Does CD Projekt underpay and abuse its developers?

the beatings will continue until morale improves

 

It could've been worse, if it was the Red Cross/Crescent.

 

At hello games:
At Rockstar,"We were working 100-hour weeks," Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser "
At EA "A similar story played out at EA with "Anthem," where employees reportedly were put on "stress leave" due to working conditions. "I actually cannot count the amount of 'stress casualties'"
At Ubisoft, Probably the only AAA company that let their developers doing their best without crunches.
At Naughty dog "In a superb report by Kotaku's Jason Schreier, development sources expressed concern at the ability of staff at Naughty Dog to continue working under brutal crunch conditions"
At Bethesda "Douglas Goodall: Ah, one of the difficult questions. It was partly due to my constant disagreements with Ken and Todd. "This game isn't big enough for the three of us." I loved the original Elder Scrolls too much to stop arguing in their favor, but I could tell that these arguments were bad for the team and for the game. I spent over a year working 70-100 hours a week, gained about 50 pounds, and had turned into an obnoxious, vitamin-D deficient zombie. My health and sanity were failing. I became someone I didn't like. There were a lot of other factors, but I'm not going to turn this into several hundred pages of real or imagined grievances.
The whole AAA gaming industry is a nightmare place.

 

How do you gain 50 pounds if you're working 70-100 hours a week? Fat fucks...

 

It's almost as if I've been explicitly saying that people should not be taking jobs in triple-A vidya companies during this entire goddamn fucking thread and that they have plenty of options outside that.

 

Crunches and lay offs happen with small studios and indie studios too.
"However, crunch time and high lay off rates can be real. They occur because game development is composed of releases, during the production, more staff can be hired to attend urgent demands and tight deadlines. Once the production ends and the game is finally released, the company has to cut costs until the next production starts and so the laid offs occur.If you want to work in a game company be prepared, the challenges in the game industry are high, artists have to constantly outperform in quality due to an increasingly exigent market. Developers will come across multiple technological obstacles, including the implementation of new tools. Changes take place weekly, candidates are expected to learn by doing in an unstructured way. If you are the kind who doesn’t adapt well to modifications you may find it hard to survive in the game industry then. "
https://towardsdatascience.com/gaming-industry-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-47c8e1244e24

 

Fuck sake, man, are you really gonna make me quote myself from page 2 of this thread? God fucking damn it.

 

So if I were giving advice to my younger brother or something on a personal level, yeah, I would say, don't go work at a video game company. Or at least do your research, know what you're getting into, etc.

At the same time, I can also hold a more general opinion that we would all be better off if the video game industry wasn't set up in such a retarded way, not necessarily just in terms of crunch time (which again I don't know the details of), but in terms of funding models, organisational structure, promotion, etc, etc.

After all, anybody on the Codex whining that Californian liberals keep writing the latest Dragon Age are doing the same thing - they're complaining at a general level about how the industry is currently set up. At a personal level, I could just say stfu stop whining just don't buy/play those games, which would be valid. But at the same time it's also valid to make a broader critique of the industry.

The problem is when you confuse the two layers, so that someone is sitting there playing 8000 hours of Fallout 4 and buying all DLCs while complaining about dumbing down, or someone is turning down other job opportunities or actively refusing to retrain themselves while tweeting 24/7 how much they hate their job.

 

Dragon Age isn't even made by a game developer in the same country as california

 

You know what's going to change the industry as a whole? Everyone giving their proverbial "younger brother" this advice and every proverbial "younger brother" not joining these companies. Let them get hit with a severe workforce deficiency, let's see how it works out for them and their products when the only people willing to work for them are 4-dollars-an-hour Pajeets in Bangalore.

But this would actually take some foresight, some restraint, some self-discipline. All of these things are severely lacking within the demographic that actually does get involved with the vidya industry because "M U H D R E A M S" - in other words, it's never going to happen and this cycle is bound to repeat itself over and over and over again because a lot of people were simply born to be slaves, and slaves they shall forever remain.

 

Absolutely, why get invested in any franchise at all, after all they're just videogames who cares

Alternatively people are human beings and it's perfectly natural for them to get upset when some danger-hairs come along and ruin something they enjoy greatly

It might not be constructive, but it's cathartic.

 

No time left for healthy eating and physical activity, more stress so more snacking, not enough sleep...

 

So you are arguing for a mass organised boycott? OK, sounds good. This is an extreme action with very high immediate costs for all persons involved, of course. Perhaps a superior capitalistic system is one where involved parties have a variety of mechanisms for negotiating conditions, instead of one where the only choice people have is to quit.

And maybe a situation in which people have a choice of (a) working in a profession with clear societal demand but with shit ass conditions, or (b) rejecting the opportunity to work their chosen craft for an indefinite period of time in the hope that better conditions might be offered - that seems like a pretty dumb setup that doesn't really benefit the consumer or the worker.

It's probably easier to not give a shit about it when it's video game developers. Logically speaking, though, the formal aspects of the problem is replicated for a lot of other professions, such as teachers, nurses, warehouse workers or food supply chain workers. So I'm not so hung up on the subsection of the developers who probably do sit there and just whine.

 

You wouldn't?
Don't lie 'dex.

 

Those poor poor devs. Won't someone please think of the devs?

I swear vidya devs are the Jews of the 21st century.

 

Don't most European countries have like 60-70% tax rates or something? That clean air, women's birthing center, subsidized agriculture farm and lesbian gaming study don't come free of charge ya know, comrade-ski. Pretty sad when gaming devs have to moon-light as security guards or truck drivers 'cause their socialist leaders want to open another drug clinic for homeless squirrels.

 

That's not really the fault of CDPR management forcing the poor devs to work overtime and get more than well compensated for it.
Euros are cucks.

 

Not really, and the cost of living in Warsaw is infinitesimal compared to a metropolian area in the US. If they do truly make a minimum of $86k they could practically live in luxury in their country.

Also Poland has an ultra-conservative government right now.

 

Wait, you think there is a single country in the world that literally takes 70% of everybody's income?

Roughly speaking, highest income tax in the world is around 39% for low earners and 59% for highest earners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates

 

https://taxfoundation.org/top-individual-income-tax-rates-europe-2019

Individual Income Tax Rates
Belgium 60%
Portugal 61%
Slovenia 61%
Sweden 60%
France 55%

Plenty others close in the 55-60% range. I wasn't far off... unless you're Estonian.

 

Pfft...bunch of pussies. All they need is some good chaw.

 

You said "don't most European countries have 60-70% tax rates". The very highest countries have 60. Many other countries have something in the 40s and 50s. That's pretty far off, since it's not like 5% income tax is a thing.

This is also the top tax bracket. I don't know if those CD Projekt paychecks would fall into top bracket in every country or not.

There's nothing wrong with having a guess then being corrected by data, it's not like you suddenly need to vote for the green party or something. It's weirder to keep insisting.

 

I think you're confusing working with working out. Because working with a computer is not the same as working a physically intensive job that helps burn fat or develop muscle mass. Also, like the other guy said, if you don't really have time to sleep well and exercise, then you're going to gain weight too.

 

There is more to tax than income tax. If I look at what an employer has to pay for average worker, and then look at what that worker gets to actually spend, I see that government takes 62% of what he earned.

And that is not in any top bracket, that is for average salary worker.

Of course, many people are morons who don't even realize how high taxes really are.