I don’t really care, at this point it’s an expectation that anyone wanting to work in the gaming industry should have. Like injuries in football, being on call as a Doctor, and your life being on the line as a cop/firefighter/military. It just comes with the job, at least CDPR is paying them for the extra hours.
You know, in the course of history, humanity has been able to call the dangers of a lot of jobs as "being part of it".
Men and children would work 7 days a week in a mine and the occasional gas pocket blowing up would "come with the job".
Women and children would work 7 days a week sewing together fabrics at the 8th floor of a warehouse without a safety ladder, and when those would go up like a tinder box, it would "come with the job".
Police/Firefighters would ask for bribes to save your house from burglars/fire, not even bother when it was too dangerous for them, and despotic rulers would throw away their countrymen in pointless military wars. You'd die from scurvy or get your limbs hacked off in the navy.
And then there were people who said, "hang on here. We could make things slightly better!".
"Hyperbole!" you say? Well, the solutions of these things came in tiny baby steps across centuries of improvement too.
One day, the miners and sewers got safety features. Police and fireman were expected to do their job and were given shiny new equipment so that they could do their jobs a lot safer too. Media and democracy decreased the risk of pointless wars for the military and every death is now a tragedy, while sailors in the navy have been given a better diet and more access to medicine.
I'd like to think that our human society, is based around making life better for people, just a tiny bit better everyday - even if just a little - and people not to sit around shrugging.
Game Industry Crunch? I don't expect it to vanish overnight, but let's at least commiserate with each other that: Yeah! We could make that better over the course of another century, if not this decade!
We have at the very least, the incremental urge towards it.
So they have to work seven extra days till release? This is an outrage! Someone call Twitter.
This just isnt a big deal.
Kings among men!
I'm not looking for a revolution, or to adorn myself with a halo forged in the fires of righteous indignation. I'm just looking for the INCREMENTAL *URGE* towards improvement and a world where no-one has to work overtime. Can I get a millimeter towards that? Half of one? How hard do I need to squeeze the stone for the milk of human kindness? You guys must be able to envision or desire a world where everyone has it a little bit better? I don't get the reactionary urge to defend the negative as part-of-the-course, the reasoning that our present society is as good as it could possibly get, and judging any kind of societal improvement as just snowflake thinking.
I am disgusted. Ethical players will gladly accept to wait longer to get the game, to avoid bad working conditions.
I beg you CD Projekt Red, don't fall for the dark side of the force.
Alright, tone it down now.
I for one am not so ethical that I won't buy the game in November. Just that I would've been okay waiting a little longer and not willing to have this news go buy without at least mentioning it here.
Ideally it shouldn't happen if things were properly planned out and workloads properly evaluated. But that very rarely happens.
Quite frankly I was amazed they managed to held out until 50 days to release before asking people to do overtime. Other studios have had people crunch for upwards to a year, it's a sad truth of the industry.
People apparently value the deadline and the cost/income more than the health of their employees.
I'm with you. It's really sad when companies put this kind of pressure on employees. These are people and forcing them to work 12 hour days 6 days a week is terrible for health. This isn't a job where you should worry about exhaustion or your deadline. It is a job where you should worry about creating the best work you can and make it something you can be proud of. The audience can wait a bit longer so that the people don't work themselves to the bone for something that probably will just have more mistakes because the creators were stressed and rushed.
We are in agreement. This is sad and/or not-ideal. That's all I wanted to point out here.
When did any kind of mandatory overtime whatsoever become 'omg, evil corporation enslaves its workers!'.
Crunch originally became infamous because of months, sometimes year+, of 80-100 hour weeks under the implied threat of losing your job. Sometimes it wasn't even paid overtime. That kind of thing.
I'm a centrist myself, so yeah, calling things an evil corporation because of it this is a BIG stretch. Still, you are talking my language. Thing got better in the past. I just harbor a hope they'll get even better in future. CDPR tried, failed and let's hope they do better next time.
Go, Go, CDPR!