Cyberpunk studio breaks promise, forces overtime on developers | Hacker News Reader

Cyberpunk studio breaks promise, forces overtime on developers

arstechnica.com

16 pointsJaimeThompson10 comments

It doesn't sound that bad even from the internal email.. It's for a short time and clearly explained.

I don't think it's particularly effective though... Sometimes a difficult issue is best solved by relaxing and coming back fresh. Especially when it comes to coding.

And as a customer: Yet another delay would kind of annoy me at this point. I understood the previous ones but now it's getting a bit rich. I can imagine they don't want to go there.

Yeah, sometimes you use crunch for business reasons in order to use it to shift time around - when you need to make a particular date for contractual or other reasons. E3 demo, releasing for Christmas, etc.

It's when crunch is used as a tool to "get blood from a stone" / get more productivity for the same cost that is becomes evil and eventually counterproductive.

I believe crunch is used to line-up your ducks in a row and add polish - not to take part in highly creative work that is usually done up-front in the project.

I regularly work 6 days a week as does my wife. I am under the distinct impression that the vast majority of professionals are occasionally required to do so.

That doesn’t sound bad at all. One day a weekend until launch is only a handful of days. Given this game has been in development for years, I say they did a pretty damn good job at managing their time.

Who hasn’t worked on at least one project that didn’t require some amount of crunch towards the end?

It’s bad when crunch time is a significant amount leading to burn out.

I'm tempted to ask if it isn't possible to simply anounce a game _when it's done_. But I guess that's how we got Halflife3 :p

Famously (or perhaps not, but I remember it anyway), Duke Nukem Forever developers 3D Realms said that it would be released "when it's done".

Duke Nukem Forever was first announced in 1997. It was released in 2011, and got terrible reviews.

All in all, giving yourself an unlimited timeline for development is perhaps not a recipe for success.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fo...

One extra work day per week for 6 weeks is not the end of the world, as long as you fully pay your developers.

Yeah surely that extra day is still counted as overtime right? I've been trying to find this out but all I can find everyone writing is 6 work days which would in the worst interpretation sound like management removing overtime pay from developers. But I would guess that isn't the case right?

These developers are heroes!

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