Hacker News Reader

Actually I see it as positive, because it proves that crunching isn't worth it, if this what happens coming out of burned developers.

The industry keeps bleeding to many people that could have made huge contributions, but decided to invest into industries where crushing isn't part of the culture.

For example, I rather do GUIs and 3D stuff for boring enteprise projects than spending endless nights and weekends fixing bugs on engine code.

Yup, left AAA a long time ago. Way more money, work-life balance, and job opportunities available when you leave the game industry. It exploits developers who are initially passionate about the field, and then leaves them in a state where it's very difficult to leave (because it's very specific skills that don't easily transfer to other industries)

If you work on game engines, trading is a fantastic transition since you'll already have high performance C++ experience.

Can you elaborate on this?

Yepppp I am way more interested in games than web dev but here I get paid well and have a loose and comfortable schedule / environment. It's a no-brainer.

I fully agree with you that crunching isn't worth it.

All of this mess isn't because of crunching thou. It was a massive fuck up from the leadership team. No crunching (or lack of) would ever solve it

The way they lied to the media, players, etc. Their intentions were always to lie and hide the facts.

Yeah, I'm so curious about what they were doing for the last 2 years. It seems like the artists have been working on the game for 5+ years: the world is huge and full of interesting and detailed environments. The graphics are amazing (on PC). But it's like the gameplay and open-world systems were written in the last year or two, and it shows.

> As someone who's worked on a (digital-only) title for Xbox One, I'm surprised this game got through the certification process in the first place.

Something I have learned from watching this saga is that those rules seem not to apply to "AAA" developers (this appears to have been fairly wide industry knowledge, but I was not aware of it).

It may also be a relatively new development, but because of how hot games are coming in, it sounds like Sony and MS are now willing to assume that day one patches will fix the issues if the studio says that they will. Not just for CDPR.

I am fairly sure sony prefers a buggy cyberpunk to a cyberpunk that is available on xbox but not ps4.

Apparently not, since after they pulled Cyberpunk from the PSN store* this effectively the state of things

* yes, I know you can still buy the physical copy from retailers

Patches have to go through certification as well. Day one patches aren’t literally pushed out hot on day one. They’ll have gone through testing and cert.

What I read, and apparently it was discussed on the CDPR emergency board meeting, is that Sony and MS trusted CDPR to correct the issues and have the game in a good state prior to launch. Seems they failed at that pretty badly.

I hope this leads to Sony and Microsoft performing Apple-style reviews on all future games from now on. Completely audit every game and every patch before it can be sold on the platform.

I don't think that's tenable. Could you imagine trying to test a 40 hour game?

Sony and MS's teams aren't QA. Neither are Apple's. Apple's team looks for the standard stuff like are they using IAPs properly? Is there anything deceiving happening here? etc.

By the sounds of things Sony and MS's review teams did find that Cypberpunk 2077 was NOT in a good spot. But they took CDPR's word that they would fix it before launch (the typical day 1 patch situation). And that bombed hard.

I think your expectation on what happens is not in line with reality unfortunately.

Allegedly, the game was rejected 6 times before it was finally approved. Even then, it was approved on the condition that the big bugs will be fixed by December 10. Apparently, they weren't.

They listed the original delay as due to current gen consoles, it's likely one of the two _did_ veto their previous launch plans on one of the consoles and they decided to delay the whole launch. The question is if it was even worse on consoles 6 weeks ago, or if they just cajoled the platform holder in question into letting them launch anyway.

This is one of those stories that needs to eventually have an article written by someone like Jason Schreier.

While I do have immense sympathy for the devs, it does bother me that none of them blew the whistle. Many, if not most, should've known that this game was nothing like what was promised, and practically unplayable on PS4 or XBONE. Yet they said nothing.

And possibly lose their job during a massive pandemic? It’s hard to be a whistleblower.

Retaliation against whistleblowers is illegal.

Typical developer is not allowed by contract to say anything related to the product externally. They are just respecting a contract they signed.

That's basically all of the game industry - from testers to PR to HR to art.

When I onboarded at a global AAA game dev place in Japan, I got a separate sheet detailing my rights as a whistleblower - it's lucky to have these, but I doubt anyone would risk their standing/future in the industry because of something like this, especially during a pandemic.

Not in Poland.

Are you actually Polish? Or are you just assuming because it is not America they dont "enjoy" America Freedom(C)?

European. I researched whether or not Poland has legal protection for whistleblowers and it turns out they don't.

I hardly doubt that many legislations will go out of their way to specifically protect whistleblowers, but what do I know about laws?

I'm not sure if this is being sarcastic or not. Doesn't America have some of the weakest employee protection in the developed world (because, ironically, freedom)?

Sure, in theory. In practice they would have let you go for performance reasons, which are only supported by this game being pulled from the store.

Of course you can fight it, but while you do you still have to pay your bills and pay a lawyer, all with no income and no guarantee that it will ever make a difference, let alone when it would be resolved.

EDIT: And all that presumed that the whistleblower protections would actually apply in this case. If it were something clearly illegal you’d have a better case, but really here all you’ve got is possibly fraud and a pretty mild version at that. Proving fraud is tough...

Even in places where that is true, that typically only applies to employees "blowing the whistle" on illegal behavior, like violations of labor codes or hazardous conditions. It's not a blanket immunity for anyone with something negative to say about their employer.

It's not always 100% correct, but when asking why someone didn't do the "right" thing you can usually answer with "their material conditions."

Interesting that probabilities of a mishap like this has at best marginally reduced but the threshold for triggering corrective actions seems to be becoming much higher over past couple decades or so

There were actually rumours a while back saying that Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed because it ran poorly on the last generation consoles.

>Niespielak speaks about the situation on a popular Polish podcast, which has since been translated into English. He basically says that CD Projekt Red was running into real trouble when it came to getting Cyberpunk 2077 to perform on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One -- the latter especially. It's unclear whether Niespielak is referring to just the base systems or the Pro and X as well.

CD Projekt Red even responded to the rumours, basically saying that there wasn't really a particular reason for the delay. Guess that may have been true, considering how many bugs the game still had when it released.

>"No hidden agendas, just working on making the game better."

That part may have not really been that truthful considering what we now know about the console versions and how they went out of their way to not show us any footage before release.

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2020/01/dev_responds_to_rumo...

> Yet they said nothing.

Why would anyone take the risk to go publicly against management?

What's in it for the devs to blow the whistle here? It's not like a matter of public safety.

They did, just not publicly. That's why there were so many delays, the developers or managers kept saying "hey we're not going to make this release date, we need more time".

> This is incredible, and must be devastating for the development team, especially after all that crunching.

I suspect the team knows the game was not ready. But its not up to the team to decide.