On the other hand, the gaming community is worried that this will lead to current employees doing some serious crunch time similar to The Witcher 3’s crunch conditions, which might adversely affect their daily lives. Crunch time is an infamous term in game development where employees work long hours in the final development stages of a game to ensure that it’s ready for release. Extremely long hours often cause them to work way over their daily work hours, and they barely get any sleep before they have to start working again.
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If a recent claim by the YouTuber MadQueen is to be believed, then things will be much different this time around. MadQueen supposedly interviewed someone from the CD Projekt Red developer team that explained the overall situation at the studio in regards to Cyberpunk 2077 crunch. “It’s kind of true what Adam and Marcin are saying there. Right now, we are in ‘crunch mode’; however, it’s not as bad as before,” said the source. “In The Witcher 3 times, if the studio was messaged that we’re entering crunch, everybody had to stay and work regardless of the fact if they had things to do.” They said that their work schedule is dependent on their timeliness and performance,” added the developer.
This unhealthy practice plagues most of the top studios in the industry. Last year, one story showed how Rockstar developers had to do some serious crunch time during the development of Red Dead Redemption 2. However, Sega has been trying to battle this issue for a long time now. It’s one of the few companies that have cut down crunch time by a large margin. According to the company’s officials, Sega is determined to provide its employees with a better work-life balance. CD Projekt Red is finally following in Sega’s footsteps, but It remains to be seen how and when other top development studios battle this problem.
Cyberpunk 2077 will be released on September 17, 2020, for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Stadia.
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