https://kotaku.com/as-cyberpunk-2077-development-intensifies-cd-projekt-r-1834849725
Footage of the upcoming role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077 has blown away fans so far, but coupled with that hype is a burning question: Are workers at CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind the game, ruining their lives to make it? The developer best known for The Witcher series has cultivated a reputation for crunch—asking its employees to work nights and weekends for weeks or months at a time—but studio management now tells Kotaku they want to improve their work-life balance, even if they continue to feel that crunch is a necessity.
“We’re known—let me be humble for a moment here—we are known for treating gamers with respect,” said Marcin Iwiński, the company’s co-founder, in an interview with Kotaku this week. “This is what we’ve been working hard toward. And I actually would [like] for us to also be known for treating developers with respect.”
One of the ways the company plans to do that, Iwiński said, is through a “non-obligatory crunch policy” that isn’t brand new but that the Warsaw-based CD Projekt Red plans to push harder. He wants to make it clear to Cyberpunk 2077’s developers that even when the studio asks them to work on nights and weekends, it’s not “mandatory.”
“We’ve been working toward it for some time already,” Iwiński said. “We’ve been communicating clearly to people that of course there are certain moments where we need to work harder—like I think the E3 demo is a pretty good example—but we want to be more humane and treat people with respect. If they need to take time off, they can take time off. Nobody will be frowned upon if this will be requested.”
Of course, anyone who’s worked anywhere knows that a request from the boss doesn’t need to be “mandatory” for it to be something you have to do. When probed, Iwiński wouldn’t promise to limit crunch to certain periods or offer specific numbers, other than to say that he hoped making this public statement would help CD Projekt Red employees feel more comfortable telling their managers when they don’t want to put in extra hours. “I think this is the commitment we’re ready to make today, and we’ll be listening to people,” he said. “We definitely open a lot of lines of dialogue here, and we’d like to start with that.”
“I’ve felt that there are hundreds of parallels that could be drawn between the story of the rocky development of Anthem and the story of the rocky and even-more-rocky-to-become development of Cyberpunk 2077.” - Former CD Projekt Red developer
My take:“Making this commitment, I hope it shows that we are treating this matter very seriously.” - CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński
