Cyberpunk 2077 Management Reneges on Crunch Promises

CD Projekt Red and the forthcoming Cyberpunk 2077 is making headlines and garnering traction among gaming journalists and pundits again, and not in a good way. The short version is pithily summarised in a Tweet from Jason Schreier, gaming reporter for Bloomberg:

“Last year, the bosses of CD Projekt Red approached me for an interview. They wanted to announce that for Cyberpunk 2077, they would be avoiding mandatory crunch.

This week, they sent out an email to staff announcing studio-wide mandatory crunch.”

— Schreier, Jason (jasonschreier), September 29, 2020.

Indeed, Schreier has been closely watching the working conditions around Cyberpunk 2077 since well before his departure from Kotaku, writing on the initial promises made by co-founder Marcin Iwiński as early as May 2019. At the time, Iwiński assured Kotaku that any overtime would fall under a “non-mandatory crunch policy,” under which the studio might request developers to work on nights or weekends but that they could say no without consequence or fear of penalization.

These promises were followed up on as part of Kotaku’s Splitscreen podcast in June 2019, where Iwiński reiterated that the studio had “already committed” to respecting designers’ private lives and not forcing them to work more hours than they were willing to.

He also acknowledged that even in the absence of a “mandatory” crunch, there might be social pressures to work long hours. Additionally, he maintained that executives would do everything in their power to minimize those pressures and keep lines of communication open between designers and management.

It would seem though, that CD Projekt Red management ultimately will not be upholding those promises, no matter how unequivocal their earlier language might have been. The recent announcement that Cyberpunk 2077 development would indeed involve mandatory crunch and overtime poke a gaping hole in those commitments. As troubling as this walking back of promises made is on its own, it becomes still more so when placed in the context of a broader timeline.

One might hesitate to call it lying outright, but words like “obfuscation” and “misinformation” certainly come to mind. CD Projekt Red Co-CEO Adam Kiciński told an investor from PKO Bank in Poland, during a Q&A session with investors, that the development team would indeed be “required to put in crunch hours” as they were entering the “final stage.” This session took place in January 2020, at which time the expected release of the game had newly been pushed back to September 17th, 2020, from an original goal of April 16th.

As we know, that “final stage” was pushed back further still to November 19th, to provide developers and quality assurance workers more time to produce a polished final product, with bugs squashed and mechanics balanced, that would truly be “ready when it’s done.”

Many customers responded favorably and in good faith to both delays, hopeful that this would mean crunch would be avoided altogether and allowing developers to produce a game they could be proud of without breaking their proverbial necks.

As we also now know, that wasn’t true and more significantly, if that January Q&A is any indication, it may not have been true for months. CD Projekt Red’s recent announcement is simply the official formalization of touch-and-go overtime and crunch practices that have been underway since the first delay, and perhaps longer still.

It’s been said, and it still holds true, that “crunch is not a triumph of the workforce; it’s a failure of the management.” Indeed the handling of working conditions on Cyberpunk 2077 and the snafu of at best inconsistent, at worst obfuscatory communications around them, all but begs for a deeply skeptical eye.

One might be further inclined toward cynicism given CD Projekt Red’s track record of crunch during the production of The Witcher 3, and its brushing off of criticisms with a response that essentially boiled down to “if you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

At our most cynical then, it’s not much of a stretch at all to conclude that the studio hoped their May 2019 promises would tide them over long enough for everyone to either not notice or forget about their responses in January 2020. It seems to have worked too, given that many reactions to the official statement of crunch and overtime policies are those of surprise or dismay, even though CD Projekt Red all but told people crunch was likely about ten months ago.

It’s certainly very convenient for Badowski to come forward hat-in-hand and contrite, though maintaining that this “formalization of an informal code that has long existed at the studio” was “one of the hardest decisions [he’s] had to make.”

Many an article already written on the subject has rightly pointed out that the overtime now mandated for developers working on Cyberpunk 2077 will be compensated. It’s undoubtedly worth noting, given that crunch practices at other game studios have not come with appropriate compensation, even when developers, artists, and QA staff were pushed to work 100-hour weeks or overworked into “stress casualties.”

The fact that CD Projekt Red is simply complying with Polish labor laws is a rather miserable statement on the ubiquitousness of exploitative and underpaid crunch if journalists are left in the position of applauding a company simply for not breaking the law.

For clarity, the labor regulations in Poland are such that overtime is permitted under one of two conditions. These apply “if rescue action is required to protect human life or health, to safeguard property or the environment, or to carry out emergency repair work” or “if the employer has special needs.” One assumes the conditions under which overtime is being applied here pertain to the latter case.

As such, weekly working hours plus overtime “cannot exceed an average of 48 hours,” and “overtime cannot exceed 150 hours in any one calendar year for each worker.” Any employee working overtime, according to the schedule detailed by CD Projekt Red, is entitled to an additional 50% of their salary, on top of their normal salary, for the hours worked on Saturday that brings about a six-day workweek.

While the pay scheme for this overtime work at CD Projekt Red hasn’t been detailed publicly, it is probably reasonable to assume it will be compliant with these labor laws. Studio head Adam Badowski further confirmed on Twitter that CDPR would divide a bonus amounting to 10% of the company’s annual profit equally among employees.

To say the least, though, answering good faith engagement from customers and the passion, effort, and time of designers with bare-minimum legal compliance and a cloud of misinformation over working conditions since January 2020 doesn’t cast Cyberpunk 2077 in a favorable light.