The new game from CD Project Red, Cyberpunk 2077, is eagerly awaited by fans. However, four former developers allegedly wanted to go public with a story that the development of the project is as rocky as that of Anthem. This is now being reported from the USA.
Where does this information come from? US journalist Jason Schreier wrote a large insider report on the development of the SF shooter Anthem in early April. For the report, he spoke with various sources at BioWare. There were issues with overtime, poor management, and a lack of leadership in the development of the online shooter.
It was said that for years, little progress was made in development, decisions were lacking, and development was often scrapped. In the last 18 months, everyone at BioWare had to work overtime to get it finished. People worked themselves sick to meet the schedule, so that Anthem would be released during EA’s current fiscal year.
According to Schreier, after the report, four former employees of CD Project Red contacted him to say that there were similar problems in Warsaw during the development of Cyberpunk 2077.
This is what the ex-developers said: One of the ex-developers reportedly wrote to him in an email (via Kotaku):
I feel that you could draw 100 parallels from the rocky development history of Anthem and the rocky and even rockier history of Cyberpunk 2077. You would only have to change the name of the game and it would have sounded very similar, almost the same.
An anonymous developer in an email to the US site Kotaku
CD Project Red aims for less overtime with Cyberpunk 2077
This has now happened: Schreier has conducted an interview with Marcin Iwiński, one of the co-founders of CD Project Red, and Adam Badowski, the head of the studio.
Schreier believes the interview may have happened because CD Project Red has been following Kotaku’s reporting on the overtime culture in the gaming industry and wanted to preempt a revealing report about Cyberpunk 2077.
In the interview, CD Project Red states that it wants to ensure that its developers are treated with the same respect as the players.
Therefore, they do not plan to have the same crunch time for Cyberpunk 2077 as they did for Witcher 3. It became known during its development that employees had had to work numerous overtime hours.
Especially in the final stages of Cyberpunk 2077’s development, they want to do better than at the end of the development of The Witcher, Badowski promises in the interview.
They now ensure that everyone knows that overtime at CD Project Red is not “mandatory”. Even if a supervisor asks their employees to work longer, they can decline without anyone holding it against them.
The co-founder Iwiński states that they wanted to go public with this statement to make it more binding and to allow employees to hold them accountable.
This way, they aim to improve in the area of “overtime”.
Why is CD Project Red crunching at all? Badowski points out that the development of a game often takes four or five years. For three years, there is no crunch. Only at certain times, like before E3 , they crunch, otherwise, everything runs “super normal”.
We are talking about the very last rounds before the release – those are always difficult to organize and problems often arise. It is very hard not to use all forces in the end.
There are unique individuals that cannot be cloned – rather, they must work on very specific tasks. They are then asked to spend more time on their tasks because there is no other way.
