projekt Red is approaching The Witcher 4 with a little more care and consideration to ensure the new game runs properly on all platforms it's coming to. If development hits a snag on any single platform, for instance, the studio stops to fix it rather than simply pressing ahead and coming back to clean it up later.

"For example, technically, we should hit, let's say, 10 checkmarks," Nowakowski said. "Back in the past, if we missed one or two, we were like, 'we're gonna catch up with that later on.' Sometimes we did, but sometimes we didn't, and then two milestones or three milestones down the road, you have like four or five missing checkmarks and it's not that easy."

The net result is parity right from the get-go: "You come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now. You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it's going to run," Nowakowski said.

'We're doing our best to ensure our game runs' is a low bar, sure, but given how poorly Cyberpunk 2077 went at launch it's not surprising that CD Projekt is making the point—and so, here's hoping it's able to pull it off. The Witcher 4 still doesn't have a release date (and probably won't for a good long time yet) but is currently "targeting" a 2028 release.

For gamers who've been following industry news long enough, Sony's recent announcement of plans to end physical PlayStation discs echoed Microsoft's plans for always-online DRM back on the Xbox One. Now, Sony is spiritually following another dead-end path first embraced by Xbox One: live TV.

A PS5 update today adds a "Live TV on PS5" app to the media tab on US consoles. The results look like any other faux-cable streaming service, with a big list of channels to tune into. The service promises an array of movies, TV shows, anime, sports broadcasts, and more, and specific shows like Naruto, Sailor Moon, Community, The Walking Dead, and others are noted in the announcement.

It's along the same lines as the speciality TV stations provided on Roku boxes and similar devices, and honestly, it's a decent value-add for PS5 users. Did I buy a game console to watch Community reruns? No, but I don't mind the option to put on some background noise in the afternoon.

But there's a reason that the trailer for this feature is filled with comments like "it’s like Xbox One all over again," "they've gone full Xbox One," and "hey Don Mattrick is that really you?" When the Xbox One was unveiled in 2013, it was presented not as a game console, but as an all-in-one home entertainment box, which would work as a sort of souped-up DVR that would integrate with cable subscriptions.

This initiative, led by executive Don Mattrick, helped build the impression that Xbox One was abandoning the core gaming audience that the brand was meant to serve. Then came the controversy over the console's always-online DRM plans, which Sony was happy to dunk on alongside the rest of the gaming world.

While Xbox One eventually ditched the DRM and the TV stuff was ultimately a footnote on the console, bad PR dealt the platform a blow that Xbox as a whole has yet to recover from. Now, over a decade later, it's a much different world. Consumer buying habits have shifted mostly to digital. People use their video game consoles as streaming boxes all the time.

But bad PR is bad PR in any era, and Sony's decision to end discs has kicked off a controversy that's shown no signs of slowing down. Whether it actually affects the company's bottom line remains to be seen, but one thing's for sure – PlayStation is making all the wrong choices if it's hoping to win in the court of public opinion.

Sony lawyers argue that nobody is stupid enough to believe they actually own digital games, because then only one person could buy GTA 6.

Blizzard is scrubbing through its new World of Warcraft Mythic Plus Dungeon top-1% rankings for people who paid for carries, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas says.

The timed dungeon mode offered its first-ever rewards at that level this past season in the Midnight expansion, which ended August 11. Unlike similar high-end rewards in PvP combat, this ranking level in Mythic Plus dungeons was a flat percentage of players, rather than a set score they had to achieve.

Some players paid for the privilege, and the glowy red-and-black bird mount that came with the title. These boosts were particularly controversial, as the percentage cutoff meant that every successful carry removed a player that legitimately earned the score.

"The team is doing a thorough scrub of this for Season 1 and will share more with the community soon about how we approached that review, as well as the final results," Hazzikostas said.

A constant grind to keep a reward in sight

"I hit 1% M+ rating yesterday and it lasted for 5 minutes," wrote one typical person on Reddit just before the end of the season. "The 1% cutoff is going up by about 2 points every day. Ninety percent of +21 [level] groups in the group finder are 'note' keys where you need to pay the keyholder to be invited. People are also buying actual boosts en masse because of the new 1% title and resilient keystones making it possible. Playing organically is no longer possible."

The 1% rewards have not yet been awarded in game. Hazzikostas and associate game director Paul Kubit said they are popular and will continue.

Blizzard recently removed the Mythic raiding mount from the accounts of players determined to have paid for them in the game's large-group content, primarily with real-money transactions, which are forbidden by WoW's terms of service.

Carries paid only in gold to specific guilds or individuals appear to be legitimate, based on past Blizzard posts and enforcement actions, but some players caught by the corrective wave in raids say they paid in gold and had their mounts removed anyway. (That's happened in the past when the sellers who got people a ranking or reward took in-game gold in some cases and real money in others, or when cross-server boosting communities were involved.)

Sales are not the only part of the new Mythic Plus rewards that players are heatedly discussing. The decision to make the cutoff a percentage rather than a fixed rating means that people near the cutoff had to play nearly continuously at the end of their season to keep their ranking.

A percentage cutoff to keep things exciting—but did it work?

Kubit, who is in charge of the Midnight expansion, said making the cutoff percentage-based keeps people playing even as their numbers increase over the course of a season.

"This is aimed at the 1%, which is by definition pretty elite, one of those people who really like to push the upper end of what mythic plus gameplay is all about," he says. "We want to make sure that you do truly feel like you can do that, as opposed to laying off the gas."

Numbers suggest that goal may not have entirely played out as expected, however. Raider.io, which tracks Mythic Plus Dungeon statistics, shows that more people played Mythic Plus dungeons at the start and end of Midnight's first season than did the first season in The War Within expansion (about 5.2 million, compared to about 2.5 million), but the drop-off at the end of the season was actually steeper in Midnight than it was in War Within.

Just 12.3% of players were still doing the dungeons at the end of Midnight Season 1, versus 16.8% in War Within. Those numbers of players remained fairly static for the six weeks at the end of both seasons.

Players enthusiastic about a new reward, but mixed on how it was awarded

Players' reactions were decidedly mixed.

"That uncertainty makes the end of the season feel more stressful than exciting," said one typical poster on Reddit.

"The reason a percentile is used is because it correlates with season difficulty. In this particular case 3900 is feasible this season but may not be feasible in others," countered another in the same post.

The addition of "resilient" keys, which don't drop in level once you've completed that difficulty in all available dungeons, has made pushing ever-higher levels—and selling those timed dungeons—easier.

Player versus player rewards were initially based on percentage, as well, near when World of Warcraft first launched. In the Burning Crusade, the top .5% of PvP arena players were awarded Elite mounts. After players complaints about the grind and rampant sales, that was changed to a fixed rating in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, then eventually to the modern system, which requires a fixed rating plus a number of wins above that rating, to help keep the number of sales down.

Class balance makes earning the bird tougher for some players

The composition of groups that are successfully timing Mythic Plus dungeons has also become more homogenized than ever before. While Raider.io charts show a broad variety of the 40 possible character classes and specializations, the vast majority of Mythic Plus keys over level 20 (required for the 1% title) contain some combination of the same seven "meta" specs in each five-player group: guardian druid, unholy death knight, devourer demon hunter, mistweaver monk, augmentation evoker, restoration shaman and retribution paladin.

The top tank specialization, guardian druid, was seen 518,467 times in dungeons recorded on Raider.io at that level over the course of the season. The bottom tank, blood death knight, was seen 7,635. Since many keys are run over and over again by the same players, that boils down to an even tinier number of players who actually completed dungeons at this level.

"When we're thinking about world record folks, then some of the fun of that gameplay is identifying, 'What if I switch to this character in this particular spec, and solve the puzzle that way?' But when you get closer to the 1%, ideally for anyone there, we want you to play the classes and specs that you like playing, that you feel like you're good at," Kubit says. "You shouldn't feel forced into any particular meta spec."

"Obviously players are going to gravitate toward certain specs when we're talking about the 1%," says Andrew De Souza, lead encounter designer. "Ninety-nine percent of players are able to get to Keystone Myth [3400 rating, compared to about 4000 for the top 1%] with any given comp."

Dungeons are designed for all classes to play, but 1% mounts may get more specific

They do watch dungeons to make sure they don't require a specific class, he says.

"In some cases that's going to naturally fit—poisons and curses in Altar of Fangs [dungeon], that's probably going to lean towards [having] a shaman," he says. "We are saying okay, but what if there's not a shaman? What does this pack look like? So we're absolutely making those considerations. It's okay if this class dunks on this trash mob. They're allowed to be awesome here—just within reason. We are trying to serve the largest audience possible."

Blizzard is now figuring out how to implement specialization-specific 1% cutoffs, Hazzikostas says, though it won't be this season—Season 2 just began—and the details remain to be hammered out (including, for example, whether it would still be the top 1% in that scenario). He mentioned the possibility in an interview with PsyBear that ran earlier this week, then kept an eye on the discussion.

"While the spec-specific title reward is something we're excited to explore," he tells us, "there are still a number of logistics, factors, and scenarios we'll need to account for as we build out that capability, to ensure fairness across the board. But it seems from our initial discussion of this idea that this is something the community is equally excited about, so we'll share more when we can."