Regardless of what field you work in, there will almost always be “bad practices” that someone in higher management tries to put upon the workers to try and “get things done quickly.” In the past, we’ve seen the many consequences of these kinds of actions, not the least of which is stuff being destroyed and people getting hurt. In the video game industry, one of the worst practices many developers have done over the years is called “crunch,” where devs put their people to work for incredibly long hours during a week. Cyberpunk 2077 was one of many games that had crunch, and it didn’t work out in their favor for various reasons.
It was well documented what happened at CD Projekt Red during the development of the futuristic RPG. At first, the company said that crunch wasn’t going to happen. But as the game slowly got more complicated to make and harder to finish, things changed. They slowly started to warp what they had said so that they could get their teams to work long hours, even saying it wasn’t “mandatory” but encouraged.
Then, things changed even more, with one of the heads of the team stating to an investor that they would have to do crunch.
That’s when the floodgates opened, and the real “push” from the higher-ups came. CD Projekt Red teammates were soon required to do crunch, and had to work six-day work weeks! Leaks from the workers even said that some of them had already been doing those kinds of hours and even working late nights for over a year! Then, when you look at what happened at launch and how buggy the game was for many, you have to wonder if that crunch was even worth it.
Hint: it was not.
Thankfully, in an interview with Bloomberg, Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty Director Gabe Amatangelo, said that such things weren’t happening with the making of the DLC:
“Fortunately, it’s a very healthy work-life balance right now,” he said.
Bloomberg even reached out to certain “lower level” people at CD Projekt Red, and they confirmed that crunch wasn’t going on.
That’s good to hear because many know how bad crunch can be on a game developer, and many have been burned out and left the industry because of such practices.
Hopefully, history won’t repeat itself, and crunch won’t be forced on the team because they desire to meet their deadlines. Only time will tell.
