I feel like without some quotes from the dev team this feels very one-sided. It could be that the devs weren’t unhappy to do crunch if the trade offs are fair. I don’t think anyone in SV can say that they haven’t had to work crunch hours, usually with zero extra pay. I hope that there is extra bonus days off on top of the extra pay.
I respectfully disagree with your point. This is trying to force a middle ground when the reporting here is straightforward: the company is untrustworthy. They announced no crunch earlier this year, and now they’re breaking their promise.
Hearing from developers happy with their employer lying to them in front of the whole world would only serve to pretend a company breaking a promise is A-OK. It’s not.
It is vital to remember that CD Projekt Red received a ton of goodwill reporting when they announced they would not force crunch on employees. I personally joyfully bought my lovely wife a Switch and Animal Crossing when Nintendo announced they were pushing the game instead of committing to crunch for it. My point is announcing no crunch time is a positive PR move for a company that can bring in more sales.
CD Projekt Red should be pilloried in the gaming press for its callous backpedaling. My heart goes to all those developers who were lied to.
To be fair what is being ordered is a 48 hour work week. They’re not allowed to work more than 8 hours a day, six days a week, and it’s (I believe) legally time-limited. It’s a stretch to say they should be “pilloried” for this, since their “crunch time” doesn’t sound anything like what American companies impose.
US game studios usually have 50-60 hour standard weeks, with crunch being far in excess of that (see, e.g., EA Spouse's account, or the accounts of Riot Games developers).
So a 48-hour "crunch" week is still less than the standard US game dev work week.
This isn't an EA Spouse situation.
EA Spouse's partner was working 70+ hr weeks, unpaid. It was just straight worker exploitation.
Here (as I understand it), everyone's getting paid overtime and while it's a big ask of the employees, there is something genuinely different about creative endeavors. A few months of 48 hour weeks isn't good for long term creative output, but it's somewhere in the realm of reasonable.
It'd be good to have some better incentives for management to resource and schedule properly (time and a half @ 40hrs, double time @ 48, quadruple time @ 60 would seem an obvious economic stick), but if employees are getting paid fairly I think this is ok.
Hope the game is great, and that everyone who is putting in the extra work feels tonnes of pride of authorship in this game. I'm looking forward to it.
Everybody needs to calm down a bit. Poland has reasonable labour laws afaik. Overtime is paid and there are limits on the max hours of overtime.
And I don't know if its the same in Poland, but here in neighbouring Lithuania - employer can't really "force" you to do overtime, one has to agree to it.
I get that overtime sucks, but it's not unpaid US-like overtime in this case.
The only way to rationalize this terrible broken promise to employees is by comparing it to a country renown for its bad labour practices. It’s terrible. Plain and simple. Even if the US is worst than that.
I’d rather management delay again than go against their word and order a crunch.
Especially because I will not be surprised if — and am almost expecting thar — management realizes 6 day workweeks won’t cut it alone and additionally delay the release again. And who wins in that scenario?
Clearly they need more time. The game will only be worse off from rushing it — on top of the larger point that all of their talent (and customers) were lied to.
Maybe they think they’ll kill their own hype if they delay again. This makes me think they sent Sony and M$ incomplete games and will require a massive day one patch to add the rest.
In any event, I’m expecting postmortems from defectors once the game ships. I’m curious as to why they’ve had so many delays. One obvious variable is COVID-19 but mismanagement sounds like a candidate as well.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 45.8 ms ] threadHearing from developers happy with their employer lying to them in front of the whole world would only serve to pretend a company breaking a promise is A-OK. It’s not.
CD Projekt Red should be pilloried in the gaming press for its callous backpedaling. My heart goes to all those developers who were lied to.
So a 48-hour "crunch" week is still less than the standard US game dev work week.
It'd be good to have some better incentives for management to resource and schedule properly (time and a half @ 40hrs, double time @ 48, quadruple time @ 60 would seem an obvious economic stick), but if employees are getting paid fairly I think this is ok. Hope the game is great, and that everyone who is putting in the extra work feels tonnes of pride of authorship in this game. I'm looking forward to it.
And I don't know if its the same in Poland, but here in neighbouring Lithuania - employer can't really "force" you to do overtime, one has to agree to it.
I get that overtime sucks, but it's not unpaid US-like overtime in this case.
They promised they wouldn't do this, then they did it. That's bad.
On a related note, most white collar professionals work 50 hour weeks. Every week.
Especially because I will not be surprised if — and am almost expecting thar — management realizes 6 day workweeks won’t cut it alone and additionally delay the release again. And who wins in that scenario?
Clearly they need more time. The game will only be worse off from rushing it — on top of the larger point that all of their talent (and customers) were lied to.
In any event, I’m expecting postmortems from defectors once the game ships. I’m curious as to why they’ve had so many delays. One obvious variable is COVID-19 but mismanagement sounds like a candidate as well.