Holy shit. There are 550 people working at CDPR right now.

[Lisbeth_Salander]

Holy shit. There are 550 people working at CDPR right now.

Huge news.

According to an unnoficial finance report, there are over 550 employers working at CDPR right now.

If with 200 they were able to make Witcher 3, imagine what they can do with 550. Hell if at least 450 are working full time in Cyberpunk 2077..christ this game might strike the gaming industry like a nuclear bomb.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

If Witcher 3 had 200, CP2077's possible 450 means more than twice the expenses on workhours per pair of nostrils alone, which has to be accounted for when thinking about the audience-to-be. Plus, a huge team is way harder to manage, as the information flow from top to bottom is far less clear and personal than with a smaller studio (e.g. the nameless codemonekeys in cubicles in a big team are just that, nameless codemonkeys in cubicles). It's not a straight translation from manpower to a guality (that would mean also Ubisoft would be making good games, and not just odorless copypaste shit).

Anyway... Isn't that kind of old news alredy, though. I thought the studio size was alredy stated and there were mentions about 800 employees at some point (the thread about it has disappeared in the abyss with the recent influx of reopened old topics, though, and I can't bother digging it up, so... oh well).

 

[Lisbeth_Salander]

If Witcher 3 had 200, CP2077's possible 450 means more than twice the expenses on workhours per pair of nostrils alone, which has to be accounted for when thinking about the audience-to-be.

Not necessarily,

if you consider that with double the amount of people they may get things done in less time, CDPR's expenses aren't terribly bigger as you make it look out to be.


Think about it: it took them 3.5 years to make Witcher 3 with 200 people working on it
if it takes them 3.5 years to make Cyberpunk 2077, it may take more money but the following factors may drastically decrease their time developing the game and their expences:

• they already have a greatly made engine to work with and time it takes for them to update it is less when compared to building an engine from scratch like it happened in the time period between Witcher 2 and Wild Hunt

• considering we're in mid production right now and CDPR is recruiting new people to work with them, these very same individuals won't work 100% of the 3.5 years time period, thus making the contract time probably shorter and less expencive

• the original team has been already working on the project for a while now, and new people are coming in

• not to mention the whole team experience factor that might really help the communication problem, the changes these guys went through from witcher 2 to 3 shows a significant level of adaptation

What we had previously was Iwinski confirming there was around 400 people in CDPR, not 550 as it happened now. Ubsoft might have a huge team and not deliver great content, but they launch their games in short periods of time, if ubsoft took more time developing their games their quality would probably go up.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

Not necessarily, if you consider that with double the amount of people they may get things done in less time, the spences aren't terribly bigger as you make it look out to be.

Might be. It is double the wages for how ever long those people are around, though, and I would assume they want to keep them around too instead of sacking them after launch.

What we had previously was Iwinski confirming there was around 400 people in CDPR, not 550 as it happened now.

Ok. Bigger (twice the size at least) team was confirmed earlier and specualtion for going even bigger was around.

 

[metalmaniac21]

I'm pretty sure Marcin Iwinski right now screams for help. I mean, remember memetic picture of him during The Witcher 3 development? Yeah, now it's 2x size team, someone surely is clueless on a new place and needs some proper management.

..christ this game might strike the gaming industry like a nuclear bomb.

(you mean like in last CP2020 novel where actual nuclear bomb is dropped on a corporate district?)

Considering the sorry state of game industry (from a player perspective), any decent game with a quality jump from Witcher 3 and everyone is in CDPR's pocket. Including cash and players' love and endless appreciation.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

I'm pretty sure Marcin Iwinski right now screams for help. I mean, remember memetic picture of him during The Witcher 3 development?

I remember he looked like he hadn't slept in days every time he appeared somewhere.

 

[metalmaniac21]

I remember he looked like he hadn't slept in days every time he appeared somewhere.

And quite messed up.

Some people even die from too far prolonged sleep deprivation or become actual retards.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

And quite messed up.

Indeed.

 

[Lisbeth_Salander]

Indeed.

h-how is he going to look like in the fourth picture, after working on Cyberpunk 2077? G-guys I'm worried about him.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

He looked quite healthy if a tad tired at PAX still. Guess we'll find out how it goes in a few years; how ever long this games takes to make.

 

[Lisbeth_Salander]

Considering the sorry state of game industry (from a player perspective), any decent game with a quality jump from Witcher 3 and everyone is in CDPR's pocket. Including cash and players' love and endless appreciation.

Products that cause emotional attachment on its customers = economically stable sales.

• EA's Star Wars Battlefront was a nice game but with almost no content. Players had fun at first, but then Battlefront got boring quickly.

• The same is happening with Assassins Creed games, where a huge amount of players are getting tired about the lack of content and inovation in Ubsoft Games.

EA and Ubisoft strategies are good on the short run but not on the long run. They can sell a single game but it doens't create emotional attachment to the players therefore they can't sell sequels very well. CDPR on the other hand knows that to sell an entire franchise for a long period of time you need to cause emotional impact on those who buy your games.

Spoiler

Look at this video and see how many times Marcin Iwinski mentions the importance of immersion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs6MtsACDx8

He talks about immersion a lot. He knows that for selling a type of product for a long period of time you need to cause emotional impact on the customers. He is smart.

Mark my words: if CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077 start to get a huge popularity it will change the gaming industry drastically.

 

[Suhiira]

It really doesn't take very many code monkeys to make a game.
It takes HUGE HUMBERS of graphic artists and animators however.
Not to mentions teams for writing, sound effects, music, HR/admin/accountants, etc.

 

[sv3672]

Anyway... Isn't that kind of old news alredy, though. I thought the studio size was alredy stated and there were mentions about 800 employees at some point (the thread about it has disappeared in the abyss with the recent influx of reopened old topics, though, and I can't bother digging it up, so... oh well).

800 employees is the number they want to reach for the entire company in the near future by hiring more people, currently there are 550 at CDPR and 150 at GOG (700 total). See this presentation. The 550 developers are split between CP2077 (the largest project), GWENT, and whatever the other AAA title that was planned until 2021 is.

 

[Shavod]

800 employees is the number they want to reach for the entire company in the near future by hiring more people, currently there are 550 at CDPR and 150 at GOG (700 total). See this presentation. The 550 developers are split between CP2077 (the largest project), GWENT, and whatever the other AAA title that was planned until 2021 is.

In Q&A section they said that they meant 800 developers, but also added that 800 is not some strict number that they aim for, so it may be less or more.

 

[sv3672]

So it is about 800 planned for CDPR only? It makes sense though if they intend to develop two AAA games at the same time and probably still continue to support GWENT as well. So the expansion happens as the second AAA game enters full production but CP2077 is not finished yet.

 

[NukeTheMoon]

Huge news.

According to an unnoficial finance report, there are over 550 employers working at CDPR right now.

If with 200 they were able to make Witcher 3, imagine what they can do with 550. Hell if at least 450 are working full time in Cyberpunk 2077..christ this game might strike the gaming industry like a nuclear bomb.

If Witcher 3 had 200, CP2077's possible 450 means more than twice the expenses on workhours per pair of nostrils alone, which has to be accounted for when thinking about the audience-to-be. Plus, a huge team is way harder to manage, as the information flow from top to bottom is far less clear and personal than with a smaller studio (e.g. the nameless codemonekeys in cubicles in a big team are just that, nameless codemonkeys in cubicles). It's not a straight translation from manpower to a guality (that would mean also Ubisoft would be making good games, and not just odorless copypaste shit).

Anyway... Isn't that kind of old news alredy, though. I thought the studio size was alredy stated and there were mentions about 800 employees at some point (the thread about it has disappeared in the abyss with the recent influx of reopened old topics, though, and I can't bother digging it up, so... oh well).

I often see either one of two comments on the size of a development team.
"Ah man, this game is gonna suck, there's too few people to do all that stuff the way I think it should be done"
"Ah man, this game is gonna suck, with all those people employed it will be built to appeal the masses, who unlike me, have bad taste in games.

Occasionally I do see "They hired more people, cool, the game could be even bigger and better that the last one." Like the OP.

But realistically, I'd say the number of people that they have apparently gained kind of sounds right to me, given their objectives.
Maybe its even conservative. For 3 main reasons.

MULTIPLAYER
Id Software working with Saber Interactive, to make Quake Champions, have a total 700 employees according to their linkedin pages, and they STILL screwed up the most important multiplayer shooter component
https://youtu.be/acjTi_i2KRQ?t=373

So when the origin and king of multiplayer FPS has trouble with net code, along with tens of other developers experienced in multiplayer I must say that to add on an extra bunch of people for (hopefully) getting that multiplayer component right doesn't surprise me.

I don't think CDPR intends to half-ass the MP component. It isn't being mandated by a publisher like Bioshock 2. I also suspect that they know it is going to be insanely difficult.
They're gamers, and I doubt they've seen the giants fall on their ass in failure and thought that they can just walk in the scene never having done multiplayer code before and ace it without some serious resources put behind it. Honestly, right now the only companies who have a good track record with net code are Valve's Source titles and Blizzards titles, and COD.
There is a reason that COD has scrapped every other single component of the Q3A engine, but not MP code.

BIG PLANS
Also, they might have 4000 pages of documents to work from, but that's a hell of a lot of work. If the Bloody Baron quest was 60 pages, imagine how much work 4000 pages would be. And that's just the CP2020 side, never mind everything that will be added to it.
It reminds me of the PAX interview of the company CEO building Witcher 1, where they had little idea on the outset of the amount of work the content they wanted to implement would cause, except now they do.

BUGS
We should also consider the effort I presume is being made on squashing bugs this time around.
I have the highest opinion has TW3, because it redefined immersion in a way that hasn't happened for me since Half Life.
...................
You know what though? I still have this bug that comes up regularly where the UI mouse get's stuck from cinematic dialogue menu into the third person view, and the only way to fix it is to save, restart, reload. Now, I suspect SLI has something to do with it, but if it doesn't, that would mean it's just a game bug. And there's crashes and other bugs, not to mention game design choices I think were made in error. A game as big as TW3 made with a budget 1/3 that of GTA5 is probably why many of the little issues (opinion dependent here) never got solved.

CP77 isn't TW3, its not going to have a massive fan base who will have played the two previous titles and read the 7 books about it, and therefor be already invested in a title despite problems.
It just simply doesn't have that advantage. So it just can't hurt it's first impression with similar problems at launch. It has to be as good if not better than TW3 1.31.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

I often see either one of two comments on the size of a development team. "Ah man, this game is gonna suck, there's too few people to do all that stuff the way I think it should be done" "Ah man, this game is gonna suck, with all those people employed it will be built to appeal the masses, who unlike me, have bad taste in games.

Me too. That's wasn't the case here though.

I have heard developers talk about this "big team vs small team" thing. There are fairly logical benefits and a drawbacks to both depending on what it is that is attempted and how it is managed (and big teams are always harder to manage as the leadership is distanced from the designers, for example).

 

[Lisbeth_Salander]

Because no one did it right doens't mean it's impossible to do. What makes the big ones in the industry not go with CDPR's route, its because its hard and takes time.

With a big team most companies get a huge temptation to do half assed games in less in short time periods just to make a nice profit; guess the right letter and you gain 1 redpoint:

_ _ _soft

tip:its a famous company in the gaming industry

 

[Meccanical]

They are only hiring so many people because they need them in order to finish this game in a decent amount of time. Sure they could have kept the team to 250, but they would have to cut a lot of things, scale back on ideas, and struggle to get it out the door. A big team can accomplish big things if they are coordinated properly.

 

[NukeTheMoon]

Me too. That's wasn't the case here though.

I have heard developers talk about this "big team vs small team" thing. There are fairly logical benefits and a drawbacks to both depending on what it is that is attempted and how it is managed (and big teams are always harder to manage as the leadership is distanced from the designers, for example).

Honestly I hate to say this, but I have a hard time believing that everybody in the development wing of the big companies wants to create an amazing game but the accountants keep f*cking everything up.

I don't think that TW3 was a amazing game because there was a great amount of management, I think it is an amazing game because the people making it genuinely were passionate about it, and didn't have a "f*ck it, that's not my department" attitude.

An affront with the game, it appears to me, was an affront to them personally, because of their attachment to the source material.
An affront was not something to just be forgot about and blamed on someone else if it comes up again.