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Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

polygon.com

31–40 of 132 posts

Re: Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

#31
post #28

And billions of profits go to owners and shareholders, while developers crunch 80 hours/week for $2000-3000/month.

Devs are always free to go indie and make it big for themselves. But it's a LOT harder than it sounds. So your point is?

I think the point is just that profits do not end up going to the people doing the majority of the work.

Re: Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

#32
post #7
post #3

That’s dissapointing. Especially after they ‘promised’ they wouldn’t do it. I wonder what the solution is here. Boycotting the game is hardly going to help the employees there. I guess this is just one of those things that the law should mandate, but does not for some reason.

Maybe a software developers’ union. Big projects like this use a lot of third party tooling; imagine if a decent percentage of those said “we won’t license this to you unless you’re a union shop” or something like that. And said union would enforce humane working conditions.

Us software developers are too smart for organised labour.

And why would companies like Epic restrict their revenues like that? Epic too sees financial gain from their developers working excessive (potentially unpaid) overtime, no doubt. Unions are necessarily devised and lead by workers, not beneficent corps.

Re: Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

#33
post #10
post #2

What is even more baffling to me is the sheer rage and lack of humanity of fans towards the developers when they delayed it several times. There was a lot of hate including death threats to the developers. I understand the internet brings out the worst in people but I can't imagine anyone desiring to be a game developer at this point.

The delays were sheer incompetence and are far from normal in the gaming industry. You don't guarantee to fans personally that the game will definitely come out at a date (which is less than a month away) then delay it the next day. This indicates that nobody even knew how bad it was. There's also rumors developers found out about the delays from social media. CDPR execs are just incompetent and unable to set realist…

Incompetence while making a video game isn't a valid reason for death threats either.

Re: Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

#34
post #29
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That not everybody does it doesn't make it any more acceptable, who said to accept it? Above poster said that death threats are easy to get these days for virtually anything and can hardly be used as an excuse.

Who is using it to excuse anything? Saying that objecting to death threats is used as a distraction technique or "as an excuse" is pretty much suggesting you shouldn't object to it, because doing so is trying to distract or make excuses instead of objecting to unacceptable behavior.

A) death threats aren't acceptable. They're not really fun to receive. I remember a span when I received several and while I was fairly sure they weren't serious, it's still not too fun to think about.

B) whinging about inevitable death threats to deflect attention from your gaffes isn't really great, either. The public complaint, if anything, further normalizes the death threats with people inclined to make them. Secondarily, it generates sympathy and distraction, which is probably the effect one wanted when one chose to whinge.

If one wants to object to death threats in a way that improves our culture and makes them less likely, it's probably best done out of band from the actual coverage of one's failing. Do it retrospectively, and in contemplative channels, not ones that are already polemic and filled with attention to the failing that caused the original outrage.

Re: Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

#35
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That not everybody does it doesn't make it any more acceptable, or makes rightfully complaining about it any more unacceptable.

What it does, is make "but we received death threats for this, we couldn't have done more" irrelevant as you'll get death threats for whatever you do.

Where does that suddenly come from?

Re: Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

#37
post #33
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The delays were sheer incompetence and are far from normal in the gaming industry. You don't guarantee to fans personally that the game will definitely come out at a date (which is less than a month away) then delay it the next day. This indicates that nobody even knew how bad it was. There's also rumors developers found out about the delays from social media. CDPR execs are just incompetent and unable to set realist…

Incompetence while making a video game isn't a valid reason for death threats either.

You're implying I made a claim I never made. I never said it justified it.

Re: Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

#38
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like every fan was acting like that. "We've received death threats" has become a tool to try and change the topic from whatever made people upset.

That not everybody does it doesn't make it any more acceptable, or makes rightfully complaining about it any more unacceptable.

I never said it's acceptable, but when twitter has close to 200 million daily users, you're going to get some death threats when you do something that makes people upset. And it's blatant PR when the company is forcing the devs to do even more crunch time, then tweet about "death threats" and you see the conversation immediately switch from critical to supportive. It's also not like tweeting "Death threats are NOT OKAY" is going to change the mind of the kind of people who send death threats.

Re: Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises

#40
post #37
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incompetence while making a video game isn't a valid reason for death threats either.

You're implying I made a claim I never made. I never said it justified it.

Then I'm not sure why you put it in reply to a comment that just talked about how they don't understand how people could do that, if it's not relevant to the threats.
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