A lot of people were worried that a big privately owned gaming corporation wouldn't be able to do justice to the inherently anti-capitalist message of the Cyberpunk genre, well look who's laughing now! We have:
-Labor overworked and exploited, made to work under intense pressure and hours to most efficiently pump out the game as soon as possible because the executives wrote a check the dev team couldn't cash by dropping the announcement way too early
-Duplicitious marketing teams outright lying about a product with impunity, effectively fooling consumers into buying a product they wouldn't get with misleading advertising
-Similarly, the advertising aimed to create sort of a cult of personality around the game largely relying on the team's good reputation from the Witcher- this is a subtle point that a lot of you might not meet me on, but the purpose of the advertising wasn't to sell the game, but to capture the audience and appeal to one of the most degrading facets of late stage capitalism- Consumer Culture has almost taken over the identity of the modern individual, meaning we make an identity out of the media we consume, it becomes who we are instead of what we enjoy and subsumes our social relationships with the world around us- anyone who's ever been on Tinder knows this, it's really quite sad seeing people who can't think of anything to say about themselves except that they like The Office and one particular song.
-A product explicitly betraying it's own philosophy of 'it'll be ready when it's ready' because the corporate team no doubt wanted to squeeze it in 1. Before Christmas, and 2. Before the PS4 and XB1's life cycle was outmoded by the next gen of consoles. They knew it wasn't ready, but shipped it anyway because muh line.
It's quite funny that in this debacle, the game has made an amazing point about how thoroughly Capitalism corrupts, commodifies, and destroys art, and how the interests of the corporate bourgeoisie are inherently antithetical to the interests and creative vision of those who create it. However the fact is that Capitalism necessitates cooperation between those two in the creation of art, and like everything that's sold on a market, the interests of capital always win because they by definition have the money and the power to decide. And their financial interests come first, the integrity of the art is a distant second if even that.
Most poignantly of course this game paints this picture on the real life canvas of the gaming industry, but this process applies to all popular culture including movies, tv, and even sports. Everything original and creative will be captured, sanded down until nothing authentic remains, and spit back out as the corpos see fit. And it doesn't stop there, Capitalism in ALL ventures is fundamentally defined by a neverending, mindlessly destructive pursuit of acceleration and growth- this is a non-negotiable part of Capitalism, because that's literally what capital means, money that begets more money. Capital will always prefer to crunch their employees, shovel out the product before it's ideal release date, cut away all the rough edges that make something unique to appeal to the lowest common denominator, market their product as dazzlingly as possible, and treat both the worker and the consumer as numbers in an equation or cattle on the feed instead of people with interests as a class.
What is the message of Cyberpunk in this moment? Art is just another theater of the class war. Someone should make a game about that.