‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Players Are Pissed That Their Customized Penises Don’t Do Anything

For nearly a decade, futuristic open-world role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077 has been among the most-anticipated video games of the century. Within four days of its release, however, the game’s developer, CD Projekt Red, had to issue an apology to disappointed fans: Not only is the gameplay far inferior to what was advertised, but the size and shape of one’s penis has absolutely no impact on the game whatsoever.

“I just don’t get it,” Sam, a 16-year-old in the Czech Republic, laments. “There’s no point to making your penis big or small. Absolutely none.” In fact, he adds, besides a glitch wherein the character’s penis shows through his pants, “you never even see your penis after going through all the trouble of customizing it.”

Allow me to fill in the blanks: Back in May, Cyberpunk 2077 reached peak hype after an announcement that players would be able to customize the shape and size of the main character’s genitalia — a feature that, along with nudity and sex, became a focal point of the game’s marketing. As such, memes and articles abounded, lauding the development as more evidence that the game was going to feature an insane level of attention to detail.

It wasn’t all a lie. While designing your character, you can choose between having an (uncustomizable) vagina, or an uncircumcised or circumcised penis of variable size. From there, you choose whether or not to have breasts (again, sizes vary), and pick the shape and color of your pubic hair. However, after picking your preferred genitalia, it never comes up again in gameplay.

Even in cutscenes where the main character would otherwise be naked, they’re either depicted in underwear or the genitalia players worked so hard (pun unavoidable) to craft is nowhere to be found.

This leaves gamers like Sam struggling to understand the point of having a big dick if CD Projekt Red was gonna come up so small. “You can’t even walk around naked for people to comment on [the size of your penis], which would’ve been something easy they could’ve done,” Sam complains.

“I firmly believe this company ran one of the biggest scams in internet history, up there with the Fyre Festival,” says Rob, a 27-year-old in California. “For whatever reason, they never intended for something as sophisticated as one’s choice in genitals having an impact on gameplay to be in their product. They merely implied or lied about it.”

Case in point, this tweet, in which Cyberpunk’s official Twitter account craftily dodged the question:

“Chekhov’s gun dictates that whatever is in art is there with a purpose,” Rob continues. “In Cyberpunk’s case, whether the purpose was to be practical or to be purely meta, we’ll have to wait for their lies to be investigated to know. But one way or another, we’ll find out soon enough.”

As for any disenchanted gamers out there who want to continue playing Cyberpunk but can’t get past their shortcomings, psychotherapist Rob Weiss has some words of wisdom. “Almost every man I’ve ever worked with has concerns about the size, look and functionality of his penis,” he explains. “But ultimately these individuals find, as Cyberpunk gamers are finding, that the size of their junk doesn’t matter very much. And so, the solution isn’t reshaping their penis, but it’s accepting and learning to love their penis as is.”

Or you know, it’s not the size of the joystick that matters. It’s how you use it that really counts.

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Quinn Myers

Quinn Myers is a staff writer at MEL. He reports on internet culture, technology, health, masculinity and the communities that flourish within.