Never heard of this company, but i bet their games aren't very successful without a 2 year hype/marketing cycle and an obsession with pushing visual fidelity as far as possible.
Hows my aim?
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CDPR Bosses in 2019: "No mandatory crunch." 2020: "Never mind, mandatory crunch."
- Thread starter Jawbreaker
- Start date
Never heard of this company, but i bet their games aren't very successful without a 2 year hype/marketing cycle and an obsession with pushing visual fidelity as far as possible.
Hows my aim?
So many responses on twitter to Jason's article are horrific.
I know this is old news and I shouldn't be surprised, but there's such a striking lack of empathy in the gaming community. It honestly makes me feel guilty for being as into games as I am. Such an awful group of people (not everyone, but far too many).
I know this is old news and I shouldn't be surprised, but there's such a striking lack of empathy in the gaming community. It honestly makes me feel guilty for being as into games as I am. Such an awful group of people (not everyone, but far too many).
Honestly not fully aware, I've always seen discussion of him involving super serious analytical gaming talk, from what I know its just super bad takes like EVERYTIME he is brought up.
Someone else might be able to explain better
Doesn't the quality of ones work as a result of fatigue ultimately pour into the results of your labor?
It is one thing to be proud of your work and happy to create something of artistic merit, but isn't it also true that being tired from an unhealthy work ethic also affect the quality of your work to suffer due to not being able to achieve your best results, especially from a physical and mental health standpoint?
It is one thing to be proud of your work and happy to create something of artistic merit, but isn't it also true that being tired from an unhealthy work ethic also affect the quality of your work to suffer due to not being able to achieve your best results, especially from a physical and mental health standpoint?
I really don't get the "delays don't help with crunch" talking point. They sure can if a genuine will is there at the top to make reduction of crunch a priority and the delay is long enough
Extreme example, but let's say they delay the game for two years, force all employees to take a month of paid vacation immediately, and then say that for the remaining 23 months of development, no one is allowed to ever work more than 40 hour weeks. Of course that would remove crunch
You can remove/reduce crunch but it's a tradeoff between studio profitability and quality of life of employees. What you're saying is that many studios are not willing to balance that tradeoff in favor of their employees
Extreme example, but let's say they delay the game for two years, force all employees to take a month of paid vacation immediately, and then say that for the remaining 23 months of development, no one is allowed to ever work more than 40 hour weeks. Of course that would remove crunch
You can remove/reduce crunch but it's a tradeoff between studio profitability and quality of life of employees. What you're saying is that many studios are not willing to balance that tradeoff in favor of their employees
This doesn't really work unless you're a company as big as Nintendo with a steady income through evergreen titles, consoles and a new release every 2-3 months. CPDR is a publically listed company and I can't imagine their stakeholders would be too happy if all they heard for the past 5 years was "We're working on something, it's coming sometime. Please be excited".
Mandatory crunch when they had promised otherwise is obviously bad, but even if a company WANTS to do better for their employers it still (sadly) needs to play by the rules of capitalism. This means there's no such thing as infinite time or money.
There's a whole discussion to be had on whether games with the size and scope of TLOU 2/RDR 2/Cyberpunk are even sustainable and healthy for the industry. but that's for another thread.
Yep. The same people who criticize crunch on one thread will be complaining about minor graphical downgrades a few weeks later. The culture is rotten and this incredible pressure on developers to push for the absolute best tech possible is bad for everyone.
Yeah it's impressive that the balls of a horse shrink when it's colder in Red Dead Redemption 2, but it couldn't matter less in the grand scheme of things. I wonder how many of these little things could be removed from the game without changing its quality even one bit while also making the development process much smoother for everyone involved.
6/7 weeks of crunch is totally different from months or even years that we've heard from other companies. Still saying no more mandatory crunch, then doing it anyway is a scumbag move.
I certainly don't disagree with any of that, but some could argue a title like The Witcher 3, which enjoyed a huge resurgence last year when the Netflix show came out, provided plenty enough steady income to sustain them a while longer. That said, I completely agree that it's much harder when your portfolio entirely consists of a couple big games. Thankfully though, they'll get there over time, as I think we've entered a period in games where products don't become obsolete nearly as fast as they used to. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk will be worthwhile products for much longer than, say, Witcher 1 or even 2 have been. Technologically, we've reached a point where it's no longer as hard to go back to games from 5-10 years ago as it used to be.
Good point. I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to crunch if they were part-owners of the game, and they were crunching for their own cheddar. I'm talking getting 0.1% of the net profit of the game in perpetuity on top of your salary. Could be $100k or $200k the first 5 years if the game is a big hit. That's half the price of a nice apartment in Warsaw. With maybe another 50 or 60k over the next decade or two. That's tuition for your 2 kids in Poland.
Crunching for a bonus tied to a metacritic score is a much less interesting deal for a dev.
Rockstar does it too with GTA/RDR games. Online revenue since GTAV probably helps them though.
I would love to read such a thing!
Indeed. Sometimes it can't be done.
Still, plenty of times, it CAN be done, and is not done because of questionable reasons. SCE or Xbox Studios could easily follow suit to Nintendo...but they have twisted evil motives like marketing.
what is the fucking point of ordering a whole studio to crunch anyway? like I could at least get HEY FOLKS WHO HAVE DELIVERABLES OR IMMEDIATE RESPONSIBILITIES WE NEED THAT SHIT DONE but like...you have plenty of folks done forever ago. let them chill at home.
Blaming marketing for crunch is generally not the right move. Deadlines are set by the project owners and are generally a factor of workforce power and budget. Marketing is often just the mouthpiece that helps announce the final date.
A lot of the dates set in these bigger companies are done to align with either quarterly earnings calls or year-end fiscal reports - both of which tend to have very little to do with marketing.
Marketing is also a very diverse field within a company - blaming the near-minimum wage social media person for announcing a release date when they are often just trying to do their job is also not the right way forward. As a Product Marketer, my job is to assist the product team with setting realistic deadlines and to plan content news drops around those dates, my job isn't really to decide the final launch date for anything aside from maybe pushing back (not forward!) launches in order to give the team more time/less pressure/a better chance to sell more copies.
Blaming marketing, to me, is just taking the focus off the real blame in the whole situation: Corporate greed.
Also, as mentioned before - Nintendo projects undergo crunch regularly, even if it isn't by direct Nintendo employees. Big games take over 1000 people to make and often a lot of those are not in-house.
Also worth noting that crunch does not stop nor change if a game's date isn't publically announced - internal drop-dead dates are very real and it doesn't matter if the game is announced or not. Even infamous "shadowdropped" games can still undergo crunch, as its a developer/publisher/shareholder thing, not a publically announced date thing.
I've seen games where people who were done their tasks were shuffled off to other roles like QA because some projects needed all hands on deck and the company wasn't going to ramping up (hiring new employees).
this definitely helps early on, but at this point in a game's dev it's usually a great way of being sure no one really knows how anything works as boatloads of context-free maybe-fixes get committed
:(
A union isn't going to solve crunch, especially over night. In fact, I think overtime will continue to be a thing.
What a union will solve is a lot of the reasons behind crunch culture within the studio system, such as people getting flat out fired for saying they'd rather spend time with their kids than crunch on a project.
Strong video game unionization will help push for a lot of things to get better and take a lot of the pressure off the societal reasons why crunch happens.
Your crunch isn't posted online so folks on the internet who don't work in your industry can be outraged on your behalf. Im genuinely curious how many people working at CDPR are surprised and/or upset about this.
Well, there's just one small, tinsy-tiny difference: Other people aren't you. That's great that you're fine with crunch; it doesn't make it right or necessary or even something remotely worth tolerating as the norm.
I think this is spot on
I "crunch" in my job too, but is totally up to me...no one should be forced to do it.
You seem to have a pretty skewed priority here.
"Don't report on this condition, because it will affect sales!", wtf?
And don't you worry, gamers--like you, who is a marvelous example of--don't give a shit for this kind of thing. Even with this kind of news, Cyberpunk will sell millions, so you don't need to worry about their work "go in vain".
Not surprised to see Gamers™ going out in full force to defend precious CDPR, the bastion of true Gaming™.
And people complained about people not giving CDPR the benefit of the doubt in the thread about their "support" to an LGBTQIA+ organization. We all know the problems with crunch run deep in the industry, but these guys are liars, playing the part of the good guy just for show.
And people complained about people not giving CDPR the benefit of the doubt in the thread about their "support" to an LGBTQIA+ organization. We all know the problems with crunch run deep in the industry, but these guys are liars, playing the part of the good guy just for show.
Indeed. Choosing a difficult path is one thing; having zero agency or say in the matter is entirely another, especially after your boss stated publicly a few months ago that it would not become mandatory.
If you ever (have the time and) make this thread, write this post, or make a youtube video of this - I just want you to know I would read/watch it.
My job requires me to work 80+ hours a week, be away from home for months and work 7 days a week. The difference is that I get paid handsomely, way above the average salary here in my country, and I kinda like doing it.
the lack of empathy on this site lmao, I don't know why I'm shocked anymore by these types of responses. Gamers rise up
Did...could you not even be bothered to read the thread title?
It's in the damn thread title!
Could you clear me up as I am not familiar with the creative business what crunch means there and why everybody is so against it. In my field crunsh means working from 6am 6pm for 6days a week.
We switched in my company from an older warehouse software to SAP and I was working from 6 am to 11pm 6 Days a week for 12 weeks in a row and slept in a hotel closer to the company so that i could still get my 6 hours mandatory rest :)
Sure it was hard but I earned over 600 percent more these 3 months so that was nice and when the company has lots of work we regularly work 6 day weeks with overpay.
So I have every year a 4-8 weeks period with longer hours and one more day at the company and it is not that big a deal because you know it is coming and we earn 50 percent more per hour than. So Cyperpunk comes out in 2 months so basicly they are working 8 saturdays and some overtime.
As long as the overtime gets paid and with extra benefits I see no problem in a short overtime period. Sorry for my English.
We switched in my company from an older warehouse software to SAP and I was working from 6 am to 11pm 6 Days a week for 12 weeks in a row and slept in a hotel closer to the company so that i could still get my 6 hours mandatory rest :)
Sure it was hard but I earned over 600 percent more these 3 months so that was nice and when the company has lots of work we regularly work 6 day weeks with overpay.
So I have every year a 4-8 weeks period with longer hours and one more day at the company and it is not that big a deal because you know it is coming and we earn 50 percent more per hour than. So Cyperpunk comes out in 2 months so basicly they are working 8 saturdays and some overtime.
As long as the overtime gets paid and with extra benefits I see no problem in a short overtime period. Sorry for my English.
One thing omitted in the article is the information that Polish labor laws are very strict concerning overtime. And overtime hourly pay rate is 150% of base, and 200 % if overtime extends to night
Release the game in a buggy state and watch gamers and this forum lose their shit. Not so perfect games and delays should be encouraged. I don't think you can create a 3A games with 1000 of moving parts and not run into a lot of problems at the end of development.
Either it's no 3A games but for the same price or buggy games. Gamers and Publishers want neither so crunch it is.
Either it's no 3A games but for the same price or buggy games. Gamers and Publishers want neither so crunch it is.
No shit they lied about this, CDPR fucking sucks. Everything surrounding this game is a disaster and this site is full of Cyberpunk Avatars licking their boots.
Wow!!!
maybe that's the reason why I didnt post about this...
Of course you misunderstood me about what I was trying to say.
if I worked hard in a project for years and something like this happen, after all the hard work I will for sure get worried, specially if this could cost my work.
If you think that the post is about some kind of protection big Companies or some kind of protection my big game, that's fine.
By the way, I don't even know if I am gonna buy this game on release date.
As I said, I just said that this is a very normal practice here in Brazil and seeing some of this development Behind the scene videos, this companys that do game development always looked some really nice place to work with confortable kitchens, big couches, game rooms, even some beds.
I fully agree that extreme crunch shouldn't happen in any type of work and I don't even know the specifics in this case, so can't have a proper judgement.
I just resolve to post in this topic because i have being seeing so many topics about crunch work lately that I thought I could take some questions to try to understand better the situation.
A Union gives workers much more leverage than not a union. A good video game Union can simply say we're not going to work 6+ days a week.
It's crazy the amount of free passes CDPR gets when even half of the stuff they've been pulling would cause a mob with any other company.
I've got bad news for you friend.
If there are people at your job who don't want to crunch, and you're crunching, part of them being forced to crunch is the pressure that you're applying by doing so.
The only way you're not doing that is if you have an employer where your bosses are going to review your hours and have a discussion about why it is you need to put in this many hours and open conversations about the projects and workload you've got. The set of companies where employee crunch is interpreted as a signifier of a failing process and not one of "a dedicated, can-do, team player" is rather too tiny.