Darvond: Unfortunately no. Nor have I seen Hackers or even Get Smart or The Man from Uncle.

Magnitus: Given that we don't have access to GOG's financial information

Magnitus: To be fair, a lot of places are like this for some time after starting up.

They have very limited money when they start so they'll either hire a very small team of cheap in-house developers (I try not to stereotype, but I've observed a pattern where a lot of those developers implement the whole thing in php) to implement their website or they'll outsource the coding to a small company, specialised in making websites on the quick. Either way, the rule of the game is to implement everything yesterday on a shoestring budget.

Even if the developers involved were top notch developers (they usually aren't... most of them haven't updated their skills enough to use anything better than php afterall and often will lack awareness of sound design patterns/standards like using proper REST for http apis even over a decade after such patterns have become widely known), the time constraints pretty much guarantee that the resulting system will suffer from significant technical debt right out the door.

From there, they'll hopefully start making money and the amount of income they generate will dictate the future quality of the system. If they make tons of cash, they'll be able to hire one or more teams of skilled developers with more time to improve the code (at that point, they'll either do a complete rewrite from scratch or slowly refactor away the legacy codebase, depending on how much of a mess things really were and how much resources they can invest).

If they don't make as much money as originally anticipated (keeping in mind that their primary goal is to turn up a healthy profit, they won't hire a crack team of developers if it will eat away a significant portion of their profits, even if they could do so while remaining green), then technical debt won't be repaid (or will be repaid extremely slowly) and the system will probably remain cr*ppy for the remainder of the company's lifespan (after which it will, thankfully, be shelved).

Given that we don't have access to GOG's financial information (and frankly, I haven't taken a look at their codebase, though the fact that they are still working in php is definitely not a good sign), its hard to know exactly what is happening there.

Magnitus: Financial reasons, more than anything else. The private company will usually be able to pay more for talent.

kohlrak: Actually, going public usually offers you more liquid assets immediately, which is the primary reason to go public. The reason is strictly legal why this happens, though: a public company's stocks are traded, on average, 40 seconds after being bought. This means that usually people are milking the fluctuations in the stock market for retirement funds and the like, not actually investing in companies (which is what happens at the private level). Due to this, the law will punish companies that drop alot in value in favor of hiring the best and brightest in hopes for a larger return on said investment.

Magnitus: Ah, it just occurred to me that I misconstrued your meaning.

You meant private vs publicly traded companies and I thought you meant privately owned companies vs crown corporations (ie, companies that are essentially state owned).

Then yes, you are correct: obligations toward profit-driven investors is a limiting factor concerning what the company can do and nips any concept of self-determination right in the bud (a publicly traded company is more akin to a piece of software written to make money than it is to an individual... its behaviour in the face of most moral quandaries tends to be predictable).

For this reason, I personally find that private company have the capacity to make moral decisions, unlike publicly traded companies (though morally, I would still place them below the average guy on the street, not because the average guy on the street is better, but because on average, self-determined entities have a tendency to act toward self-interest and the amount of power the average guy in the street has is more or less proportional to his share in the self-interest pie while the amount of power your typical medium to large company has tends to be disproportionate relative to their share of the self-interest pie).

Zrevnur: This article (German unfortunately) wonders if CDPR was the buyer:
https://tarnkappe.info/cyberpunk-2077-quellcode-nach-ransomware-angriff-verkauft/
It also says this suspicion came from Twitter. The reasoning in the article is like:

The buyer was anonymous.
The buyer demanded that nothing (else) was to be leaked.
And nothing (else) was leaked.

It also names 'Victoria Kivilevich' - supposedly a security analyst from 'KELA' - as a source. No mention of the suspicions here that the hackers just wanted to 'save face' and failed to sell anything.

john_hatcher: Oh, how convenient. Now the hackers are responsible for the delays and superb Cyberjunk game. Good thing I never preordered this game.

Zrevnur: As CDP is publicly traded they need to release some: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/financial-summary-report/
There is also some more detail information including some about GOG somewhere there.

Mortius1: It looks like the recovery process still has a long way to go.

CD Projekt Ransomware Hack Severely Disrupts Work on Cyberpunk Updates Mortius1: ... Mortius1: These workers can do nothing except twiddle their thumbs, as they have been asked to ship remaining computers back to CDPR's IT department for malware scans.

I suspect that people making unofficial fan patches will be more productive this month.