pandemic arguably pushed this game to an absolutely absurd level of
success. Releasing just as we all realized we would be stuck inside for a
while, nothing sounded more appealing than hanging out and living life
on a virtual island full of homes to decorate and animals to talk to.
The game hasn’t even been out for a full year and has already sold 31
million copies, with at least one of those copies owned by President
Biden staffers.
INVISIBLE WAR
Eventually, things settled into about as “normal” as they could. In-
person events, from industry conferences to esports tournaments,
were cancelled. Still, between the many remote live streams and game
trailers, you could almost pretend we were back on track throughout
the summer.
In retrospect though, the additional troubling signs were already there.
Slowing down and transitioning to a work-from-home setup didn’t
exactly cause problems, but it exacerbated existing ones. Cyberpunk
2077’s development issues run deeper than one bad year, but who
knows how many more technical issues might have been ironed out
before launch without also dealing with COVID-19. New consoles always
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PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S even managed to launch in
2020, considering the constrained supply chain. New Nvidia GPUs are
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These are just the games and products that managed to come out. The
real proof of the pandemic’s impact will be the games that get delayed
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Lord of the Rings: Gollum all slipped from their original dates. Persona
5 Strikers is releasing in North America a year after releasing in Japan,
due in part to COVID-19 delaying localization work.
More interesting, though, are the internal delays we’ll likely never
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