Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red declared mandatory 6-day work weeks leading up to the game’s November launch date.CDPR’s studio head Adam Badowski notified employees about their new work hours on Sept.
28.This is a complete turnabout from CDPR’s statements last year, when co-founder and joint CEO Marcin Iwiński promised that the company wouldn’t force its workers to crunch.“Crunch” is industry jargon for the excessive overtime that workers go through leading up to a title’s release.While it is common practice in all software development, it is particularly ubiquitous and brutal in the games industry.Several top-tier game studioshave made teams work 70-100 hours a week for upwards of 6 months.Critics have claimed that the normalization of crunch in the game industry is the result of poor management and disregard for workers’ rights.Badowski said that 10 percent of CDPR’s annual profit will be “split directly among the team”