Cyberpunk 2077 Developers Crunching for November Release

According to a Bloomberg report by Jason Schreier, CD Projekt Red, the developers behind the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, have sent a memo to their employees stating that a 6 day work week will be implemented going forward, leading up to the game’s release later this November.

This memo is in direct contradiction with the developer’s earlier statements that the game’s development would not see any implementation of overworking it’s staff, or “crunch”, in order to complete the game.

Red, a subsidiary of CD Projekt SA, has be widely criticized for it’s previous implementation of crunch on it’s employees with their past works like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. With Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red’s co-CEO Marcin Iwinski stated that they were optimistic about the game’s development and it’s steady progress, hoping that crunch would not become an option, stating to Kotaku last year, “We can never be 200% sure that there won’t be some pressure, but it’s actually our management’s work to make sure people are OK with that, and I think I’d like people to tell other people within the company that that’s OK, because that’s when we are successful when introducing it. But so far so good.”

Unfortunately, that hope has run out, as Projekt Red’s studio head and Cyberpunk 2077’s creative director Adam Badowski stated in his email to staff that their work period is now in, “overdrive” in order to polish the game and remove it’s numerous remaining bugs and glitches, stating, “I take it upon myself to receive the full backlash for the decision. I know this is in direct opposition to what we’ve said about crunch. It’s also in direct opposition to what I personally grew to believe a while back — that crunch should never be the answer. But we’ve extended all other possible means of navigating the situation.”

Badowski also responded directly to Schreier on Twitter with the following tweet.

Cyberpunk 2077 is still on track to release on November 19th, 2020 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The game will also release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S sometime in 2021.