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Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher studio CD Projekt laying off 100 staff
(www.pcgamesn.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Isnt that like, a usual part in the game development cycle? I've seen news reports like this for over 15 years now. Developer starts with ideas for a new game, small team. Developer starts actual production of game, team grows. Developer realizes how much work there actually is to be done, team grows even further. Game is almost done and in a good state, team starts to shrink since there is no longer enough work for everyone. Part is laid off and part is reassigned to early development of DLC. Game is released, and smaller team is able to do patchwork. Developer starts with idea for new game, cycle repeats.
Perhaps the main reason we havent seen a lot of these news blurbs over the past few years is that A: CDPR is a good punchingbag. Common memory of the target audience hold the bad release of CP2077, so its easy to get back in the habit and haul in these clicks. And B: TripleA game development mas mostly conglomerated into a few big developers/publishers with several teams around the world. That means that when one project winds down, surplus personnel might be easily integrated into a different team that is just winding up. CDPR is one of the few tripleA developers not able to do this (yet).
No, this is not really typical for a large studio. I've been in the games industry for 10 years and losing your team every project is a studio killer. No one does this anymore aside from really small indie studios that can't afford to keep the team together. This is not normal for a studio that knows what it's doing.
And CDPR absolutely doesn't. Their games may look pretty but the quality is always absolute dogshit and takes years to patch until it's not a buggy mess
Saying that GDPR doesn't know what it's doing is like saying MGM doesn't know what it's doing. They aren't the best in the industry but they've still made some quality products. They know far more about what they are doing than an indie studio that hasn't even released their first game.
That's a low bar lol
GDPR fans always come up with the most ridiculous excuses for GDPR's terrible quality. "Well at least they're better than an indie that's never released a game", like seriously?
I'm not a GDPR fan at all. They put out one game I even got through and it was mediocre. I'm just not a fan of the general gaming public thinking they know more than a studio full of veterans.
Ah the classic "if you haven't done X yourself you have no right to criticize X." I trust you never criticize books, movies, paintings, games etc of you're not in those fields?
And, funnily enough, I spent almost 15 years in the games industry as a developer, but I suppose I'm still not allowed to say anything bad about GDPR's quality because, uh, reasons
I'm not saying that they can't criticize. I'm saying it's still a studio that I would say knows what it's doing more so than a studio that is going to lay off a bunch of people just because the project they were working on ended. You've been in the industry for 15 years, how many times have you been laid off at the end of a project at a well-formed studio? In my experience, it rarely happens. If you have a good team you don't break it up willingly.
That's all I said. It doesn't make business sense to do so and CDPR and any well-put-together studio knows this. Any business knows this. To say that "Well, it's CDPR thus they are going to make stupid mistakes that a novice indie team would make" is silly and not seated in reality.
Not really the case, I was hired 1.5 year ago. There were a bunch of new hires in the meantime and after the layoffs the team looks really similar to what it looked like at the point at which I was hired.
If that's the case, it's not the norm. Most studios do not lay people off every release. They get them working on another project immediately. Typically a project starts up as the game is wrapping up for release then people switch gradually.
It was the "traditional" pipeline and to be honest only good for the "publisher" and some big enough studio, but really aren't that good for those job hunting game devs(and part of the churn and burn culture, can't and won't trying to form union if your turn over is high.)
It is how you get broken games every new release cause the guys that sticks around as supervisor didn't actually code the previous games or know the actual workflow/pipeline that makes the last game(their last touching code/software might be like 10+ years ago), the middle leads etc might have burned out during last crunch and go to next company after their vacation because fuck this crunch thing I have a family, then then newbies wearing shiny shipped game under their belt move to next company for a better position/pay. So no one or very few actually knows how last time things were done and may or may not have a voice during decision making. Every game, you build the team almost ground up and thus, make similar and more mistakes with ever increasing pressure from schedule and scale.
It's not an healthy cycle, it is something that creative industry should break away from.