Lukasz Szczepankowski, a Lead Technical Designer at CD Projekt RED offered his thoughts on the Cyberpunk 2077 "crunch controversy" reports, which surfaced lately.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that CD Projekt Red have broken their "no crunch" promise and have informed developers that six-day workweeks will be mandatory leading up to the November release of their blockbuster title Cyberpunk 2077. To say that report caused a lot of discussions over on social media and gaming forums would be an understatement.
Today, we have some bold comments from CD Projekt Red developer, who offered their thoughts on the whole crunch situation. Lukasz Szczepankowski, who is currently working as a Lead Technical Designer at CD Projekt Red defended the company and his managers via a Facebook comment in a lengthy post by Former Creative director at People Can Fly Adrian Chmielarz .
He responded to a comment which suggested that only developers experience the crunch while management, presidents and higher-ups "collect millions of bonuses". Szczepankowski stated that while there are cases where higher-ups would not crunch and everything is on devs' backs, at CD Projekt Red, this is not the case. Since his comment is buried in the thread we're gonna paste it right here in full:
"I can only confirm what Adrian Chmielarz wrote. Even if there are situations he described, it is my experience that game dev has relative solidarity in this respect from top to bottom, regardless of his position. I must disappoint you: Game dev managers are not the proverbial capitalists - exploiters who count money while smoking a cigar and look at the fragile developers from time to time (however this vision sounds picturesque)."
CDPR
This certainly is quite a bold statement directly from CD Projekt Red devs who are currently pushing hard to purge bugs and ready their game for the release. It's also interesting to see the other side of the story, since many pointed finger at CD Projekt Red in the last week or so, without waiting for a statement from the devs themselves.
Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Project Red, RPG in Cyberpunk 2020 universe
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Anyway, Cyberpunk 2077 is officially hitting the shelves on November 19, 2020, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S.
Thanks, Game Pressure.
