*Puts on outfit made in 3rd world sweatshop*
*Pulls out I-phone made in Chinese sweatshop*
I can't believe the news middle class game creators are forced to work six days a week for moderate overtime! This is a true failure of capitalism and worker exploitation and why I won't be supporting Cyberpunk2077 and why we need communism so that games are made for free on the worker's schedule.
*Eats chocolate harvested by child slaves to feel better about this terrible news*
I don't know what changed in the "industry" to make twitter checkmarks and permanently online people give so much of a shit about crunch development in games. My best guess is it was checkmark "journalism" considering their jobs and lives have so little meaning or opposition in them that they need to find increasingly esoteric shit to get upset about for twitter asspats and oppression brownie points.
Having spoken to people who work in tech, business tech, software design, gaming et al, crunch happens fucking constantly in every single tech sector. It's a management problem as other posters have said. It's not unique to the games industry, and it's very likely not as bad as limp wristed "games journalists" make it out to be. Every single company does it because every single company will have some flaws or faults in its management structure and planning. That's a consequence of large amounts of people collaborating on a single project. The more people you add, the more chances for miscommunication, for human error, for general fuckups.
Your best codemonkey might get the 'rona and slow development on a specific feature or level down because his tasks can't reasonably be offloaded to another person for whatever reason. Your grunt coders could get the wrong idea and only a week later their team lead checks their progress and realises it's all spaghetti and needs to be rewritten. These are dumb examples, but you try and tard wrangle 300 or more people and have every single person understanding exactly what to do and exactly how to do it with no mistakes. It's just not feasible.
What was the turning point that decided the poor innocent little devs needed to be saved from the oppressive practice of making sure everything is as good as it reasonably can be a few weeks before release, complete with overtime pay? Do any of these people realize very few devs and even less companies actually give any kind of a shit about what some random asshole thinks of their business practices when they start raking in worldwide profit?
It would not surprise me in the slightest if developers hold significant contempt for games journos based on how massively pathetic they are, trying to pretend they're important in an industry that would function perfectly fine, potentially even better, without them existing to leech off of it.
Anyway since 2077 is releasing on GOG that means it'll be cracked and downloadable day one with little to no hassle. Wait a few days or weeks for patching the most egregious bugs, play the GOG copy and buy it if you think the price is justified or you enjoyed the game. There's no excuse not to pirate the game if you're doubtful it'll live up to hype considering it's going to GOG. Unless CDPR pull some last minute shit and add DRM (which may go against GOG's policies) it's going to be downloadable within hours or less of release.
www.bloomberg.com
