Cyberpunk 2077

[Tom Guycott]

Originally Posted by Destor id love to know what people who villainize crunch do for a living. go ask a lawyer about what crunch is like. its the job; comes with the territory. the evils of crunch of propagated by YouTubers and children.

That attitude prevailing is kind of the problem, though. It's a similar attitude of how GameStop got away with being a shit company for so long because of how it lures in young, naive nerds who think of it as a dream job, and how more of those "suckers" can be thrown into the ground level grinding wheel of low pay, minimal hours, having lofty numbers goals hanging over their heads, and the perpetual Sword of Damocles above them; that they can be replaced at the expense of the next young, naive nerd. And that's just retail. These people - programmers, testers, and the like - have more specialized skills working on more technical things.

Just because "business is done that way" and possibly done that way forever doesn't mean it should be done that way. And in an industry like games, there's this weird conflation of people voluntarily banding together and putting in all the time and effort neccessary for a great product, and a corporate mandated encampment. Even in other job fields like, say, manufacturing, there's a gulf of difference between offered overtime and mandatory overtime. It's really only after the EA Spouse letter that any of it came to some sort of public thought, but it doesn't mean it was never a horrible way to do business, just not a publicly discussed one.

To simply pass this off as YouTubes (where I assume you mean they're being reactionary for views) and children (who I presume you mean don't know any better) is pretty reductive. On top, how does this make *them* the villain for pointing out bullshit? Again, just because business is done that way doesn't mean it should be. Another conjoining business practice is essentially holding ones career hostage with the same type of logic where people say "if you don't like living wherever you are, just move", as if moving is a free and simple prospect. In this case, quitting the job probably also means you getting a black mark in the industry; being labled as "difficult to work with" or somesuch nonsense, to where nobody wants to hire you for your "reputation"... a reputation born from you not wanting to live out of your office and throw your personal life into upheaval for a few weeks/months unexpectedly because someone above your paygrade deemed it neccessary to do so. I've had a couple jobs like that. Shit sucked. But for me it fortunately wasn't something I had a degree tied to, or in a business where they would talk to other places similar to them and potentially prevent me from doing something similar elsewhere.

What makes this particular story a bit scummier is that CDPR made a show about how they wouldn't/didn't have to crunch for Cyberpunk because they're better than that; that they could just delay the launch instead of shitting on their workers to the adulation and brownie points of the public... and here we are. It makes it seem as if they either went back on their word, or they never intended to keep it in the first place.