My team an I spent months obsessing over the REDlauncher interface, trying to make it a seamless "handshake" between players and Cyberpunk's Night City.
Then the game was released, and one million people tried to shake our hand. After having some time to reflect on everything that happened, I noted a few lessons from leading the design for this project.
Peak of the storm
1M concurrent players was surreal. For a single player RPG, those numbers were unheard of. Fair to say it was quite a test for our infrastructure.
While the headlines were (rightfully) focused on the technical bugs within the game, my world narrowed down to that launcher window.
It was the gateway for the majority of those 8 million preorders that went digital.
Unexpected lifeline
We anticipated the so called launcher fatigue (gamers questioning why another launcher is necessary is nothing new), but beyond just starting the game and collecting in-game rewards, the launcher became critical.
It was the primary delivery vehicle for information about the emergency patches we scrambled to release in those first 30 days to keep the experience from falling apart.
A secondary function quickly became its most important one.
Utility beats aesthetics in a crisis
We had all these beautiful ideas for the UI, but when $1 billion in revenue flowed in over ten days, the only thing that mattered was: did the “Play” button work? did it stop crashing? what to do to make people see that the massive patch download is still progressing?
In a crisis and at this scale, elegance is a luxury. Reliability is everything.
The human cost of the “win”
The burnout was real. Seeing that huge player drop-off by the end of the month was a gut punch for many.
You can build a "bridge", but if people don’t like the destination, it takes a lot to win them back (especially in gaming).