It’s been a long month for Twitch streamers, who’ve spent the past 30 days weathering an ongoing DMCA storm with few signs of reprieve. Today, CD Projekt Red announced that it’s added a new mode to Cyberpunk 2077 with this show-stopping dilemma in mind.
During the latest installment of long-form Cyberpunk commercial series “Night City Wire,” UK head of communications Hollie Bennett explained that the game will have a mode that will not only remove licensed music from the in-game rotation but replace it with music that won’t get creators’ channels zapped out of existence. Handy!
“If you’re planning on livestreaming Cyberpunk, or if you just want to make videos, we want to introduce you to a new mode that will allow you to disable certain copyrighted tracks,” Bennett said. “We know that for content creators, licensed music can sometimes be problematic. So with this new mode, you’ll be able to disable a small number of selected tracks which could cause some issues, replacing them with a different song—helping to avoid any problems.”
On console, this mode will automatically be enabled should you choose to stream, but you can toggle it on and off. On PC, the mode won’t have the auto-enabling functionality.
While features like this have appeared in a handful of other games—for example, Remedy’s 2016 action game Quantum Break—they’re still far from an industry wide norm. In light of recent events, however, expect them to become a lot more common in the near future.
Kotaku reached out to CDPR for additional information about how long this feature has been in the works and what kinds of songs will take the place of licensed music, but the company declined to comment but said that more details are coming soon. Still, at the very least, this means that streamers won’t have to disable music entirely, which can ruin the mood of a game for streamers and viewers. It’s still far from an ideal solution—nothing short of Amazon and Twitch striking a licensing deal with the music industry would be—but for now, it will have to do.