I’ve always wondered how many of the people who went into the industry loving videogames since childhood and had their passion killed by working for the wrong company(ies).
CD Projekt Red orders mandatory crunch for employees ahead of Cyberpunk 2077 launch
- Thread starter Exley97
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To be fair, many other people enter into careers because they're passionate about whatever the hell the career is, and it's rare that they maintain that passion for very long.
Even pornstars have done interviews and just been like, "Meh, it's work bro."
I think it is exceptionally rare for a job to never become "just work" for people.
What is more surprising is how good games have become with time. You'd think that the games would be getting worse as workers get more and more overwork. Yet we still seem to get these incredible experiences. It's usually coorporate influence that fucks up projects, not the treatment of the workers.
Which begs the theory that even though they are overworked, nobody wants to make a shitty game.
You probably don't need to do much crunch to re-release the same 8-year old game.
18 Months After Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Has Made Big Cultural Changes
Last fall, nearly a year after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, top Rockstar executive Jennifer Kolbe sent out an email to staff with a list of bullet-pointed initiatives to improve Rockstar’s culture.kotaku.com
Would’ve never thought Rockstar of all places would be the first to buckle down on these sorts of issues.
GTV is on more shit than Skyrim at this point.
And also Rockstar isn't working on any new games so it's no surprise that they could put a face on restructuring. Though we'll see if that holds up the next time a big game reached deadline.
GTA6 is almost certainly being worked on, but yeah we’ll see how it goes once the deadline approaches. Would be interesting to see how much better or worse a game that size will turn out with less crunch factor and more sanitized corporate environment.
I mean in theory you should get the same game but with a longer dev time. That's all.
Even with the crunch stress, these developers are still making amazing stuff when they arent working for EA or Activision.
Can anybody tell me what they see in this game that makes it so special? I haven't been following it too closely, but from everything I have seen of it, it doesn't look *that* impressive. It looks like a pretty standard first person story based game, just set in the future now instead of, say, on a foreign island (Ala Far Cry 3).
Does a lack of micro-transactions in a single player experience really make this so worth hyping up this much?
Does a lack of micro-transactions in a single player experience really make this so worth hyping up this much?
The setting looks awesome and people loved The Witcher 3. Therefore the next game out of the studio was something to be excited for
Huh, I guess it's just a matter of taste then. I personally thought the setting looked kind of bland for a "cyberpunk dystopia".
I mean, it does and Cyberpunk 2020 has always been one of the more generic Cyberpunk games. But on the other hand, Cyberpunk (genre) games are few and far between so when one actually comes around it is hard not to get a little excited.
I am somehow sceptical how much crunch CDPR actually can use. It is still a studio in the EU and subject to EU laws that kinda limit working hours, overtime etc.
Sweden has some of the strictest laws on working hours in the EU and there's still an easy way to get around them: The laws only regulate mandatory or enforced overtime. As the Reddit post so aptly points out, a lot of the overtime is done via peer pressure and impossible work goals (assigning 85 hours of work in a 40 hour week). At that point the employee can either choose to give more workload to their colleagues by insisting on a 40 hour work week or nut up and take on 'voluntary' overtime to do their part. And since voluntary overtime isn't covered by the EU's regulations on working hours, CDPR is legally in the clear.
I have colleagues who love their job and money who can do 200 hour work months pretty regularly. The employer doesn't like it (since in Sweden they'll be responsible for rehabilitation if/when an employee suffers from work related stress) but they can't stop it since there are no regulations about voluntary overtime until you hit something like 100 hours of overtime per month. The closest there is is the law that for every 24 hour period, the employee is entitled to at least 10 hours of uninterrupted time off, intended to ensure sufficient sleep.
Witcher 3 is quite well thought of and I suspect a lot of this is carryover from that. We'll see if the game lives up to the hype when it comes out.
I'm expecting it to be good myself, but not game changing.