In a new report, former and current employees of Romanian QA outsourcing firm Quantic Lab spoke about mismanagement at the company and explained how it affected Cyberpunk 2077's problematic launch.
A new report once again drew the public's attention to dubious business practices in Romania-based quality assurance outsourcing firm Quantic Lab.
According to several current and former employees of the company, Quantic Lab's management not only pressures the team to work overtime but also misleads clients about the size and competency of its QA teams and makes its staff lie to clients and create the appearance of full teams.
The story was first reported by the YouTube channel Upper Echelon Gamers which posted several videos covering mismanagement at the company and how it affected the problematic launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
It was later corroborated by the Romanian tech journalist Doru Șupeală and the Romanian outlet Libertatea which cited several Quantic's employees who spoke about poor working conditions, harassment, and emotional abuse at the company, as well as fraud.
And now, a new report from PC Gamer has added some more details to the story. According to former and current Quantic's employees that PC Gamer spoke to, the company is "constantly operating beyond its means" accepting more projects than it has the capacity for, which is why a number of projects are left short-staffed, while the employees are pressured to lie to clients about the size of the teams.
One former employee stated that "it was common to see entire projects handled by one person, which actually needed a team of one to three testers" as well some lead testers had to handle two or three projects at a time with "fewer than needed testers assigned to each one."
More than that, the QA teams often didn't have experienced testers, and even those who were considered "experienced" ones didn't actually have more than one year of experience. That is why, as employees claim, the lead testers were often given directives to keep up the fiction of teams' sizes and the competency of their members when talking with clients.
Among the projects that Quantic Lab was working on were Cyberpunk 2077 and NBA 2K21. According to the employees, these two big projects were a "gravity well" for the company that pulled testers from other projects leaving them understaffed. However, having more testers working on Cyberpunk 2077 and NBA 2K21 didn't mean that these projects didn't have any problems.
Apart from the fact that QA teams at the company lacked professional testers, another issue here was that testers were filing a number of low-impact bug reports in order to match daily quotas set by Quantic management. This is why CD Project RED mostly received reports of low-priority graphical glitches instead of higher-priority issues like the progress-blocking main quest glitches that eventually made it to the final release.
In addition to all these issues, the report also covers other numerous problems at the company including low pay and the toxic environment at the company. You can learn more about these issues by reading the full PC Gamer report here.
Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.