CD Projekt Red Breaks Promise and Starts Crunching

CD Projekt Red might make some of the best RPGs of the modern era, but their track record with employee welfare has been less than ideal. Better than Ubisoft, sure, but being forced to work long hours of crunch is still a miserable way to spend your time -- especially during a pandemic when people are stressed out over other, more important things than video games. Last year, after some well-deserved backlash, CD Projekt Red project head Adam Badowski vowed that they would treat their employees more humanely and that crunch was a thing of the past within their studio.

It was a nice moment. A wholesome moment from a more innocent time. But it should still come as no surprise to find he was lying through his teeth, according to a new report leaked from the bowels of CD Projekt Red.

An email, received by Bloomberg, reveals that now that we've reached the final strech before the release of Cyberpunk 2077, they've "run out of options" and have to start crunching if they want to make the deadline. The only silver lining is that they'll be getting paid for the overtime, something CD Projekt Red is not legally obligated to do for some insane reason.
 

“Starting today, the entire (development) studio is in overdrive. Your typical amount of work and one day of the weekend... I take it upon myself to receive the full backlash for the decision. I know this is in direct opposition to what we’ve said about crunch. It’s also in direct opposition to what I personally grew to believe a while back -- that crunch should never be the answer. But we’ve extended all other possible means of navigating the situation.”

It's all well and good to "take it upon himself to recieve the full backlash", but he's not the one working 6 days a week here. Or maybe he is. It doesn't matter. I'm sure he can weather some angry press and fans easily enough, and it's not much of a consolation as it is acknowledging what would have happened anyway.

So that's fun. That's great. But at least they're not Ubisoft, am I right?