Cyberpunk Game Maker Faces Hostile Staff After Failed Launch (bloomberg.com) 120
Rebellion is in the air at Polish video game publisher CD Projekt after the company's highly anticipated, and thrice-delayed, latest title was released to scathing reviews about glitches. Bloomberg News reports: Frustrated and angry staff fired questions at the board during an internal video meeting Thursday that opened with management apologizing for Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch, according to two people who were present. It was a fitting atmosphere for a company whose slogan, plastered on posters all around its Warsaw office, is "We are rebels." Developers asked blunt questions about the company's reputation, the game's unrealistic deadlines and the relentless overtime in the months and years leading up to the game's Dec. 10 release. The meeting took place before Sony's shocking announcement that it was pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and will offer full refunds to any customer who requests one. During the staff meeting, CD Projekt's directors said they had come to an arrangement with Sony but didn't offer specifics. In a Twitter post on Friday, the company said that "following our discussion with PlayStation, a decision was made to temporarily suspend digital distribution" of the game.
Why are they surprised? (Score:3)
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They're also competing against GTA V. That's a large task in itself but they weren't putting the resources in. GTA V had an existing code/texture base to draw from, a team of 1,000 over 5 years of pre-launch development. Cyberpunk had just 500 and no pre-existing code base. At minimum it needed another year of development and that catches it up to just 2013 not the following 7 years of patches GTA V has had.
They should have been running with a team 3 times the size to get this out in a reasonable time f
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In what way is a game that comes out at the tail-end of 2020 competing with a game that came out in 2013? CDPR didn't even start pre-production on CP2077 until 2016, three years after GTAV was released.
For that matter, CP2077 wasn't starting from nothing, they were working from their existing codebase as they added features to REDengine.
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They compete in the sense that GTA V was a huge success and pretty much set a standard. If you announce a game with the same "urban free-roam" sort of design, it will be compared to that.
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It's being compared in detail to GTA V - https://streamable.com/xal31p [streamable.com]
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I'm comparing them because take away the cyberpunk theme and they're relatively similar games that would have similar development requirements. Cyberpunk is arguably more ambitious and more complex. Are they competing in terms of sales? No not really. They're competing in terms of gameplay/target audience. GTA V set the standards that Cyberpunk is being judged by (https://streamable.com/xal31p literally).
CDPR should have known at the outset that they could not create a more ambitious game with half the
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The 2016 date mainly comes from records like this: https://www.eurogamer.net/arti... [eurogamer.net]
> It's been over 2077 days since we announced our plan to develop Cyberpunk 2077. We released a CGI trailer, gave some interviews and... went dark. [...] We wanted to give you The Witcher 3 and both expansions first [...] As soon as we concluded work on Blood and Wine, we were able to go on full speed ahead with CP2077's pre-production.
Blood and Wine came out in 2016, the article is from 2018, which tells us that pre-prod
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As I said, wildly erroneous - 2012: https://youtu.be/OAATUe9uBI8?t... [youtu.be]
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That's just an announcement of intention and a few pieces of concept art. That doesn't indicate that they actually started any serious development before 2016. If anything, it reinforces those quotes, whereby a skeleton crew started some pre-production work in 2012, but serious pre-production didn't start until 2016.
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Wrong again. Longer version of the same - https://youtu.be/KK5qvys_Jz4?t... [youtu.be]
Literally states that senior developers have been working on it "for a couple real time years" at that point
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Because the two games are likely going to attract a lot of the same kind of players, not to mention that GTA V online follows a free-to-play model so they'd be competing for the same dollars. So for Cyperpunk 2077 to succeed it's going to have to pull people away from games like GTA V.
You better check yourself (Score:2)
Good for them (Score:4, Insightful)
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Will their punching-up actually accomplish anything though? I don't mean getting a couple of lead-programmers or mid-level managers fired, I mean real structural changes in leadership.
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I used to work for Gateway computers. They had a very open policy of allowing employees to "punch up" as you say, then promptly ignoring any useful input with the excuse that management simply knows better, and in most cases a quiet shuffling off of the people that had been encouraged to give open feedback to management about possibly failures and fixes for those failures a few weeks to months later for "completely unrelated reasons."
I haven't ever heard of a situation where that type of upward negativity
IT problem in general (Score:5, Insightful)
picking launch dates based on what they want to market rather than the actual realities of development
the world would be a lot better off if the first time you heard about something in the market is basically when it is already complete and now they've picked a launch date
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If they kept delaying it I would not simply call this a problem caused by sales dept. It's taken them 7 years.
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Its technically been in development a long time but hasn't been a major project within the company all that long by industry standards. It became their main project after The Witcher III was released. So its only been in serious development since the second half of 2015. Before that was just preproduction. That's still adequate time I should think but I just don't like it when people bring up the 7-8 years thing.
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Alright, point taken.
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That's a losing proposition though. Vaporware builds interest and lets a company drive marketing hype without having to spend very much on that hype.
If the consumer market for a product wouldn't fall for vaporware I would agree with you, but the phenomenon long predates my own attention to this field and not only shows absolutely no sign of abating, but it looks like it's actually growing.
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Not disagreeing but the games been under development for nearly a decade. At some fucking point the devs need to deliver
IT problem or ID problem? (Score:2)
There's this old game company that famously set an unachievable date for their game's release date. They managed to pull it off and reap great rewards.
Do you think decision-makers in game companies have forgotten about this tale? Everyone wants to be the next Carmarck.
WHY? (Score:2)
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why is this game getting so much press?!?
Because it got so much press. CDPR hyped the game to hell and back for a year or 2 at least, and promised features or capabilities that would be more or less groundbreaking. And, since The Witcher 3 was such a massive hit, people went with it.
does anyone really give a shit about a failed video game launch?!
Yes, for the reasons stated above. They massively (and publicly) overpromised and massively underdelivered. This happens all the time; for a good and- for once- appropriate car analogy, look at Nikola.
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Yeah, people love the drama of both underdogs making it, and behemoths falling. CDPR has now been both, the latter is a spectacular fashion.
Also I'm still waiting for The True Cyberpunk Game and I'm not alone. There's a reason Deus Ex has a large cult following. I was hopeful (but not expecting) for CP2077 to be legit, and it mostly wasn't. No big deal to me, I still feel like CP2077 was mostly worth the money, but it didn't really make it. It's not a coincidence that in the year leading up to this release,
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Don't forget needing to use a hex editor to actually get mouse keybindings working....that felt right in line with the game!
-Yo Grark
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There is one way CP2077 was a true cyberpunk experience: a corporation released software that could induce seizures, and screwed its customer base. Even if the game was a disappointment, the customer experience has been 110% cyberpunk!
Yes, that one was truly special. I mean how can you be this completely and extremely incompetent in this day and age?
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Confirmation bias?
As in, you're paying attention to the nerdy/techy/gaming circles that this sort of thing is reported in?
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The games industry pulls in as much revenue as the film industry, on a good year, people use terms like "$100 billion dollar industry", which puts it ahead of ~120 countries by GDP
I'm having few problems with the game. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem was they tried to release a next generation game for the previous generation consoles. Just a bad idea in general and they delayed everyone else to do it.
I play on a PC. Admittedly on the high end but Ive not had one crash yet. Ive had a few bugs. Nothing game ending. Sure it runs like crap in 4k but in 2K on ultra with raytracing on I'm at a steady 60FPS with smooth game play even when driving around at 150kph. I know the main story is not as long as it could have been. Some people say they finish it in 15 hours but they aren't getting the full game doing so. Pop up that map and you will find lots of missions depending on your street credit which you earn doing side missions. I'm 30 hours into the game and am still having a blast at the game and aren't anywhere near the end of the main quest.
The one thing I did do was the community fix for AMD optimization which greatly increased my speed. (Threadripper 3960x). It ran fine before but I can see the difference in cpu utilization it made.
AMD Fix https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cyberpunk-2077-amd-ryzen-performance-bug-fix-testing
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The problem was they tried to release a next generation game for the previous generation consoles. Just a bad idea in general and they delayed everyone else to do it.
The one thing I did do was the community fix for AMD optimization which greatly increased my speed. (Threadripper 3960x). It ran fine before but I can see the difference in cpu utilization it made.
The fact that you have to use a community patch to fix performance on a very common CPU architecture argues that the game was either not ready or not tested at all.
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Even where bug reports are submitted, reproduced, and accepted, the priority and values for even trivial fixes just arent there. The bug can exist for years, be trivial to fix because its a typo such as the wrong sign on a value, with a programmer
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Admittedly on the high end....Threadripper 3960x...
yeah slightly on the high end...not hating, I'm in the same boat, but that's like the top .001%
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I could tell from the game's announcement and earliest screenshots that it was going to be a buggy launch. Pretty much every AAA game is buggy mess when it's first released, and it's disingenuous for the accumulated mass of gamers and gaming journalists to assume that it would ever be otherwise. Where has everyone been for the last 30+ years of consumer computing that they would expect a 1.0 release to be perfect? If it ends in 0, just say no. And especially PS4 owners. You've got a last-gen console and you
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Urgh. Does it really look that ugly? I am more glad than ever I refunded without even taking a look.
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I've had no crashes and performance has been good and steady on my 5+ year old PC with a GTX 960. I haven't gotten to play it everyday since launch but I've been able to get in a few hours most days and I haven't even left the first district of the city you start in.
I haven't had any significant game breaking bugs either. The only thing that comes to mind is when I summoned my car once it spawned in below the pavement surface and was stuck colliding with some other object. I just ran down the street a bit a
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I play on PC too. I've had maybe 2 crashes in the time I've played. There's some really good things in here too. The game loads blazingly fast and it's amazing the world works without loading screens.
But the bugs man. I've had a few game breaking bugs, NPCs not reacting when they should. I've had dead characters come to life and die again, characters die standing up stiff, I've gotten out of vehicles only to have them drop into the ground and be unable to be reused (but still there so you couldn't even call
Quick Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Response has been overly harsh... (Score:2)
I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be pissed when they receive a defective product, but to be fair Cyberpunk 2077 has been less buggy for me than say Fallout 76. Cyperpunk 2077 on my Xbox One X has been crashing once/day. That is obviously too often, but hell sometimes Borderlands 3 crashes the entire Xbox so at least I just have to restart the app. I'm the most disappointed by the graphics - things feel washed out like there is a cloudy film over everything. Hopefully when I eventually snag a Series X
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I'm the most disappointed by the graphics - things feel washed out like there is a cloudy film over everything. Hopefully when I eventually snag a Series X and they push out the rest of the "next gen" update, this will get better.
When studios are designing games for multiple generations of a system, they really should put out marketing material to show expected visuals and performance for each generation. Otherwise, if all you show is the best possible output on the latest, greatest hardware, you are going to have a lot of customers end up disappointed. Even though they know deep down going into it that they won't see performance like that, you're still priming them for an experience they won't have so they can't help but be disap
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Agreed!
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The lowest setting on more and more new games requires at least 2GB of vram
Thats a completely unnecessary obstacle r
Re: Response has been overly harsh... (Score:2)
FO76 was a *mess* at launch, but to their credit they have put a lot of ongoing energy into improving the game. To your point that I am comparing against a low bar - you are right. However, FO76 wasnâ(TM)t pulled from the Sony store. I donâ(TM)t want to give game developers a pass for their sins, but I also donâ(TM)t want to see Cyberpunk 2077 or Red fail because both have brought me a lot of joy.
Crunch Time! (Score:4)
Is anyone surprised? (Score:3)
Mass Effect: Andromeda... No Man's Sky...
This seems to be a new trend. Or maybe not so new, but much more common than it once was.
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Andromeda was on a Steam sale for $10, might still be. I picked it up. Probably I'll be getting Cyberpunk for $10 around 2023.
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On sale till the 21 (thanks I've been meaning to pick it up)
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I've still got to finish RDR2 and Witcher 3 before I install it, but it will be interesting to see how it goes. All the people complaining it was "too different" from Mass Effect 3 never meant much to me, since I didn't particularly like Mass Effect 3. More exploration seems like what I need right now in my lil' corona cocoon.
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I played it a bit back when it came out, seemed fun enough (never got into the other ME games). I don't think I'll ever finish RDR2?
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Mass Effect: Andromeda... .
Now, I picked up ME:Andromeda after the patches and I knew what I was getting into, but the thing that bugged me most about the game was you are literally in another galaxy, have first contact with an entirely new species of aliens, and they speak English. Really?
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This seems to be a new trend.
Three games in three years out of hundreds is a "trend"? I mean it's not three, you missed Fallout 76 as well. But the reality is there is a reason why this is in the *news*. And that's because in the larger industry releasing a buggy hot mess is still very much a newsworthy event, and not a trend approaching normalcy.
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If we're going to mention BioWare, then I would put Anthem rather than Mass Effect: Andromeda.
If ME:A didn't have the McLargeHuge shadow of the original Mass Effect trilogy to crawl out from under, or was in fact an entirely unrelated IP, it would have had a forgiving and reasonable entry to the games market. I bought and played it about 16 months after its debut. The game was fine.
Anthem on the other hand was a hot mess. The number of times I managed to get onto the servers was in the single digits. It con
The real loss (Score:3)
I assume the biggest bugs will be fixed in 6 months, they usually are. What I'm more concerned with are the actual features, the gameplay elements that may have been cut to meet the deadline. There's a good chance some of that might never get seen, even if a portion gets segmented off into DLC that might play more like a standalone game (and let them charge you $100+).
Bugs are very in-your-face but I wonder how much these arbitrary deadlines contribute to lack of innovation in the industry as a whole. It's kinda... Stagnant.
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I assume the biggest bugs will be fixed in 6 months, they usually are.
They are working quickly to address game breaking bugs. https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/n... [cyberpunk.net] https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/n... [cyberpunk.net] (this is today's hotfix) So it's clear the developer didn't just crap it out and abandon it.
Bugs are very in-your-face but I wonder how much these arbitrary deadlines contribute to lack of innovation in the industry as a whole. It's kinda... Stagnant.
While I get the sentiment and realise that this buggy mess could have done with another couple of months of development it's worth remembering that this has been in development for nearly a decade now. At some point you need to not let perfect be the enemy of good enough. If you include everyth
Cyberpunk 2020 (Score:2)
Good thing I've saved my Cyberpunk 2020 rpg game books. At least I can play with those and have a good time!
If only this could have been prevented (Score:3)
It is a shame that we only have something like 150 years of research showing that "crunch times" actually hurt net productivity, not just quality, and don't actually get things done sooner than having people get enough rest so they are performing at their best. As a result of the comparatively scarce entire body of literature in this field, all of it publically available, the information needed to prevent disasters like this has been extremely hard to get, being available only to anyone who can read, anyone who has ever worked, or anyone who has ever actually met a human being.
8+ million sales, 1 million concurrent users (Score:3, Insightful)
Those figures are not what describes a "failed" single player game.
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Those figures describe a profitable single player game. If the goal was purely profit then I'd agree. If the goal was profit and not having your entire studio name dragged through the mud then this launch is very much a failure.
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:5, Insightful)
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Meanwhile, game studios in the US was baffled that Poland allows mere workers to criticize the bosses over standard industry practices.
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:5, Funny)
You wouldn't chide a woman for not being able to give birth in six months,
Sure you would. She could have easily gone out and hired another woman to get that gestation period down to 4.5 months. Even if she split the cost and time of the second woman with another pregnant woman you're still hitting your 6 month birth target!
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All I know is that somebody got screwed in the process.
Re: Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:3)
Ah. The mythical woman-birth-month.
Re: Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:3)
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:4, Insightful)
At the end of the day, no software is ever perfect,
No, but our standards for software are already pathetic and getting worse. Nothing else in the world, no medicine, machine, car, food or other product would be accepted in the market with the number and severity of problems that software regularily has.
We also know how to write better software. We don't do it because it takes effort and skill that we didn't train the majority of coders in, and because it's not sexy and doesn't allow for the "hero coder" feeling.
Software is crap, and we are very slow in improving its foundations, because of the "if it compiles, ship it" attitude.
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At the end of the day, no software is ever perfect,
No, but our standards for software are already pathetic and getting worse. Nothing else in the world, no medicine, machine, car, food or other product would be accepted in the market with the number and severity of problems that software regularily has.
You get what you pay for. There's plenty of low quality food for cheap prices, because there is a market for that. The market for aerospace and nuclear power plant software has very high prices because the market is willing to bear that cost. The gaming market could produce much higher quality games if games sold for $1000 each, but there aren't enough buyers willing to pay that much. Just because the buyer wants the high quality for a low price doesn't mean that the market logistics will support a prof
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It isn't so much a matter of price. Yes, quality is not for free, but the effort required is mostly in procedures, methods and training of programmers.
We way we teach people programming is a ridiculous pile of crap. I went back to university 10 years ago, for a specific reason that's outside the discussion here, and because beaurocracy had to attend the "introduction to programming" course. A complete joke. How anyone can learn proper coding from that is a mystery to me, because you START by tinkering aroun
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but this looks like an ambitious game to say the least
Ultimately it's a far prettier version of GTA, and one that has been in development for 8 years. I do thoroughly enjoy this game but it is incredibly clear that this was rushed to the point of skipping basic QA/QC.
You wouldn't chide a woman for not being able to give birth in six month? But would you chide a woman for having a C-section to yank a premature baby out at the 6 month point and hope for the best simply because she's too impatient to carry the pregnancy full term? I'm sure you would.
This game nee
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:4, Interesting)
Any given programmer has control only over small portions of the project. It's up to whomever is managing the project to ensure coordination between everyone on the team.
I did software quality assurance for awhile. My job was to find the flaws. Sometimes a programmer was receptive to my criticism, sometimes hostile. My testing methods were based on both routine operations and on edge-cases that while not the most common, were still plausible. It wasn't my responsibility to compel the programmer to fix the issues, merely to report them to my QA director and the overall director and systems architect, those guys were responsible for supplying the necessary motivation.
Even then though, those directiors were still beholden to the company officers and if the company officers wouldn't listen then it could lead to problems, including the occasional ship-then-fix mentality. Fortunately we were usually able to get the worst of the critical stuff dealt with prior to shipping but it's never a good feeling when upper management insists it has to go out the door to meet some kind of quarterly deadline even when it's not fully ready. But if it doesn't meet that deadline then the company's financial situation goes downhill, so it must go so that we all keep our jobs.
Yes, it's mess sometimes. But this is how just about all business works. Make production or risk going out of business.
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:5, Insightful)
If the process was anything like...well....every software project I've ever known, it went something like this:
Manager: We need you to code this new software that does something amazing and awesome so we can sell a lot of it. Here are the 300 pages of requirements.
Developers: OK. After looking at the requirements, we estimate it will take 24 months to get it out the door.
Manager: That's too long! If we wait that long we'll miss our sales window!
Developers: OK. If you let me double my staff of devs, QA, etc. I can probably get it down to 12-18 months.
Manager: That's too expensive! If we propose the project at that cost, the board will never approve us to get started!
Developers: Look, I've done all I can do here. There is no way to shorten this or make it cheaper.
Manager: You're just not thinking creatively! What if we eliminate the QA stage? That'll save time AND money!
Developers: Are you nuts? No, don't answer that. You are nuts.
Manager: Did you build any time in your estimate for unforeseen complications?
Developers: Of course we did! There's always something unforeseen when you're breaking new ground.
Manager: OK good.. We'll eliminate that time from the schedule and just assume everything will go perfectly according to plan! That'll save even more time and money! I'll tell the board we can do it in 12 months, no additional employees, and we can even CUT STAFF in the process! They'll love it!
Manager: We need to ship this! My job is on the line! You need to get this out the door ASAP!
Developers: We told you it wouldn't be ready by now but you wouldn't listen! It's a steaming hot pile right now even though we've worked triple overtime! If we ship it as-is, it'll be a PR nightmare!
Manager: You're obviously part of the problem and not part of the solution. We need solutions-oriented people! You're fired!
Re: Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:2)
I see this every day at the Fortune 500 company that I work at. It is the challenge of finding the optimal spot amongst all the variables and software quality needs to be compromised. Good management will value it appropriately while others will neglect it because itâ(TM)s not on the spreadsheet.
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:5, Insightful)
Lemme guess: you don't write software professionally? ;-)
I'm not saying the devs are perfect and without fault, but anybody who has spent time in the software industry has encountered this sort of thing a million times over, perhaps just less publicly.
Scope creep, underspecified requirements, delayed dependencies, managers who overpromise to their bosses, and then a super late and/or buggy launch. The closer to the top of the org hierarchy you are, the more you seem bewildered by the mess, while the people in the trenches are like, "yeah, for 6 months we've been warning that this was the likely outcome".
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Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet better people will do better jobs. There's very little proof that the people working this job were the most capable. There is evidence that they possibly weren't. The game speaks for itself. For the record, I'm not saying this is the case. Just saying that these threads always focus on management and never on whether the talent simply wasn't there for the job.
Look around your own place of employment. If hypothetical layoffs were to happen I'm pretty sure you would have no problem singling out those who may deserve it more than others. All jobs have with those who are mediocre or worse.
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:4, Insightful)
We already know that they were in crunch time for months. That's a management issue.
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:4, Insightful)
Management had 8 years to see that it wasn't on time and to identify why. Either trim "nice to haves" or find the deadwood and replace it. They could have done this LONG before crunch time.
They might have under-staffed, they might have allowed too much creep in the specs. The specs might have been too vague.
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet better people will do better jobs. There's very little proof that the people working this job were the most capable. There is evidence that they possibly weren't. The game speaks for itself. For the record, I'm not saying this is the case. Just saying that these threads always focus on management and never on whether the talent simply wasn't there for the job.
Look around your own place of employment. If hypothetical layoffs were to happen I'm pretty sure you would have no problem singling out those who may deserve it more than others. All jobs have with those who are mediocre or worse.
While it may be true the talent was lacking, that by itself is also a management failing. It's not like the devs hire themselves. Someone in management interviews them and pronounces them qualified for the job. Beyond that, as the project progresses, a good manager should be able to recognize if someone isn't keeping up. That's why they're MANAGERS.
The most likely root cause here is someone in the middle of the chain giving the next link upwards in the chain an overly-rosy prediction of what was going on. Once that got taken as gospel and repeated on up the chain to the top, the top expected it to happen. I doubt very seriously the launch issues of this game came as a shock to anyone below the level of Manager. They knew it would happen but nobody listened to them.
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Nobody does their best work after too much crunch time. That's a management issue. Even (or perhaps especially) with go pills, you can't go forever.
Given high enough expectations, nobody can meet them.
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There is actually good research on this: Crunch helps for a week or two (!), the next week you are back to normal productivity. After that, productivity drops because errors soar. And you need several weeks of vacation of very light load to get back to the original productivity level.
Crunch makes absolutely no sense except in emergencies. Competent management knows that. These idiots did not.
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Errors and technical debt soars. No one goes into crunch mode thinking "I'm gonna spend 10 hours per day, 7 days a week to come up with a well thought out and carefully considered design". Once you're in crunch mode, everything becomes temporary fixes that you will "do properly" later. When crunch never ends... well later never happens. It's not too bad if technical debt piles up for a week or two because you still remember the crap you did and can (perhaps) fix it the week after. But, if it adds up for yea
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aren't capable of meeting expectations
Really? You think when someone comes in your office and telling you out of the blue "this must be ready on monday", you're the one to blame when it's not ready on monday?
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Or maybe when you get requirements and insufficient time to fulfill them, this is _not_ your fault?
Your statement pretty much reflects the defective mind-set that causes this type of disaster.
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Bzzzt! Wrong! You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. It is a 100% management decision whether and when to ship a product.
I have seen it firsthand when schedule rules above all else, and a half-baked product gets released to scathing reviews, and it's extremely frustrating to those who were working hard to make it as awesome as it might otherwise have been <cough> Blackberry Playbook </cough>. It is situations like that where I developed a begrudging respect for Steve Jobs, who
Re:Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:4, Insightful)
Handling staff is one of the costs of working with creative workers (artists). It's not really the same as being a plumber or bank teller. Where you can do your job for the day then go home and totally forget about all the bullshit from work. Creative types don't really let it go, it's not really feasible for them to do so and still be able to do the work. They end up being way more emotionally invested than seems reasonable to an outsider.
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Depends on what you mean by plumber.
The plumber that shows up to your house to fix a broken faucet is just doing a quick job.
A plumber that is handed the blueprints for a brand new build and has to figure out how to plumb the whole house from scratch where his reputation is at stake if there are leaks or performance issues (ie poor pressure etc) is very much invested in his job and the quality of his work, especially if he takes pride in doing a good job.
The size and scope often dictates how much pride some
Re: (Score:3)
Just like I, as a software engineer, go to work and design software to meet a purpose, a plumber does as well. I'm not trying to express anything beyond what is functionally necessary. There is no emotional content to the software I write, and I don't intend it to evoke emotions in those who see it. Just as a plumber who is excellent at her craft may lay out a reliable and functional plumbing system for a structure.
Just because something is complicated or difficult doesn't make it artistic.
Management destroyed years of work (Score:3)
> I'm sure they are still cashing their beloved paychecks.
Not for long. The company can't sell the product
Playstation isn't selling it, the brokeness means customers won't buy it much even if it's still sold for XBox, and it might not be available for Xbox by the end of the day. Management's decisions on this may well mean nobody at the company will be getting paychecks much longer.
(I say management - lead developers probably made their own mistakes, but hey - management choose those people for those pos
Re: (Score:2)
They made all their money back on day-one and preorder sales. It's a commercial blockbuster. They could abandon it now and still end up with more money than any game company in Poland.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a good point that revenue from pre-orders and first week sales would cover the costs. On the other hand, an unknown percentage of those sales are being refunded.
The developers were promised 10% of the 2020 profit, so I'd certainly expect them to have some questions about if there will be any such profit, and if so how much is expected.
Re: (Score:2)
Polish game developers make about $15K-$20K a year. A poor return for working 100 hour weeks.
https://www.payscale.com/resea... [payscale.com]
Re: Not sure what the devs are whining about (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How is it possible to mess up this way? (Score:4, Funny)
They used what, twice the programming hours as Witcher 3 and still managed to ship a game half the size. I would be impressed if I wasn't so pissed off.
Well, Cyberpunk has twice as many penis sliders as Witcher 3 did. And apparently those require a lot of time and attention.