As you may know Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed by about 5 months. I'm personally all for this as more time to polish and refine the game is good, I'd rather wait years for a solid game rather than a shorter time for a buggy one.

However, after the news Adam Kiciński (One of the CEO's at CD Projekt) held a Q&A interview about this which you can read on this website (I can't link it due to a anti spam measure, this is my first post as well.)
In this interview A guy named Micheal brought up if the devs had to do crunch hours and if you're not in the loop of that PR word it basically means overtime, but to the extreme. Like for weeks they have to work on a strict schedule. Of course Adam said that unfortunately they would have to do that.

I don't know how other users on this forum would react, but I see this as not good. It was my understanding that pushing the game's release date would let the devs be more flexible working on the game and have breathing room. I don't understand how basic bugfixes and refinements forces you as the CEO to push your workers to the limit. They have a life outside of their work. If they are super passionate about working on the game and want to spent a few extra hours working on it, then let them! (Pay them overtime of course) but don't force it upon them like that's somehow normal, it really isn't.

I'm really looking forward to this game, and I have a lot of faith in this company, especially in this DRM Free storefront. This is coming from someone who has a lot of respect for the employees at CDPR and loves what they do. I just don't want the staff to be that stressed out, I have heard terrible things coming from Rockstar and Bioware where people literally have mental breakdowns due to this inhumane practice.

I'd like to hear what other people think about this situation, do you agree or have a rebuttal, maybe the higher-ups could make up for it, comment if ya want. This is just my two cents.

[deleted]

Hi Jacob,
crunch time is in my job also normal when our company get a big contract or we are close to the target line. In our case here with the game developers, i think it is a normal task and afaik triple A studios paid their dev's good.

Crunch time or whatever you want to call it is normal in most employment fields. Factories have a yearly shutdown, during which everyone has to do overtime and/or weekend work. People who do projects will have to do overtime when the deadline comes closer, like Andreas said. A video game is a huge project, usually with hundreds of people involved. Why would it be any different here? The only problems here would be unpaid overtime and extended periods of long workdays. But with a delay of 5 monhts I highly doubt that they're in permanent overtime mode and no wannabe journalist can convince me otherwise.

I can't speak to game developers, as I'm just a software developer, which is, as I understand it, quite a different world, but even so, I just can't imagine that unionizing is going to do crap.

First of all, you have to understand why unions mattered to begin with. They had to do with controlling the supply of labor to the means of production. If you didn't pay your factory workers well enough, they would stop working. If you tried to hire new guys ("scabs,"), the union would physically block them from accessing the means of production. With computer programmers, the "means of production" is a computer. You can be physically anywhere in the world and still work for a particular company if you have access to the internet. Programming is too "distributed" to set up things like picket lines.

So, say CDPR's programmers unionize, and CDPR management fires the lot of them and hires new people. What will the fired programmers do, other than raise a big stink? And note that this basically happens all the time anyway: few people who worked on (for example) Starcraft 1 were around to work on Starcraft 2. I understand that big game developers see a pretty high turnover rate. So you basically, over time, fire everyone anyway. So, what would unionizing actually do to help the programmer?

More than that, why is it actually necessary? Look, programming is a high-skill profession that's in high demand and low supply. If my employer demanded I work overtime for 5 months, I'd tell him to take a hike. If he threatened to fire me, I'd laugh in his face and just quit and I'd have a job within a month, I guarantee it. This is not particularly unusual for other programmers, in my experience (I'm a Java developer, but I see similar dynamics with PHP and C#). Most programmers I know get great paychecks, great benefits and very relaxed working conditions. Even if I were to unionize, I doubt it could get much better than it is now.

Game developers don't seem to be in such a good situation. Or, at least, they seem to complain more and people worry about them more (and you have things like "the Widows of EA"). Why is that? Well, from what I can gather (and despite my love of computer games, and my burning desire to develop them, why I never went into the profession), it's because everyone wants to be a developer. Development is also a high-skill profession, but the demand is lower and the supply higher, because you've got loads of people getting their degrees to become developers. People dream of working for EA or CDPR or Blizzard, at least until they do. So they accept lower pay "for the honor of working on games." The AAA developers know this. I think this is why they have such high turnover rates: you get into the job, star struck, realize after a few years that it's BS, demand better pay, they kick you for the next star-struck schmuck, and you go off and create an indie studio that makes a better game anyway. This highlights the last problem with unionizing game development: I think if you asked a lot of game developers to unionize, and their management told them that doing so would threaten their job, they wouldn't unionize.

Hell, they don't have to crunch: they can just say "I quit!" and probably find new work somewhere else slinging some other form of code, probably for better pay. So why don't they? Because they want to be game developers. As long as people have a passion for game development, someone is going to be there to exploit their labors of love for some extra money. There are costs to this (I happen to think the best game studios keep the same developers around for a long time, invest in them to improve the overall skill, which speeds up development time and improves code quality, and they tend to focus on smaller, less-ambitious projects that allow them to increment their engines and their skills), but not insurmountable ones for the AAA industry.

Unionize - just like that UAW, who killed Detroit by killing its' car industry?
Yeah, sure, great idea.

Not to mention that a guild is almost the opposite of a union.
A guild is organized by established masters in their craft to protect their trade from external interference and to guarantee the lasting quality of their craft by securing an influx of talent whom they school and hone to perfection.
A union is a press-gang/racket, organized by talentless thugs aspiring to politics or the civil service, and whose soul purpose is to destroy the free market, control the influx of talent and bully everyone remotely attached to their craft into giving them whatever they want.

Yes, they both try to interfere with the free market, but in completely different ways. A guild represents the employers, a union pretends to represent the employees but actually only represents union leaders. A guild's goal is to elevate the art of their craft being while being commercially successful, a union's goal is to screw everyone (including its own members) out of as much as possible while giving as little as possible in return.

Exactly.