Higher-up greed disguised as "passion" and "perfectionism", by penny-pinching every employee to offset the "costs" of the delay.
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CDPR Bosses in 2019: "No mandatory crunch." 2020: "Never mind, mandatory crunch."
- Thread starter Jawbreaker
- Start date
To be clear -- I am not calling out jschreier on this individually, nor uniquely. His reporting has been excellent, as always. I just think the trend over the last few years of beating the "let's eliminate crunch" drum is misguided/unrealistic. I think a lot of others in the games industry would agree. It doesn't mean the journalists reporting on it aren't doing a good job of representing the reality of the industry, but the end-goal being called for just feels untenable.
Agreed, working in tech up until launch uncovers a lot of "last minute" fixing of various bugs that usually aren't uncovered until late in the process. There's not really any way to avoid it due to how things are scheduled, and sometimes the solutions for fixes aren't always easy.
Obviously perpetual crunch can lead to burnout but there are many industries where you'll need to work 6 days per week for a few weeks to meet an important deadline. I don't see this as being something terrible, and generally those working crunch do get compensated for their additional time.
It's not a proper review build IIRC, but a preview one with some new content we haven't seen. Brazilian journalists have been able to play for up to 3 hours. They've been publishing articles, I'm assuming we'll get some more in a week or two.
Jogamos Cyberpunk 2077: tire suas dúvidas sobre gameplay e história
Cyberpunk 2077 é um dos jogos mais esperados de 2020. Jogamos uma prévia de três horas e contamos as principais novidades sobre armas, personagens e gameplay.
Preview de Cyberpunk 2077: o jogo mais ambicioso do século?
Jogamos bastante e temos muito o que falar sobre o game mais esperado do ano
Cyberpunk 2077: Um show de armas, distopia e tecnologia
Jogamos o novo game da CD Projekt Red, desenvolvedora de The Witcher 3
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Is that the case with CDPR though? From what I've seen different devs on twitter talk about CDPR, they don't seem to be trying to eliminate crunch so much as making it their norm. And then their's CDPR's own comments, particularly the one I remember was something like not being able to stand the heat, get out of the kitchen?
You don't have unlimited time and money, but it's absolutely not inevitable. This has to due with putting scope on an unrealistically short timeline and release date without presenting to investors from the start what it truly costs in months and salaries to get it done fairly. They stick to what they think will be a bankable release, and they promise to minimize the delay that is seen as an obstacle to revenue, even when the new delay period itself is not realistic to begin with for employees to maintain their reasonable schedule.
It's not bad management. Bad management implies that it's an error or something. It's wanting to make as much money as possible, knowing that working people to death is profitable, and knowing that the workers don't have enough power to say no.
You're saying crunch is specially a game development thing?? Really??
No. Nope. 100% disagree and anyone with any amount of corporate software development experience would disagree with you as well. 200% in fact.
Yeah, and then there is no need to think of ps4 or ps5 box, It will be there and the robust update next year will just automatically apply! I am hyped though.
You should name these devs that don't crunch or exploit game developers on some level.
They kept preview even back in... June. Some were on-location (e.g. Polish media) and others played remotely through streaming.
Now they have apparently had another round of previews to media via streaming with same build from back May / June.
Just look up "Cyberpunk 2077 preview" and for articles from Summer.
My take on this is that if this was the only crunch the devs had to do (i.e. a month or so until release) and it's paid in full, I don't have a real issue with it. This is what tends to happen when massive projects come together at the end.
The problem is it sounds like the devs have been crunching for months/years on end which is totally unacceptable. It's just poor management.
The problem is it sounds like the devs have been crunching for months/years on end which is totally unacceptable. It's just poor management.
Again, this post is missing the point. The point isn't that "crunch is avoidable" or "crunch is unique to games" or any of that.
It's that CDPR went on the record for whatever reason to write a check that they NEARLY IMMEDIATELY couldn't cash. The same project. Come on.
I'm not naive enough to think you're going to get a game like TLOU2, Cyberpunk, or anything on that scale without crunch. Maybe you can! I don't make games. Seems tough, expensive and unlikely, but who knows!
Just don't tell people that you won't do it at your studio (because evidently you've solved the mystery of game development!), only to turn around and do exactly that in a laughably short amount of time.
as I posted on twitter and going to share here, please don't bash me I'm just exposing my experience.
I've been in the field for the last 9 years, moved from Brazil to the US working just with development. I've been in 6 companies during those years and it's really common (even with that don't mean it's cool or good) practice for that to happen.
I don't work in the game industry (ERP - CRM field) and we sometimes need to do overtime to ship a product/update.
I am a CDPR fanboy and I'm really waiting for cyberpunk to be launched (as you can clearly see by my handle on twitter and picture on the forum) but by far all people I've spoken who are working into deploying the game probably have feelings for the product receiving all the praise they can get, so I think they probably had a meeting with higher management and are OK with that "crush" push for the next 2-3 weeks (the game is 50 days away, needs to go gold soon)
And please guys, before saying that I don't have the respect for myself or I'm "licking boots of bad management" things happens. I just wanted to express my view of the situation
I've been in the field for the last 9 years, moved from Brazil to the US working just with development. I've been in 6 companies during those years and it's really common (even with that don't mean it's cool or good) practice for that to happen.
I don't work in the game industry (ERP - CRM field) and we sometimes need to do overtime to ship a product/update.
I am a CDPR fanboy and I'm really waiting for cyberpunk to be launched (as you can clearly see by my handle on twitter and picture on the forum) but by far all people I've spoken who are working into deploying the game probably have feelings for the product receiving all the praise they can get, so I think they probably had a meeting with higher management and are OK with that "crush" push for the next 2-3 weeks (the game is 50 days away, needs to go gold soon)
And please guys, before saying that I don't have the respect for myself or I'm "licking boots of bad management" things happens. I just wanted to express my view of the situation
"We are known for treating gamers with respect," Iwinski said. "I actually would [like] for us to also be known for treating developers with respect whenever it doesn't impact the bottom line."
What's the reason that it's unrealistic? Are we not in an era where we can properly manage schedules?
Everyone who works in game development knows that its incredibly chaotic and difficult. Everyone. You simply cannot predict what is going to happen when you finally implement a mechanic or system in your game.
But you can give yourself and your team a massive buffer of time, and not set launch dates 8 months away. Change the culture. Change the management style. I'm tired of hearing it's not possible to fix the problem because game development inherently encapsulates fixing problems. We know this. We work in this industry. Never give an ETA because ETA = Expectations To Avoid. You give an ETA, you've created the pressure, and the pressure is always going to result in someone or something being fucked over.
I did corporate software development with strict shipping deadlines and sustained weeks crunch were unheard of. Sure the week before GA you might get the odd 12 hours work day but outside of that it was normal working hours
is it almost like something disrupted their plans this year.
but what could it be???
mmmmmmhmmmm
what could it be...
A game of this scale will always have crunch, even if it's delayed by months and a year. Crunch sucks? Definitely. These guys, however, are on a quest to try and make a game that will be remembered as one of the best of the generation. You don't earn that by delaying the game more and more by months and years until another dev comes with a great game and steals your lunch. They want to put their minds and souls in that project and then later collect the rewards.
I guess it's like if you want to get a job working with the government, or become a judge, or something similar with a job that has few slots but pays a lot. You will have to study a fuck ton. Spend days and nights studying to get ready for your test. And then after you are done and hopefully get that job? Then you just collect the rewards.
I guess it's like if you want to get a job working with the government, or become a judge, or something similar with a job that has few slots but pays a lot. You will have to study a fuck ton. Spend days and nights studying to get ready for your test. And then after you are done and hopefully get that job? Then you just collect the rewards.
Infinite time and money don't exist for a majority of studios, which is what your suggestion would require. It's much more than changing culture and management style.
"But we've extended all other possible means of navigating the situation."
This sounds really concerning. Sounds like the game is still riddled with bugs. I was really hoping the extra ten months development would mean less crunch on the devs and a more polished product for the consumer........
This sounds really concerning. Sounds like the game is still riddled with bugs. I was really hoping the extra ten months development would mean less crunch on the devs and a more polished product for the consumer........
I'm not very familiar with the culture at CDPR, so I'm afraid I can't speak to it. From my limited exposure to them, they seem like a studio that means well and has a lot of passionate people working on really ambitious projects. Beyond that, it's hard for me to say what else is going on betwixt their walls.
I'd say this is a case of Hanlon's razor -- never attribute to malice what can be more easily explained by stupidity, or perhaps in this case, naïveté.
Sometimes it's not always scope in an unrealistic timeline -- sometimes the timeline is perfectly adequate for the scope, but you have no way of predicting what kind of issues will appear, and when they will appear, when building something as uniquely complex as a video game. It might be one of the most complex areas of software engineering, which requires interoperability by dozens, if not hundreds, of hugely complex systems. It doesn't help that often times in game development, your pipeline doesn't start really coming together in a cohesive way until the last few months of development, which are the most critical and most likely to lead to crunch being necessary. Had you given the team more time from the get-go, the likely outcome is that crunch still would've happened, just closer to the new date.
In this case, I don't see an unrealistic production schedule and CDPR has already made the concession of delaying the game twice. It's definitely an ambitious project. I don't see a timeline where no crunch happens on this game.
Like someone else has said, games is a business. There is not unlimited time and money. There are schedules, and there are expectations to meet, and you need to market around a release date if you want your game to be successful -- unless you're in a very unique position which very, very few studios are in. Valve is one of them. It was nice, I'll admit, but also brought its own host of problems (not releasing new titles and seeing multiple things get shelved was demoralizing for a lot of us, just as much as crunch might be to others). Not everyone, actually -- almost nobody -- can replicate Valve's situation.
Yeah, but the thing is that this doesn't pay a lot. There's no reward for that. Will you remember the names of every single developer that worked on the game? The developers won't make a single penny from the sale or anything, so it doesn't matter if it's know as the best game of all time ir the worst game, it's just more work.
What? But Era posters keep telling me that CDPR are the only good publisher and are the saviours of the game industry?! How could CDPR do this I'm pissing myself right now!
Not for too long that's for sure. At some point these huge projects will simply be too expensive to become profitable, the continuing cycle of development teams getting bigger and development times getting longer has to stop at some point.
You can't possibly be surprised? I remember someone once started a thread with the thesis of " I know crunch is terrible and I know I'm being selfish but please crunch because I need my game."
Well I would like to hope this would at least give people pause every time one starts to say "why can't more companies aim for the Rockstar/CDPR standard of quality" considering the cost on the employee side associated with that that is very well known by this point.
But I know it won't. Sure people will bring it up "but they crunch their employees" whenever a studio makes a game they don't like and that kind of story about it is floating around, but the second it gets to games one actually wants suddenly there's a million and one reasons why severe crunch is a-ok.
But I know it won't. Sure people will bring it up "but they crunch their employees" whenever a studio makes a game they don't like and that kind of story about it is floating around, but the second it gets to games one actually wants suddenly there's a million and one reasons why severe crunch is a-ok.
Bad management doesn't imply an error, it implies that you're not good at managing a project for the good of all. Managers are meant to be there to help get things done, including enabling their staff to do great work, feel appreciated and kept healthy. People somehow have turned Management into meaning "Get shit done at any cost so other people (the owners of the company) can get another yacht". It's all a big scam and we fell for it hook, line and sinker.
They shouldn't have promised to not do crunch then =P
Hell, they already delayed this game like 5 times ... why not again?
It is like the "no politics in cyberpunk" thing ... we would have no problem if they just released the game, but one week they say this game does not have politics and the next they say it has =P
Under Polish Law can an employer force an employee to complete mandatory (paid) overtime?
I'm sure this couldn't happen in the UK, not sure about USA?
I'm sure this couldn't happen in the UK, not sure about USA?
I have worked on some massive non-games related software projects (as architect vs developer, but still). There has been some crunch "sometimes" close to release but normally quite brief (at most week or two). However, inside Game industry, crunch for months upon months is normalized.
You have folks who could go, get a job at their or higher seniority level, get a significant raise, and have better job security and better work/life balance. Something is clearly wrong.
I disagree you need infinite of either. There is a solution here, and its tangible and realistic.
Well like anything in life, unexpected things happens.
if there's problems they definitely should delay but there's more than just saying crunch is bad
At this point it'd be more surprising to make a story when a AAA game doesn't have crunch. Sad stuff.
Wasn't CDPR supposed to shed their talent like crazy post Witcher 3? No wonder why, if so. Wouldn't be surprised if they are currently losing a lot of talent as well with C77 on the final stretch. We may see various promising new studios made of ex-CDPR people.
Under EU law, you can sign away your rights away to not work over the working hour limit which is something like 56 hrs. Technically it's voluntary but that's "technically", we all know employeers have plenty of ways of pressuring their staff into things
I knew this avatar was familiar, I love how you're pretending to care now mr. "TLOU II gave me feelings so sorry to the lives of the devs give me my game". I guess ND gets a pass hm?
https://www.resetera.com/threads/wo...ther-gotg-like-the-last-of-us-part-ii.280457/