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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).
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.