Following one of the most disastrous AAA launches of the last generation, CD Projekt RED’s management is reportedly facing backlash from its staff for questionable decisions made during the course of Cyberpunk 2077‘s development.
The report comes from none other than Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who has been sounding the alarm about mandatory crunch at the studio throughout the year, only to be met with hostile CDPR fans in denial. In an internal meeting prior to Cyberpunk 2077‘s delisting from the PlayStation Store, frustrated staff apparently fired blunt questions at the management about forced crunch and their misleading statements to the public about the state of the game.
“One employee asked the board why it had said in January that the game was ‘complete and playable’ when that wasn’t true, to which the board answered that it would take responsibility,” Schreier reported. “Another developer asked whether CD Projekt’s directors felt it was hypocritical to make a game about corporate exploitation while expecting that their employees work overtime. The response was vague and non-committal.”
Apparently, CDPR’s directors have promised staff that they’ll improve production practices going forward, but didn’t elaborate what they have in mind.
Several current and former CDPR developers have told Schreier that Cyberpunk 2077, which was announced in 2012 and entered production around 2016, suffered because of “unrealistic” deadlines set by the studio’s management. It’s also unclear at what point in development CDPR practically abandoned last-gen consoles considering the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X weren’t announced until later in development, and their dev kits weren’t sent out until recently.
[Source: Bloomberg]