CD PROJEKT RED Mandates Six-Day Work Weeks Ahead of Cyberpunk 2077’s Launch

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I don't understand this outrage culture over paid overtime. If people are willing to put in more hours and are getting paid for it,then why is it the evil of all evils? This is internal business of the developer. It's their job to care about their employees morale, not mine.
I don't want to hear about it until there is something to report, like employees not getting paid on time or at all for their overtime, or being forced to work more than what is allowed by law. I even condone them working more than allowed by law if it is fully voluntary.

The issue is how its uses and the effect it has on employees. They're often salaried employees and are forced to work massive unpaid overtime as salaried employees are exempt from OT laws. This crunch time can sometimes last for months, if not years. This leads to burnt out employees, employees so tired they can't work effectively and is VERY unhealthy for the industry as a whole.
 
the issue was cd projekt red promised specifically they wouldn't do this

Then again, it's a business and circumstances can change. If there is no binding agreement between the employees and the employer then anything legal is on the table. "You said you wouldn't" might get a new response of "Yes, but [new detail] has emerged and we can't afford not to crunch." Do they now owe the general public an explanation for all their business decisions? Of course not, which was why it was a bad idea to weigh in on the issue in the first place. It's a legal issue between workers and employers; while social media and clickbait websites could certainly be used as tools to support a collective bargaining movement, the problem here is that the social media and clickbait websites are the movement. [social media]: "But you said you wouldn't!" Get real.
 
The issue is how its uses and the effect it has on employees. They're often salaried employees and are forced to work massive unpaid overtime as salaried employees are exempt from OT laws. This crunch time can sometimes last for months, if not years. This leads to burnt out employees, employees so tired they can't work effectively and is VERY unhealthy for the industry as a whole.
Not in Europe we get full overtime 150% for Saturdays and 200% for Sundays as salaried employees, as soon as you exceed your 40 hours or start working on a weekend it is as if you were an hourly employee. Fully hourly employment is very rare here anyway.
 
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It is not enforceable. You cannot put a guard over the shoulder of every employee to check if they actually worked 48 hours only. We have the same limit in my country, the only effect it has that we don't get paid in time for anything beyond 48 hours, because it must be left off the books, so it is paid later either as bonuses or fictional overtime hours.


And you believe in fairy tales, too? They promised because they didn't think they'd need it. But they are still for profit, and profits outweigh the needs to make nice.
Depending on the country it could be a matter of 1 simple phone call and that all comes crashing down, I dont pretend to know polands laws inside out or how hard they enforce I'm just simply trying to bring more actual info to the discussion. For example In Canada if your company gets reported for breaking labor rules and they find you broke them they check EVERYTHING regarding that and will force you to pay and compensate every employee affected not just the reporter

Then again, it's a business and circumstances can change. If there is no binding agreement between the employees and the employer then anything legal is on the table. "You said you wouldn't" might get a new response of "Yes, but [new detail] has emerged and we can't afford not to crunch." Do they now owe the general public an explanation for all their business decisions? Of course not, which was why it was a bad idea to weigh in on the issue in the first place. It's a legal issue between workers and employers; while social media and clickbait websites could certainly be used as tools to support a collective bargaining movement, the problem here is that the social media and clickbait websites are the movement. [social media]: "But you said you wouldn't!" Get real.
It sure is just a business, I don't know why people assume that me posting facts or reasons behind out-rage is me either condemning or supporting something. As long as they follow the laws they can do whatever they want to, but they also need to prep for lashback when they make a public statement about how they won't do crunch time and then do the exact opposite, you can't do the surprised Pikachu face when fan's get pissed at you for breaking a promise. Considering the general public buys their products, i'm gonna say yes they do owe explanations to them when they promise their customers something then do the complete opposite
 
Not in Europe we get full overtime 150% for Saturdays and 200% for Sundays as salaried employees, as soon as you exceed your 40 hours or start working on a weekend it is as if you were an hourly employee. Fully hourly employment is very rare here anyway.

It's not the same for all of Europe. Each country has it's own laws. And many of them have exemptions for "IT" workers.
 
This is standard operating procedure in the industry. I don't see it as an issue unless it's unpaid time or lasts for several months, six weeks of paid time on a multi-year project doesn't seem unreasonable.

I read an article a few years ago in a game industry journal with interviews of several people that worked there and the consensus seemed to be that they expected a lot out of their employees and worked them hard but also gave them more freedom and listened more to their input than other studios they had worked at so they felt the job was fairly rewarding in terms of satisfaction. I do know there were some western developers that felt insulted and got upset when CDPR offered them jobs at Polish wage rates which I can understand them not wanting to work for a lower wage but I'm not sure how they expected any different.
 
It's not the same for all of Europe. Each country has it's own laws. And many of them have exemptions for "IT" workers.
I've never heard of such a thing. What country has separate rules for "IT"?
 
I've never heard of such a thing. What country has separate rules for "IT"?

USA. Overtime Exemption. Look it up. Not all IT(wide brush there) workers fall under this, but many do. I remember getting a salary increase when the rules went into affect back in like 2008 i think, and moving off of overtime pay.
 
Sure, but shouldn't they know this is the job when they go in? This is exactly what will happen when they apply? Or are they absolutely completely so ignorant that quite literally every AAA title that has ever been released goes into "super crunch" as the game nears release date. It's kind of like going for a job as a warehouse worker then "being afraid" to complain that your job is hard because you have to lift shit off of shelves.

Your comparison is flawed as the warehouse worker scenario is the worker being lazy or weak for the job they applied for. The thread at hand is about workers being forced to work longer hours than agreed to during employment. Yes its possible they are hourly, yes its possible they get paid extra for a relatively short time period, yes at hire time they may have made mention that extended hours were possible but the trend of making workers work longer hours is now a normal. This normal will be abused further to where people wish they just had six 8 hour days. If the workers refused to work extra hours, they would be shown the door. Just like all major companies with the mentality of "you don't like it, we'll find a replacement who does".

The only reason I can think of for not delaying the game even further like every other title of this caliber is because they are trying to cash in holiday and COVID stay at home dollars. For which the worker employees suffer and management benefits, per usual.
 
What people never worked hard, last year I was banging 70+ hours ever week for months and the same the year before that and so on.
 
If I worked in an industry with a release date for the one product you've been working on for years, I'd fully expect work hours to ramp up leading up to it. I suppose in Europe working Saturdays might be a lot more rare than in the US though.
 
CDPR has been everywhere with mostly positive PR for a long time now, so now that they're asking their employees to work an extra 5-6 days before the release this whole situation is being way overblown and used to create negative press for the first time in a while. Keeps generating clicks.
The only reason I can think of for not delaying the game even further like every other title of this caliber is because they are trying to cash in holiday and COVID stay at home dollars. For which the worker employees suffer and management benefits, per usual.
Another reason would be marketing, with all the commercials, banners, ads, etc. being blasted everywhere, and ramping up more and more... it would be hard to pull the plug on all of it, especially since it's worldwide.
 
Any release date is an implicit “right to left plan”, ie get it done based on that time and work out how to make it fit.

I’ve never worked on a non trivial software project with fixed (ish) deadlines where it hasn’t involved a crunch a few weeks out. That’s why we have a term for it, crunch :)

pretty much all games have it from what I understand, historically driven by publisher deadlines. I’ve got friends at CA and EA and they’ve all had the stupid hours before release to get the maximum bug fix done. Way worse than this sounds like.

It kinda sucks and it shouldn’t be the base case of someone’s work life, but if you don’t have a deadline and a surge to deliver to it, you end up like Chris Robert’s 😀

They also probably didn’t plan for some of the covid hit. Software is one of the least affected by remote working (and many developers’ productivity improves) but the mental toll of the year has for damn sure affected people’s productivity. Everyone has gone mad.
 
What makes me sad about all this is the amount of people that white knight for companies that do this. Unless you WANT the OT being made to work more than your normal shift is still bad, the fact so many of you are proud of the fact you give up such large parts of your lives for a company that would replace you in a week or less is sad. I've done plenty of 100+ hour weeks, it's not a badge of pride.
 
Man, I love the times when I have to work non-stop. You can eat whatever you want, you can drink whenever you want, and you can tell everyone whatever's on your mind as soon as it crosses it.

I bet these guys are dreaming cyberpunk dreams all night, too. They're probably all walking around with that unbeatable natural high, already thinking about what might happen next.
 
Yeah, Axman is right.
I wouldn't even go home to be honest.

I mean, I'd probably demand that I be allowed to wear cyberpunk style cosplay there too, and be in-character 24/7.
They'd have to refer to me by my cyberpunk cypher nickname and everything.

Why not? I mean, that's what their life is now. It's cyberpunk life.

Why hold back? Just become the cyberpunk.
 
What makes me sad about all this is the amount of people that white knight for companies that do this. Unless you WANT the OT being made to work more than your normal shift is still bad, the fact so many of you are proud of the fact you give up such large parts of your lives for a company that would replace you in a week or less is sad. I've done plenty of 100+ hour weeks, it's not a badge of pride.
I don't know if I'd say proud, but it's the way things are. I just don't see how a company requiring Saturdays for a few weeks for the ONE project they've been working on for years to be released is a big deal. They kinda have to produce something to sell at some point to recoup all the costs up to that point, or else like someone said above you end up with another Chris Roberts.

IMO the bigger travesty is companies - usually manufacturing in my experience - that have endless mandatory OT for YEARS during both the week, and the weekend as a normal way of conducting business. There is no crunch to overcome to get out of it, it's just the way they operate standard business. For some it's either work a lot and bring home a half-way decent check with the OT pay, or be unemployed looking for another job. And let's face it, it's not like if you start up your own company and work "for yourself" you're working 30 hour weeks and watching the money roll in either, in 99% of cases.

On the flip side of that, I don't see how some people are proud of the fact that they do the absolute minimum amount of work possible to just get by and brag about it. Those people are one of the reasons others have to work the mandatory OT to cover for. Of course the slackers are there to collect that sweet OT pay too. What the people that do put in the OT and actually make things happen are actually proud about is the result from their hard work. If you don't take pride in your work then I don't know what to tell you (I mean in general, not you specifically.)
 
This game has so much hype behind it that it probably will never be able to meet expectations. With that said, i rather have a good, delayed game than a rushed half baked game. Yes its been delayed quite a few times now, but i rather have a polished game than a buggy game. You will only have 1 good 1st impression. But this is usually not up to the studio/devs, but up to the suits that have to meet their deadlines for bonuses etc...
 
Depending on the country it could be a matter of 1 simple phone call and that all comes crashing down, I dont pretend to know polands laws inside out or how hard they enforce I'm just simply trying to bring more actual info to the discussion. For example In Canada if your company gets reported for breaking labor rules and they find you broke them they check EVERYTHING regarding that and will force you to pay and compensate every employee affected not just the reporter


It sure is just a business, I don't know why people assume that me posting facts or reasons behind out-rage is me either condemning or supporting something. As long as they follow the laws they can do whatever they want to, but they also need to prep for lashback when they make a public statement about how they won't do crunch time and then do the exact opposite, you can't do the surprised Pikachu face when fan's get pissed at you for breaking a promise. Considering the general public buys their products, i'm gonna say yes they do owe explanations to them when they promise their customers something then do the complete opposite
Poland is a shit hole. People are desperate for a decent job. The job market is garbage and people would kill to work for a company like CDPR. Labor laws are not strictly enforced.
 
I don't know if I'd say proud, but it's the way things are. I just don't see how a company requiring Saturdays for a few weeks for the ONE project they've been working on for years to be released is a big deal. They kinda have to produce something to sell at some point to recoup all the costs up to that point, or else like someone said above you end up with another Chris Roberts.

IMO the bigger travesty is companies - usually manufacturing in my experience - that have endless mandatory OT for YEARS during both the week, and the weekend as a normal way of conducting business. There is no crunch to overcome to get out of it, it's just the way they operate standard business. For some it's either work a lot and bring home a half-way decent check with the OT pay, or be unemployed looking for another job. And let's face it, it's not like if you start up your own company and work "for yourself" you're working 30 hour weeks and watching the money roll in either, in 99% of cases.

On the flip side of that, I don't see how some people are proud of the fact that they do the absolute minimum amount of work possible to just get by and brag about it. Those people are one of the reasons others have to work the mandatory OT to cover for. Of course the slackers are there to collect that sweet OT pay too. What the people that do put in the OT and actually make things happen are actually proud about is the result from their hard work. If you don't take pride in your work then I don't know what to tell you (I mean in general, not you specifically.)

There's often reasons for manufacturing to do mandatory OT that that aren't obvious. Things like taxes and regulations often drive the madness.
I worked a summer job at a manufacturing place and demand was always much higher in the fall. But they couldn't build up stock during the slower times because they would have to pay a bunch of extra taxes on any inventory. Also it would have been a risk to build up stock because they didn't know know for sure if they would sell those models. The company solved this by filling demand with summer jobs for college students and high schoolers.
Some weeks were very slow and we would just make our most popular model as slow as possible, and other weeks would be 70+ hours with the lines going as fast as possible. The OT money was pretty nice. Most people loved it, but some people hated it and just found new jobs.
 
You people need to realize how well CDPR treats their employees in that shit hole Poland. Where there are shit for labor laws.
Poland is a shit hole. People are desperate for a decent job. The job market is garbage and people would kill to work for a company like CDPR. Labor laws are not strictly enforced.
Damn... did Poland touch you in your special place? :joyful:
 
Man, I love the times when I have to work non-stop. You can eat whatever you want, you can drink whenever you want, and you can tell everyone whatever's on your mind as soon as it crosses it.

I bet these guys are dreaming cyberpunk dreams all night, too. They're probably all walking around with that unbeatable natural high, already thinking about what might happen next.

they’d probably love to have a Cyberpunk dream. It’s more likely that they’re waking up in a cold sweat over c# garbage collection and a memory leak or else a lightning bolt of inspiration for resolving some weird luascript problem that’s been stuck in their backlog for the last week.

Then getting out of bed at 3am to “try one thing” and looking up to see it is afternoon.

they’ll be post coital at the chance to actually play it. Well if they’re not in the post release bug fix team that is.
 
I'm disappointed that after two delays for a total of 7 months extra time they still need to resort to this.
During which they boasted about the game having been practically finished and all those stories about mismanagement pure fiction. They sure prooved them wrong.

But, hey, crunch is understandable when a thirsty games is eagerly awaiting his precious.
 
Why is this even news? The project is hugely complexed, pushing the envelope. Covid came and messed things up as well. Besides a true team takes responsibility for the outcome and not just blame management but that is besides the point. Unfortunately the hype train is not good because some folks would never really get into a game like this but may end up buying it and not liking it. I am not even sure I will even play it, if the actual game turns out great, gets needed updates if necessary then that will be the time for me.

Really, 72 hours is harsh??? lol, some of us had to work for a living, serve our Country and what not. Was a manager for years, 72 hours would be a short week. Owners of businesses, some put in 16 hours+ a day, 7 days a week for years and become either rich or in a mental institution :(.
 
USA. Overtime Exemption. Look it up. Not all IT(wide brush there) workers fall under this, but many do. I remember getting a salary increase when the rules went into affect back in like 2008 i think, and moving off of overtime pay.
He specifically said Europe.
 
Fact is, software engineering, and by extension game development, is a multi-disciplinary art. People aren't machines, people make mistakes. You can't really estimate correctly how long/much it takes to fix a mistake, since mistakes are often unique in their fixing, otherwise they wouldn't have occurred in the first place since there would be experience and prevention measures already in place.

I've worked on both kinds of projects: ones where the deadline was decided by management and ones where we devs decide the deadline. I've had to crunch working on both types. It's not always management's fault, as even devs can't accurately estimate work load either (since they haven't started working on it to know for sure). Estimates are just educated best-effort guesses, and even when a 1.5x standard buffer onto the estimates, most of the time you either get very close to the deadline, or you overshoot and have to crunch.

From my POV, deadlines are there just so PMs can report something to the CEO, because realistically any good dev team won't be able to estimate well. It sounds contradictory, but with a good dev team, anything that's trivial/common or someone on the team have experienced before gets prevented by preemptive measures way before it can become a problem. Therefore, any problem that actually pops up are usually complex, new and unique, and take a lot of time and effort to research and fix. Sometimes, it's even possible that the problem is unfixable, and requires redesigning whole parts of the program.

All in all, to me crunch is inevitable, unless your project is blessed by the god of good luck. Shit will hit the fan, and you will spend too much time figuring out how to fix it, therefore crunch will happen. The software dev industry as a whole have been trying to fix the crunch problem for at least a decade now, with relatively little success. Everybody, even managers, understand that crunch leads to burn out and poor productivity, but it's the only way for now.
 
If they're getting overtime and a profit share? Should be getting actual shares. If the compensation is high and the crunch is short, fine.

Not like some companies that have a 2 year "crunch" on a 5 day salary...
 
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I've worked on both kinds of projects: ones where the deadline was decided by management and ones where we devs decide the deadline. I've had to crunch working on both types. It's not always management's fault, as even devs can't accurately estimate work load either (since they haven't started working on it to know for sure). Estimates are just educated best-effort guesses, and even when a 1.5x standard buffer onto the estimates, most of the time you either get very close to the deadline, or you overshoot and have to crunch.
Just as a side note, I've been reprimanded before for finishing work before my estimate. They can be rest assured it will never happen again :LOL: This is how stupid management can get.
 
If this were unpaid overtime for extended periods of time (as in, months after months) as is unfortunately the case with the greedy side of industry in the USA, then I would have a problem. But this sounds like a normal paid overtime to meet a deadline, not "crunch". Usually it is also much bigger than normal hours, from 50% all the way to 200% depending on when you are working, and they get a bonus on top of that. I am sure some people in CDProjekt are going to buy a house instead of living in rental.
 
Your comparison is flawed as the warehouse worker scenario is the worker being lazy or weak for the job they applied for. The thread at hand is about workers being forced to work longer hours than agreed to during employment. ....

If the workers refused to work extra hours, they would be shown the door. Just like all major companies with the mentality of "you don't like it, we'll find a replacement who does".
You could say that the workers in this case are "being lazy", since it's pretty much universally known that all major companies will require extra hours from all workers when they get into "crunch time", in the same way these same companies will lay off massive amounts of workers right AFTER said big game is released.

As for refusing to work extra hours, again you say extra I say assumed. People are being hired not as generic entities in a company but to get a game published, and that means they need to do whatever necessary to get said game published, and if that means working extra hours to reach some deadline because they were unable to finish it earlier for whatever reason, then that means extra hours of work are needed.
 
You could say that the workers in this case are "being lazy", since it's pretty much universally known that all major companies will require extra hours from all workers when they get into "crunch time", in the same way these same companies will lay off massive amounts of workers right AFTER said big game is released.

As for refusing to work extra hours, again you say extra I say assumed. People are being hired not as generic entities in a company but to get a game published, and that means they need to do whatever necessary to get said game published, and if that means working extra hours to reach some deadline because they were unable to finish it earlier for whatever reason, then that means extra hours of work are needed.

In the vast majority of cases "whatever reason" is management knowingly setting unrealistic goals and not hiring enough people to allow them to be met in time. Also, its real shitty to call people lazy for not wanting to spend their entire waking moment working. No one should want to be a slave to their employer, especially when the employer is at fault for the overtime.
 
they got into the industry knowing what to expect. get over it already.
 
It's fascinating that people just think it's OK for game companies to require so much crunch, while so many other types of software development don't, to say nothing of other industries.
dude, it happens all over. even in retail, ya know xmas time? they were given a heads up, its 6 extra days in 6 weeks, are being paid for it AND went in knowing this happens routinely in the game dev industry.
are all you people complaining about it euros?
 
It's fascinating that people just think it's OK for game companies to require so much crunch, while so many other types of software development don't, to say nothing of other industries.
It does happen in other software development as well pretty much any industry that revolves around project cycles, the longer the project cycle the more crunch time you can expect towards the end.

It should be known by anyone considering getting into software development that the game industry does have some of the worst pay and work conditions, if someone is a CS major and wants the best pay and work conditions they should look for boring or difficult fields to specialize in.
 
In the vast majority of cases "whatever reason" is management knowingly setting unrealistic goals and not hiring enough people to allow them to be met in time. Also, its real shitty to call people lazy for not wanting to spend their entire waking moment working. No one should want to be a slave to their employer, especially when the employer is at fault for the overtime.
Yeah, but you're hired into a job where that kind of workload is absolutely going to happen... yet when the hammer drops, "I don't wanna"
 
I like how everyone talks about how they are getting paid... Based on the way the management worded it they wouldn't be if they had a choice. The fact that the company response is due to Polish laws we will be paying everyone overtime.

If a company came out and stated our product will not kill children because laws in the USA prohibit us from selling poison to children that take away wouldn't be their product is safe the take way is why do they need to state that they are not going to kill kids? Do they want to kill kids? If they could poison and kill kids would they?

All they had to say is that we will be compensating our employees for working overtime and stop there, the added because we are forced to by law doesn't make it sounds like they have the employee's best interest at heart.
 
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