Can We PLEASE Stop Attacking The Cyberpunk 2077 Team For Doing What Everyone In The World Is Doing?

[Editor’s Note: This is another guest blog from prospective Gaming blogger, @UnfilteredNerd, who knows his stuff and then some. Go and give him a gander.]

There’s a lot of outrage on the internet right now against CD Projekt Red for this statement, and it’s something that we need to address.

I remember interviewing for a mechanical engineering job American automotive company in 2015 at a college career fair (in the ugliest pinstripe suit you could imagine because I was young and thought pinstripes were cool).

In that interview, the recruiter told me that design engineers work ridiculous hours (80+ a week) for about 10 months out of the year to design and troubleshoot new car models. But for the other two months, “you get to work a normal 40 hours”. And they repeat this insane cycle every year.

I balked at the idea. Who in their right mind would subject themselves to that kind of life? I asked the recruiter this and he said: “people that love designing cars”. He explained that you truly have to love your job to work that kind of schedule and that if I didn’t love cars that much, this position wasn’t for me.

Why am I telling you this story? Well first, to explain that this type of “crunch culture” isn’t exclusive to the video game industry. It happening all around us. It happens in manufacturing, in real estate, in sales, and even at Barstool Sports. I’ve worked under those conditions before and I’ll admit that it fucking sucks, but sometimes you have no other option. Things come up that you didn’t plan for and at the end of the day, the customer has to get what they want/need.

And second, the team at CD Projekt Red is working on one of the biggest video games of all time. The development team understands that to work in this industry, sometimes you have to make sacrifices (like John Mamais says in the above article). But the dev team also loves what they do and want this game to be perfect.

So…all of this is to say that instead of attacking a company like CD Projekt Red for doing exactly what everyone else in the world is doing, we should shut up and encourage the devs who are working their asses off to make what will be THE GREATEST VIDEO GAME OF ALL TIME.