CD Projekt Red devs unionise after its third round of layoffs in three months
eurogamer.netOne would expect them to be drowning in cash after the success of The Witcher, and Cyberpunk 2077, 80M+ copies sold. That’s billions of dollars in revenue.
Even a headcount of 1000 at SV tech salary levels (which Poland definitely does not have) would barely make a dent. Why cut costs now?
Witcher hasn't had a new game in almost a decade (unless you count gwent which i don't) and cyberpunk 2077 was a complete joke until the trigger OVA (and even then it's still extremely broken).
Check the game again, they updated the game recently that revamped and added a lot of features (Cop AI, vehicular combat, clothes arent armor) that should've been there at the start.
idk about 2.0 but i tried it out last year when the anime released and there was still extreme pop-in artifacts, with NPCs walking directly in front of me with their low-polygon models on.
The 2.0 update is extremely overhyped. Even with all of that, it’s still an extremely dull and clunky game. It’s trying to be GTA: Cyberpunk but honestly it’s closer to watchdogs and I had more fun with the watchdogs games.
I'm replaying with 2.0, and it's honestly a much smoother experience. I'm not sure if it's over hyped. It was small bits here and there, but it was a very holistic overhaul of the game in the end.
(FWIW, I'm someone with around a hundred hours in the game)
even before 2.0 the game was pretty playable and decent, but it's far from everything they promised. RPG aspects are put aside and when I played I felt my impact on the story was less than that of Skyrim missions. The main quest in particular is basically resumed to one option in the end, a lot of side quests are like that, and the factions are very clear "endless enemy" burden. It's not a bad game, but it's a bad role-playing game
The main story has multiple endings, and also a hidden ending. It's not really that single choice. Also, there's all the characters and how they interact has some impact on the end story depending. Some side quests can similarly become available or unavailable depending on some choices. There's also the relationship with Johnny, etc. The roleplaying aspect apparently improved in Phantom Liberty. But I wouldn't say CP is worse than Skyrim! Both have their moments
I agree with you on the point it was decent even before 2.0 and that there's missing features. If you're on PC though, there's a lot of mechanics added in by mods too!
2.0 level scaling just removed all the fun and point of leveling up.
Everything is the same difficulty if you're level 1, 15 or 50.
Did they fix that bug where Jackie after the medivac takes the girl in the intro would walk dead ass through a wall and send all the physics objects flying?
it's far cry mixed with deus ex.
it's a great game from that perspective and side missions are great in expansion
Doesn't change the fact they sold over 80 million copies, you can do the math.
yeah they sold 80 million copies three years ago, and now instead of being three years into developing The Next Big Thing they're struggling to catch up to where they were supposed to be in 2020. You don't need a PHD in mathematics to see how that would lead to them losing money.
The usual suspect: it's publicly traded.
Happens all the time in non-publicly traded companies as well, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telltale_Games
>[...] but the rate of production created a "crunch time" culture behind the scenes, leaving poor company morale [...]
>Internal restructuring led to a layoff of 25% of the company's staff in November 2017 [...]
>In the midst of releasing The Walking Dead: The Final Season, the company was forced to initiate a "majority studio closure" after their last investor had pulled out of funding. Telltale announced on September 21, 2018, that it had let go of all but 25 of its staff as part of this closure [...]
Where all investors demand free money from the Fed and a vastly underpaid and overworked workforce.
Public companies don't get "free money from the Fed" in any meaningful sense. The closest thing that has any bearing in reality is that money printing makes interest rates lower, which means they can borrow more with the same amount of money and raise money from investors easier.
In this case they're on the Warsaw stock exchange, so I'm not sure how much the Fed turning off the cash hose enters into things.
The CEO said in July that they were overstaffed.
https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-red-organ...
Yes. Staring at their financial statements, it looks like revenue is down in 2023. They're probably seeing a faster taper (or smaller revenue bumps from CP fixes) in sales than expected.
The wording in the statement really sounds like the typical project based employment thing. Seems like their pipeline got out of wack (maybe the CP fixes and updates?), and they're downgrading sales estimates on future projects, and suddenly you have less slack than before.
Sucks. Wish the best for the devs (and their new union) and the company.
Interesting, seems like developers unionizing is getting popular in Europe. Is there any union for general software devs in Germany? I know workers council (Betriebsrat) is popular but that's very company-dependent.
Game companies have notoriously been sweatshops for devs, so not surprising I guess.
I think you’d be covered under Ver.di. I worked in an IT security consulting firm and was covered
Yes, IG Metal is active across many IT related companies, and it was already a thing when I moved here 20 years ago.
Game companies and small agencies are the exception actually.
If you do IT at a big German company, you will most likely be covered by union agreements, even if not being part of one.
Ok, so it is a clear sign that CD Projekt is going under. You cannot have a labor union and still be a successful company. Unions are cancer.
More to the point: IT job market in Poland is based on freelance (B2B) contracts. The fact that CD Projekt staff can unionize proves that they were mostly employed on Contract of Employment. Which means that all the best stuff have already left CD Projekt long time ago, because no self-respecting programmer would work on Contract of Employment when they can make twice the money as a freelancer.
> You cannot have a labor union and still be a successful company.
Huh? A plethora of successful companies in established industries has worker unions - virtually all manufacturing companies, but also service (airlines etc), and so on.
IT industry was exception to the rule so far.
>because no self-respecting programmer would work on Contract of Employment when they can make twice the money as a freelancer.
There are differences between B2B and CoE, yet it is definitely not 2x, unless you are doing overemployment.
Probably something like 1/3. It is lowered by "author's costs": tax deductible costs and if you're below specific age, then taxes work in a different way for you on CoE (0% tax below age 26).
So in general saying that B2B is always better than CoE is imo bullshit. A lot of depends on your situation and also on the agreements that you have with your 'customer'.
There's additional dynamic that may be taken into consideration - when you're on CoE it is harder to fire you and it guarantees you a month or three of safety
> You cannot have a labor union and still be a successful company. Unions are cancer.
Hard disagree.
Every German carmaker has unions. The US is just not capable of integration.
Most gamedev studio employees are artists, not programmers