Cyberpunk’s QA partner responds to allegations and claims ‘a lack of understanding of how a game is tested’

The outsourced QA team behind Cyberpunk 2077 has responded to claims that it misled CD Projekt Red over the experience of its team working on the game, and accused the person behind the original report of having “a lack of understanding… of how a game is tested”.

Earlier this week, YouTube channel Upper Echelon Gamers released a video in which it claimed to have received confidential documents from an employee at Romania-based Quantic Lab, the external QA company behind Cyberpunk 2077.

The documents allegedly painted a picture of several things that went wrong during the QA process, and how Quantic Lab work may have contributed to the overall poor quality of the game when it was released.

According to the report, CD Project was under the impression that a team of veteran QA testers was working on the game at Quantic Lab, which had previously carried out similar work on other projects for the company, including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Gwent: The Witcher Card Game.

However, UEG’s report claims, among other allegations, that the external QA team working on Cyberpunk 2077 was almost completely comprised of junior members of staff with less than one year of experience.

In a response to the report issued to VGC on Tuesday, Quantic Lab CEO Stefan Seicarescu said the company “always strives to work with transparency and integrity with our industry partners”.

While Seicarescu did not explicitly deny the specific allegations made in the video,  he claimed it included inaccuracies about Quantic Lab, and claimed that its creator appeared to show a misunderstanding about how the QA process works.

“The video published on social media as mentioned in your article starts with incorrect statements about Quantic Lab’s history,” Seicarescu said. “There seems to be a lack of understanding in the process of how a game is tested before its release to the market.”

He said Quantic Lab currently employs over 400 employees across three offices in Romania and that it has over 60 active clients.

“Quantic Lab supports over 200 projects per year from several global leading publishers and continues to maintain a quality comes first approach to all the work we undertake.”

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Cyberpunk 2077’s external QA team allegedly misled CD Projekt over its experience

Confidential documents are claimed to show what went wrong during the QA process

Seicarescu also appeared to suggest that multiple parties may have contributed to the poor quality of Cyberpunk 2077, which was released in December 2020 with a host of technical problems, resulting in refunds being offered and the title being pulled from the PlayStation Store.

“All our customer agreements are confidential but in general, global publishers are working with several QA outsourcing companies, not depending solely on one, in addition to internal QA resources at developer level in most cases,” Seicarescu said.

“Each project we undertake is unique with regard project requirements. Project direction is agreed and adjusted accordingly as per real time requirements with our clients.

“Quantic Lab always strives to work with transparency and integrity with our industry partners.”

Approached for comment on Upper Echelon Gamers’ report on Monday, a CD Projekt Red spokesperson told VGC the company does “not comment on rumours”.