The Polish gaming studio CD Projekt Red has announced a new game in the “The Witcher” series. It is not called Witcher 4, but the name has established itself. The game’s director is looking for new employees on Twitter, but is confronted with the dark past of the studio: It is being accused of treating staff like dogs and making them crunch.
This is the situation:
- CD Projekt Red announced the development of a new game in “The Witcher” with a single image . It is not an introduction intended to generate hype among fans. Rather, it seems to be about first finding new employees. The release of the game is likely at least 5 years away.
- The new game in “The Witcher” will not be developed with its own engine, the RedEngine, but with the widely used Unreal Engine 5 from Epic Games. This shows that they are learning from past mistakes: For Cyberpunk 2077, many resources had to be invested in their own engine.
- However, it seems the studio is indeed having difficulties recruiting new employees, as it has a reputation for operating “Crunch.” This is what it is called when employees have to invest inhumane work hours for months to compensate for misplanning in management. People have already died due to crunch in games.
Twitter user mentions “terrible crunch” and “treatment like a dog”
This is now the promise: On Twitter, Jason Slama announced that he is in charge of the new Witcher game. He has been in this new role since June 2021, and from 2017 to 2021, Slama was responsible for various roles in the Witcher card game Gwent.
Slama said that they have a lot of new positions to fill. He asks if people can imagine working on the new AAA game. The Game Director even mentions the possibility of working from home on the new Witcher game.
However, he is confronted by a user: He forgot to mention that there would also be terrible crunch as a “sign-on bonus” at CD Projekt Red, and one would be treated like a “dog”.
Slama says: “Not if I have anything to say about it.” So he promises that under his leadership these conditions will not occur.
Interestingly, Slama does not even try to deny that there was “terrible crunch” before or that “employees were treated like dogs”: He only assures that it will not happen under his supervision.
We had an extensive discussion with Witcher expert Michael Graf on MeinMMO about the game’s announcement and the studio’s situation:
Before Cyberpunk 2077 even promised “no crunch” – promise broken
What does the user mean by that? CD Projekt Red has a reputation for making employees crunch and subjecting them to difficult working conditions.
In 2014, there was an insider report about the working conditions in the studio during “The Witcher 3” (via gamespot). It was said at that time that the studio’s PR had announced such unreasonable ambitions regarding what the game should be that the team had to undergo unreasonable “crunch working hours” for years to fulfill this vision somewhat.
When CD Projekt Red was planning the sci-fi epic “Cyberpunk 2077”, they assured in May 2019 that they would not crunch this time, but strive for “humane working conditions”. This was to preempt an insider report: Former employees had complained to the website Kotaku that the development of Cyberpunk 2077 was going as terribly as at EA’s failed Anthem, where employees allegedly worked themselves into burnout and where a clear weakness in management was diagnosed as the cause of chaotic development.
The promise not to crunch anymore had to be retracted by the studio in September 2020, when the project was again under time pressure and CD Projekt Red introduced a “mandatory 6-day week”. There were also horror stories from Cyberpunk 2077 about 13-hour workdays and a harsh tone (via kotaku).
After the release, the studio management promised again that one of the company’s most important tasks would be to avoid crunch in future releases.
It is becoming increasingly important to offer “good” workplaces – in every respect
What lies behind it: “Crunch” and “bad working conditions” are topics that have overshadowed the gaming industry for decades. Terrible reports have repeatedly emerged about employees having no life for months because their work consumed them.
As early as 2004, a widely discussed article “EA Spouse” was published, in which Erin Hoffman anonymously recounted the conditions under which her fiancé had to work for Electronic Arts (via ea-spouse).
The employees’ own motivation to “achieve something great,” an expectation from management, and the pressure not to let colleagues down had led for years to a culture that “crunch somehow belongs to the job of developing a game.”
In recent years, the topic of “crunch” has been more critically examined. Especially games that offer an extreme amount of content, such as Witcher 3, Fortnite, or Red Dead Redemption 2, which are “milestones of the genre”, seemingly demand extremely many work hours that are performed under difficult conditions. Some other studios outsource such work to external companies, especially in Asia (via gamestar).
It is known that companies like Activision Blizzard or Rockstar have treated employees at the bottom of the food chain, such as quality testers or translators, as “second-class employees” and forced them to work under extremely difficult conditions.
In South Korea, employees have even worked themselves to death during extreme crunch time.
In recent years, a change in mindset has occurred here. Discussions about working conditions, burnout, and “mental health” have come to the forefront, with some studios explicitly positioning themselves against a crunch culture like Bungie (Destiny 2) or Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile).
For a studio like CD Projekt Red, it is essential to convincingly demonstrate to potential employees that they respect them and their health and do not sacrifice them to develop the best possible game.
Players often have an ambivalent relationship with crunch. If the game is really good, many seem not to care too much. Before the release of the highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077, many players did not want to hear anything that could dampen their anticipation:
Cyberpunk 2077 is making overtime – and many gamers really don’t care
