You don't need to feel bad. The reason for crunch is not the gamer. It's the producers fault and the manager's job to stop the devs from overworking. For a publicly traded company like CD Projekt it is especially complicated because you have investors you have to answer to, you're on the stock market, they want a release date, so they know when all of the money you've been spending on the thing is due to get return, so it's more about giving those people a release date than it is giving gamers a release date. It's a busyness requirement and we can't really do much about it.
On the other hand, betcha crunch will vanish within a month, globally, if every "gamer" or consumer in the world would shut their wallets to any kind of product that has crunch, or any other kind of undesirable work ethic or societal issue that we as a species would rather like to get rid of.
That's not gonna happen of course because we as consumers are far too attached to buying shiny things like the hoarding magpies we are, all while giving little to no consideration to the consequences.
However I don't want to feed into crunch and undue stress for the developers. I suspect that pre order culture is the reason for crunch among other bad practices in the industry.
It's not pre-ordering that's the main problem. It's buying for the "newly released" price at all.
You should maybe feel just a little bit bad, but only as bad as every other gamer here, for not doing your part in that aforementioned solution: not buying it. I'm just as guilty of that when it comes to Cyberpunk.
If you are though... there's an ocean of games out there. The next best thing you can do is buy it for half the price a few months later and just put your attention into other half price games. I do that with every other game I've bought over the past decade and I've only made an exception for Cyberpunk (which I'm beginning to regret).
There's also gamers who will go "well, it's the companies for doing crunch and government's fault for not making the right laws, isn't it? Not mine!". Then the companies go "well, it's the gamer's demand for games and the competition this creates, that forces us to crunch against the other companies! Not our fault!". And the governments go "People want to have money remaining to buy games and clearly employee crunch isn't high up on their political agenda! Not our fault!"
And like that, the entire system just sustains itself without anyone taking any responsibility, and that's even sadder. At least you gave it some thought Donalds.
This too. I mean buying at full price on release date? Conceivable.
Giving the publisher your money ahead of time? That's simply ridiculous IMO. They're not going to run out and no publisher is worth that amount of trust. I've come to the point where I'm of the opinion that CDPR isn't worth that either. (I'm just not going to make a song and dance out of it by creating "I've Cancelled!!1!!!" posts).
. For you idk, if you have doubts about the kind of game or the setting (since you're asking) I'd wait to see if you might like it (and i think in this case couple of hours will be enough and you'll find playthru and opinions right away on youtube and so on). Personally I'm staying away from such platforms and, in this case, for me it's more than mandatory as I don't want any kind of spoiler.
