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Saturday, December 19, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Howdy, this here is Week in Review. Last week, we talked about Wall Street’s virtual reality, this week, I’m taking a look at a couple of pieces of real bad content.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

The Big Story

Don’t rush it.

I woke up Friday to the surprise that Sony had announced they were refunding gamers who had purchased Cyberpunk 2077 and were furthermore just yanking the title from the digital store. You can not care about video games at all and still grasp at what a shocking saga this has been. Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the biggest games of the year, and even after numerous delays the dystopian title arrived buggy as hell, the product of what seemed to be a harshly rushed rollout.

Later in the day, I read how The New York Times had announced they were retracting their hit podcast series “Caliphate” after they were unable to substantiate reporting from a central interviewee that served as the basis for the series. It was a rare fundamental reporting misstep on the Times’ part, but also one that can be seen as the product of rushing to capture enthusiasm around a renewed medium.

New mediums have fundamentally shifted the distribution of art and entertainment, but these are just a couple high-profile examples that showcase how hard you can crash when you betray the fundamentals.

While the NYT’s error is more likely to be categorized as a judgment error from specific people that the org will have to break down and learn from, I think it’s true that journalistic entities — in a rush to embrace new mediums — haven’t quite defined the ethical parameters of pushing news reporting through a magazine journalism lens into a serialized, guided podcast epic that entertains and informs a general audience.

By contrast, CD Projekt SA, which built Cyberpunk, is undoubtedly at the brunt end of an industry-wide corner-cutting of which it just found the limits. Game studios have been shipping incomplete titles for years, relying on day one updates to squash bugs and polish titles over time, an advantage that the systems of yore didn’t possess but that studios have been using as a crutch for too long. This botched rollout is going to be catastrophic for CD Projekt, and I think will serve as an emblematic moment for big studios that are thinking about just shoving their game through the door.

Discover how B2B SaaS SimilarWeb is scaling business in Brazil

Facebook takes aim at Apple
Facebook went on the offensive this week against Apple, suggesting that Apple’s sunsetting of certain ad-tracking tools will directly hurt small businesses. Why should Facebook care so much? Because those rollbacks will hurt it more. More here.

Twitter is shutting down Periscope
Twitter has had an unusually active year in terms of feature updates and it might have something to do with those activist investors trying to oust Jack. This week, Twitter announced that it was shutting down Periscope as a distinct app as part of an effort to further streamline functionality. Read more here.

Apple launches Fitness+
Apple finally dropped their Peloton competitor this week — no, not an exercise bike — but a digital subscription workout app with guided lessons. Read more here.