CD Projekt Red co-CEO Adam Kiciński apologized to employees for saying that crunch at the company is “not that bad — and never was.”
When talking to investors, Kiciński said that “a large part of the team is not crunching at all since they have finished their work. It’s mostly about Q&A and engineers, programmers — but it’s not that heavy. Of course, it will be extended a bit, but we have feedback from the team, they’re happy about the extra three weeks, so we don’t see any threats regarding crunch.”
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, however, cites CDPR devs who say they recently clocked a 100-hour week, while former employees described their colleagues as “physically ill.”
Now Kiciński himself admitted that he downplayed the extent of the crunch on Cyberpunk 2077. This he did in an internal memo obtained by Schreier.
Whether Kiciński’s apology is sincere is not even the point. The point is that CDPR devs are looking at an additional three weeks of mandatory crunch that will only end when Cyberpunk 2077 hopefully releases on December 10th.