Daily Briefing, Monday 14th December 2020

Hello, friends, and welcome to another issue of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news straight to your chosen screen.

CD Projekt Red apologise for Cyberpunk 2077's PS4/Xbox One issues

The studio have apologised for now showing Cyberpunk 2077 running on the base last-gen consoles before release and have confirmed that they will be allowing refunds for digital and physical copies of the game - saying they "should have paid more attention" to last-gen performance.

• CDPR have confirmed a new update, due to release within the next week, will target some of the game's more glaring bugs, crashes, and performance issues. Two additional updates, intended to release in January and February, will fix should fix the "most prominent" last-gen issues. Here's to hoping.

Cyberpunk 2077 devs will still get full bonuses despite issues

CDPR staff's initial bonus arrangement for Cyberpunk 2077 was centred around the game obtaining certain review scores at release. This idea has been scrapped, with studio head Adam Badowski telling staff they "did everything [they] could to deliver an ambitious, special game."

• Reviews for Cyberpunk 2077 may be mixed but sales have been solid - with the game already recouping development and initial marketing costs. CDPR staff are promised a 10% of annual profits, too.

EA pip Take-Two to Codemasters sale

The $1.2bn deal was a rather ballsy move from EA, who sniped in at the last minute just as Take-Two's $994m acquisition deal looked like a done deal - it is unknown whether Take-Two will/can respond with a counter offer.

• The EA deal, like Take-Two's, is expected to close in Q1 2021- with EA gaining access to one of the world's foremost developers of racing games. EA's Andrew Wilson says the company have "admired" Codemasters for many years, so we'll see what becomes of this union.

Steam breaks concurrent user record yet again

This past weekend was a busy couple of days for Steam, as it looks to have broken its own concurrent users record twice in as many days - peaking at a whopping 24.8m simultaneous users according to SteamDB.

• Steam's previous concurrent users record, of just over 22m users, dates back to March of this year when Steam broke user records for three consecutive weeks. Cyberpunk 2077 probably played a hand this time around - it reached 1m Steam players within two hours of launch.

Elden Ring news could be right around the corner

Elder Ring may have been the Most Anticipated Game at last week's Game Awards but it didn't actually appear in the show, and we haven't heard anything substantial about it in quite a while - but could that be about to change?

• VentureBeat's Jeff Grubb certainly seems to think so - stating that we should "just give it a month or two more." Grubb advised fans to have "just a little bit more" patience and, while the next Elden Ring news may not be super soon, it also won't be "months and months and months."

That's everything for today - catch us back here tomorrow for another batch of gaming news!