Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher studio CD Projekt laying off 100 staff
Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 developer CD Projekt says it will lay off 9% of its total staff in an effort to streamline its RPG game development.
So the half-cocked product release strategy doesn't work and its time to punish labor for the mistakes of executives.
"punish labor" 😂
They'll find new jobs. Companies have no loyalty to employees and employees have no loyalty to companies. Nobody is in it for love. They got paychecks, now they'll find someone else to give them paychecks. It's transactional.
Do you think that being laid off is a good thing?
The employees are suffering the negative consequences of the leadership's piss-poor decisionmaking, that was their point. Leadership hasn't seen any turnover or resignations, to my knowledge.
Is it so wrong in your mind to expect a little personal responsibility? Or do you find it just that leadership can fuck up consequence-free and shitcan others for their failures?
If that's how you'd run your company, I'd run the other way as both a worker and a consumer.
Isnt that like, a usual part in the game development cycle? I've seen news reports like this for over 15 years now. Developer starts with ideas for a new game, small team. Developer starts actual production of game, team grows. Developer realizes how much work there actually is to be done, team grows even further. Game is almost done and in a good state, team starts to shrink since there is no longer enough work for everyone. Part is laid off and part is reassigned to early development of DLC. Game is released, and smaller team is able to do patchwork. Developer starts with idea for new game, cycle repeats.
Perhaps the main reason we havent seen a lot of these news blurbs over the past few years is that A: CDPR is a good punchingbag. Common memory of the target audience hold the bad release of CP2077, so its easy to get back in the habit and haul in these clicks. And B: TripleA game development mas mostly conglomerated into a few big developers/publishers with several teams around the world. That means that when one project winds down, surplus personnel might be easily integrated into a different team that is just winding up. CDPR is one of the few tripleA developers not able to do this (yet).
No, this is not really typical for a large studio. I've been in the games industry for 10 years and losing your team every project is a studio killer. No one does this anymore aside from really small indie studios that can't afford to keep the team together. This is not normal for a studio that knows what it's doing.
It was the "traditional" pipeline and to be honest only good for the "publisher" and some big enough studio, but really aren't that good for those job hunting game devs(and part of the churn and burn culture, can't and won't trying to form union if your turn over is high.)
It is how you get broken games every new release cause the guys that sticks around as supervisor didn't actually code the previous games or know the actual workflow/pipeline that makes the last game(their last touching code/software might be like 10+ years ago), the middle leads etc might have burned out during last crunch and go to next company after their vacation because fuck this crunch thing I have a family, then then newbies wearing shiny shipped game under their belt move to next company for a better position/pay. So no one or very few actually knows how last time things were done and may or may not have a voice during decision making. Every game, you build the team almost ground up and thus, make similar and more mistakes with ever increasing pressure from schedule and scale.
It's not an healthy cycle, it is something that creative industry should break away from.
Like the leadership that forced a release of an unfinished game? Doubt.
lol since when have business "leaders" ever had to face consequences of their own idiotic decisions?
Management types are often power-tripping narcissistic idiots who'll make dumb-as-fuck decisions, and when things go to shit they'll just fire the people doing the actual work and congratulate themselves on being such savvy businesspeople
Yeah, management positions are often filled by people who:
A) Want to get a higher paying job and don't care about the product or the industry necessarily (MBA-circlejerk types).
B) Are Devs/Artists/Creatives that wanted increased compensation, and the only way up was as a manager where they have less aptitude.
Executive staff needs to better integrate management as "servant leaders" within teams, and compensate EVERYONE better
Nah. Only the hard workers.
So, about Cyberpunk 2077: Can you by now buy your own apartments? And do the NPC's have day-and-night-cycles as well as realistic AI that they give the impression of the most believable city to date?
The game will never be what people wanted (and what was - to some extent - promised). It's too flawed and unfinished to be fixable through patches.
I still thoroughly enjoyed it (I'm just about to finish my first playthrough at 100+ hours), but the game has to be approached with the understanding that it's fundamentally flawed. I have no problems with that, Fallout: New Vegas is one of my favourite games so I'm comfortable with the situation and I'm used to fixing problems myself through mods (yes, even on a first playthrough).
The best comparison I can think of is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (though perhaps that game is now too old to be a relevant example). You can't play it expecting a finished, polished product, but it's still worthwhile and the good parts are really good.
Yeah the writing in Cyberpunk 2077 is honestly phenomenal, and the setting is really good. I was honestly shocked by how good the writing and VA in this game actually are. Maybe it's because it's more relevant to me, but it's the first time since FNV I really felt the writing in a game was gripping and interesting to me on a serious level.
It's gameplay is honestly decent enough as well. Gunplay isn't bad, and with the large amount of mobility makes the gunplay even more fun. Hacking and stealth are a bit op but fun, my biggest problem is the melee combat feels a bit weightless.
I am for sure looking forward to Phantom Liberty and the perk rework. Maybe my view of cyberpunk is tailored by the fact I never bought into the hype so I was never let down by it. I just watched Edgerunners, loved it. Played the game and was further impressed.
There's like 3 apartments but they're more or less pointless, the NPCs still suck and the AI is terrible, so generally the game is still an overhyped piece of shit but it does look quite nice. I paid less than 20€ for it though so I did get my money's worth out of it at least.
So it's a game with the biggest open city in any game bar none and so on. But that's not enough, reason is what you are hoping is likely impossible not at the scale of night city. Even if AI was ok it would be not enough NPC models not enough buildings to explore and so on. But all these things don't contribute anything to this kind of game.
The financialization and corporatization of the game industry and it’s consequences has been a disaster for the average player and game dev.
You should go to Poland and do some Johnny Silverhand type shit.
That happens literyally every time with these hackjob of a company
Just speculation here, but is this a sign that CDPR is tilting more towards mainstreaming GOG over prioritizing game development? Valve did exactly that with Steam and they very, very rarely release games they make any more.
Steam is a cash cow that literally just prints money for them. I'd imagine CDPR corpos to be salivating over that kind of low maintenance income that comes with owning a large digital distribution gaming platform.
Seems like they tried to grow the company waaaaaaaaay too fast (practically doubled their number of employees since TW3 was released).
Obviously this sucks, but it's good that they're not unceremoniously dropping people with zero notice (looking at you, Activision). Doubt we can expect an environment where gamedev layoffs suddenly disappear, but people actually getting advanced warning about this stuff would be a huge improvement on the industry's norms.