Bullying Claims Lead To Witcher 3 Director To Resign

Don’t you just love it when you hear that someone in power for one of the best games of the last decade, of all-time, has been abusing that power? I mean, hate it, yes I forgot I wasn’t talking to the executives of large game publishers who often seem to ignore things like bullying and harassment by those who’ve been there for 20-years. Was that a dig at Ubisoft for that bloke that put drugs in baked goods, or whatever it was Serge Hascoët was doing? Yep!

Well, if you tend to take an extreme stance on things like this, you’ll have to start burning your copy of The Witcher 3. Director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has resigned following a month-long investigation into accusations of bullying. The reveal of the resignation from Tomaszkiewicz came from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, noting that the commission that was investigating these allegations found him not guilty. Though as Tomaszkiewicz wrote in emails that Bloomberg has reviewed, he said, “nonetheless, a lot of people are feeling fear, stress or discomfort when working with me.” He then went on to apologize “for all the bad blood I have caused.”

As I said at the top, Tomaszkiewicz is just the latest example of someone either being accused or resigning from developers and publishers. We’ve covered it multiple times, from Ubisoft’s several resignations and Dmitry noting that we should continue to talk about this. At the tail end of last year, we saw Rocksteady see a few claims thrown their way too, and they didn’t respond well. Through I disagree partially with Zoë on minor things, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 mess both behind the scenes and in-game was one of the biggest stories of last year. A story that overtook the complete and utter shambles that was Naughty Dog’s management issues from this time last year. I’ve even covered smaller studios and their awful management issues.

Through, as I said in that long example of the industry’s big problem, CD Projekt has had a slew of issues over the last several months. Tomaszkiewicz, while working with the company worked not only on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but also the Netflix series which adopted Andrzej Sapkowski’s books and the games. He would also be listed as part of the production team for last year’s mess that was Cyberpunk 2077, and one might assume some smaller projects within the company as well.

The company as a whole has had a topsy-turvy few months since Cyberpunk 2077‘s release, as the game was quickly pulled from the PlayStation store over quality concerns. Stocks had dropped significantly with the release of the game in December when reviewers and players noting copious numbers of issues. Issues that would lead the Polish consumer rights bureau to start investing them in the New Year.