This. We have high profile projects with immense pressure and crazy deadlines. The team members willingly work overtime to achieve the targets and are remunerated accordingly. It’s not uncommon for those people to get paid 1.5-1.7 time their normal monthly CTC during these times. The reality is that these projects are often always like that (at least one of our projects has been at this velocity for 8 months now).
@DieGrootHammer I understand your frustration in crunch being bad, but it’s a reality of the industry. Our industry is still evolving and becoming more competitive by the day. We’re experiencing this first hand, especially expanding into Europe. Margins get smaller and expectations grow higher. In order to succeed in this industry, one has to go the extra mile… or ten. The rewards are obviously generous, as is any gold rush. Typically projects with high amounts of crunch time do get their team members to unwind for 2-3 weeks at a time and typically afford more leave days than normal occupations and industries. I guess people should just be aware of the reality of working in the software industry - it’s high pressure and long hours, but the rewards make up for it.
PS - as per @SIGSTART’s comment, I’ve never been paid overtime. In fact, my considerable contribution to overtime billing gets split between the team members during incentive periods.
Look I totally get that crunch is a reality of the industry. I myself got burnt out severely a few years ago due to crunch. Working 100+ hour weeks for months on end trying to reach an impossible deadline without any overtime pay. The practice left me in a really bad shape mentally and I saw what it did to other developers in my team. This is why the fact that we normalize it as “part of the industry” is the wrong thing to do, but I do realize that in many ways to stay competitive it has to be done. It sucks, and I will always complain about it.
The other thing I see is that internet discourse tend to defend crunch more when CD Projek Red is involved, but when Naughty Dog does it, people at the company get death threats and unbelievable vitriol from the internet. The hypocrisy is super bad.
Please don’t judge, I know ALL the arguments why it’s ‘dumb’, never preorder bla bla, but it was a part gift to myself and my lady who absolutely LOVES the trinkets etc. We bought the collectors edition last year from raru (and subsequently started the tiny awesome review meme about kyle thats on there, im proud of that).
Anyone have any inside knowledge on when those are being shipped…? Or is it being shipped on 19th Too, we don’t maybe at least get it on the way by then?
It is perfectly fine to be excited for a game, but remember that most of the best games comes at extreme expense of developers and people being treated poorly to meet deadlines. This happens at EA, Ubisoft, Activision, Blizzard, CDPR or any other big developer.
This is why it’s bad that people become ferverent fans of corporations. They are not your friend. Their main goal is to make money and not to be your best friend. Just because they make great games does not make them exempt from this.
What is worse? A company that puts their employees through a lot of crunch or a company that breeds a culture of abuse? I’m obviously talking about Ubisoft here in case it’s not clear.
Both are really shit situations to be working in I’m sure but at the end of the day it just doesn’t bother me that much on a personal level.
I am a fan of The Witcher and by extension I’m very hyped about Cyberpunk but I’m not a rabid fanboy of CDPR. If they crunched their workers too much then shame on them. But that won’t make me cancel my preorder or anything.
Do you have a direct link to that Reddit post? Or at least to where it used to be? I’m just supremely careful about believing anything on the Internet I can’t verify.
That said, yes I think it’s important to remember that CDPR is a company, and that it is not beyond criticism just because it doesn’t treat its customers as milking cows, like other publishers are wont to do.
However, I also think it’s important not to chuck out layers of nuance.
American companies have insisted on crunch without paying developers overtime. Gearbox (allegedly) reneged on a promise to pay developers their fair portion of a profit share agreement for Borderlands 3.
CDPR is committing to not only paying for overtime, but also providing profit share.
As I’ve said before… I’ve never been paid for overtime in my life. Yes mandatory overtime sucks. Yes I’d far rather have the overtime “paid out” in leave rather than in money. But I’d also rather have the overtime pay than nothing at all, which is the norm not only across the gaming industry, but for all “high-level staff” here in sunny South Africa too.
If CDPR is deserving of criticism, so is every single top employer in South Africa, whether an IT company, dev house, bank, or telco.
This is why I’m grateful for a link to go and read that thread myself…
Reading between the lines, this is a foreigner who is complaining that they are being peer-pressured into crunching because that’s what the native Poles, especially the team leads, are doing.
Also, they have made a statement which will immediately reveal whether they are the real deal. Or at least how “in-the-know” they are (emphasis mine):
Day 1 patch is most likely going to be quite massive, the game was rushed and the announcement of “gold” came as a surprise for most of the team.
It is unlikely the game will be 100% done and polished even including the day 1 patch. The game would easily need at least 4-5 more months of work - counting crunch
The technology behind the game is not bad actually the rendering and engine lighting teams did a great job and the visual quality is quite high, although the RedEngine is a bit mangled the game is not terrible - technically speaking - but it could have used more time to be properly shipped.
So we’ll see what the state of the game is at launch.
