Cyberpunk 2077 is “ready for PC”, per most embarrassing investor call of all time
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Let’s face it, we’ve all been in situations where we’ve done something at work that’s resulted in a conversation we know is going to be awkward and embarrassing, but we’ve still had to do it anyway. On this basis, I sympathise with CD Projekt Red’s joint CEO Adam Kiciński and board member Michał Nowakowski, who […]

Some highlights:

But they probably definitely will be ready to launch on December 10th – or at least that’s what he says in response to an investor asking if the studio can really be comfortable saying it’s going to actually come out on the 10th: “That’s more or less what I’m saying, I guess – yes.”

Later in the transcript it gets really bad, with some incredibly poor comments about crunch, and some hilarious pretzeling over whether or not there is actually a “problem” with current-gen builds. But several of the investor questions boil down to “but m8, is it definitely coming out in December? Because you’ve said this before?”

Regarding crunch, which has deservedly been a bit of a PR nightmare for them of late, Kicińsk says that “actually, it’s not that bad – and never was”, which is a hell of a pull quote. Although he acknowledges that some people are “crunching heavily”, he says most of the team aren’t at all because they’ve finished their portion of development (were they crunching before? Who knows!). At this stage “it’s mostly about Q&A and engineers, programmers”, (which still sounds like a lot of people, if you ask me), and in any case the crunch is “not that heavy.” Those who are crunching will, y’know, have that crunch extended for the duration of the three week delay, but according to Kicińsk everyone is happy with the delay! So no worries! Pay no attention to the crunch behind the curtain!

This tone apparently did not go down well with staff: Bloomberg News reporter Jason Schreier tweeted that he has been passed an email sent to CDPR staff from Kicińsk apologising for his comments on crunch. “I had not wanted to comment on crunch,” quotes Schreier, apparently from this email, “yet I still did, and I did it in a demeaning and harmful way… What I said was not even unfortunate, it was utterly bad.”

Oh and the developers found out about the extra crunch the same time everyone else did.

  • ArmedHostage [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    They promised they would do this without crunch and the CEO even went as far to say crunch time was a symbol of failure and they wouldn't do it. Now they've had the 6 weeks of mandated weekend work, and that's still going on until around December 10th presumably. Some of those workers are pulling 100 hour weeks already. And what are they gonna get in return? An employer paid gym pass? Free fresh fruit and coffee in the office? 10% profit share between 1000 or so workers?

    It doesn't matter if the owner says he's against bad employment practices, it doesn't matter if they hand a little bit extra back to their workers of the enormous amount of stolen value, you need a union together or to be in a co-op.