Cyberpunk 2077 – CD Projekt Red Discusses Development

There’s been plenty of talk related to “crunch” and poor working conditions for video game developers lately. And if you’re sympathetic to their plight, you’ll be pleased to know that, according to this Kotaku interview with Marcin Iwiński, CD Projekt Red’s co-founder, and Adam Badowski, the director on the studio’s upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, the current plan is to treat the game’s developers with “respect.” If you’d like to learn what that means exactly, you should check out the interview itself. Here’s a snippet to get you started:

Footage of the upcoming role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077 has blown away fans so far, but coupled with that hype is a burning question: Are workers at CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind the game, ruining their lives to make it? The developer best known for The Witcher series has cultivated a reputation for crunch—asking its employees to work nights and weekends for weeks or months at a time—but studio management now tells Kotaku they want to improve their work-life balance, even if they continue to feel that crunch is a necessity.

“We’re known—let me be humble for a moment here—we are known for treating gamers with respect,” said Marcin Iwiński, the company’s co-founder, in an interview with Kotaku this week. “This is what we’ve been working hard toward. And I actually would [like] for us to also be known for treating developers with respect.”

One of the ways the company plans to do that, Iwiński said, is through a “non-obligatory crunch policy” that isn’t brand new but that the Warsaw-based CD Projekt Red plans to push harder. He wants to make it clear to Cyberpunk 2077’s developers that even when the studio asks them to work on nights and weekends, it’s not “mandatory.”