Cyberpunk Game Maker Faces Hostile Staff After Failed Launch

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-18/cyberpunk-game-maker-faces-hostile-staff-after-failed-launch

by r0n0j0y • 6 years ago

23 15 6 years ago

With 9 years you can’t really say the deadline was strict... I’d probably chalk it up to bad managers who didn’t know what they wanted in the start of the project. Kudos to the developers for making a nice looking game.

mrkramer• 6 years ago

They probably spent first few years of development doing concepts and experiments in order to lay out the foundation and the vision of the game.

dagw• 6 years ago

The game was announced in 2012 but actual development didn’t start until 2016

basicneo2• 6 years ago

If I had worked for months doing overtime only for the game to be released before it was ready, and seen the reaction it has got, I'd be frustrated.

yawnxyz• 6 years ago

this smells of scope creep / feature creep, and management releasing crazy promises that the devs then had to figure out how to add to the game...

in comparison, both the new Xbox and PS5 seem to have taken less time to be conceived, designed, developed, and released.

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

Aren't the new Xbox and PS5 basically PCs? So they mainly selected components and designed a case? Does not seem like a comparable system.

ydlr• 6 years ago

It takes a lot of hard work and ingenuity to turn a powerful general purpose computer into a crippled appliance.

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

It seems like management is the same almost everywhere. Bad.

How many executives and powerful managers are there at CDPR and how many of them have significant development experience?

Another aspect is the timing with Christmas.

I think it came down to getting $400 million now for a buggy beta version or admitting it's not done and either delaying again or offering a partial refund to preorders.

So the right thing to do might have been to release a beta version for people who wanted it, say it's a beta, and give people back $10 or something. Because if you say it's not finished, people are not going to want to pay the full $60.

So I think it comes down to money. You would need a really strong person to suggest that they do something that could reduce the income by $80 million or something. Maybe that person doesn't exist. But if they do then I doubt they would be a manager. They would be a builder.

basicneo2• 6 years ago

It seems like management is the same almost everywhere. Bad.

If you perceive almost all management is bad, perhaps your standards are unrealistically high.

I don't mean that in a glib way, I mean that the decisions they have to make might be more nuanced and difficult than how you see the decision.

libertine• 6 years ago

How many executives and powerful managers are there at CDPR and how many of them have significant development experience?

I bet a lot of them, due to the origins of the company.

If you're talking about something like EA, then I'd believe they'd brought in people with more marketing/sales skills because they know how to make money.

But, it's easy to criticize managers - their work has visibility, and they own the responsability of the product (assuming you're talking about product managers). They have deadlines as well, or not? It's not like deadlines are something arbitrary.

Yet it's like: developers can deliver bugged software due to limited deadlines/bloated features, but management can't deliver bad outcomes due to limited deadlines/bloated features? Something doesn't add up here.

Why isn't it fair to say that bad developers hide behind tight deadlines? Why not say that simply the dev team isn't good enough to pull this off on these timelines?

It's like time constrains doesn't help anyone, and the release a new franchise isn't something easy. Right?

So the right thing to do might have been to release a beta version for people who wanted it, say it's a beta, and give people back $10 or something. Because if you say it's not finished, people are not going to want to pay the full $60.

Clearly they wanted to be one of the first "true next gen titles" for PS5/Xbox S X, I don't even think such platforms allow for beta releases, neither it would make sense to release a beta game in a brand new platform - that would suck for their brands.

slezyr• 6 years ago

I bet a lot of them, due to the origins of the company.

And you lose.

https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/board-of-director...

omega3• 6 years ago

I really hope the CDPR can turn it around and rebuild the trust. I'm worried that the corporate rot has already taken hold of the company however.

elyseum• 6 years ago

I see some criticism in this thread towards DEV, but 6 day working weeks... to me it’s a classic example of incompetent managers trying to fix a project they lost control of. I mean, you work with highly skilled people, thrilled to be part of the next big thing and all you can think of is bringing in the whip. As if people aren’t motivated enough and not doing overtime already, giving the best they can to make it work.

Yes, it’s the DEVs that write the bugs, but it’s hard to not get sloppy from time to time when there’s constant pressure to make progress and meet deadlines for the sake of meeting them. It’s not DEV’s fault the intermediate deadlines apparently were just green coloured cells on an Excel sheet and did not include actual quality checks, or planning / priority reviews to prevent quality issues and excessive overtime.

not_really• 6 years ago

https://outline.com/93CYw8

Cyberpunk Game Maker Faces Hostile Staff After Failed Launch

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