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CD Projekt Red boss Adam Kicinski has apologised to the members of the Cyberpunk 2077 development team after describing crunch on Cyberpunk 2077 to be "not that bad – and never was." during an investor call this week.
The original comments were made during a call to investors last night (the transcript of which can be read here and was spotted by Eurogamer) in response to questions regarding the game suffering a delay of three weeks less than a month before it was originally due to launch. At the time, Kicinski said: "Regarding crunch; actually, it’s not that bad – and never was. Of course it’s a story that has been picked up by the media, and some people have been crunching heavily, but a large part of the team is not crunching at all since they have finished their work; it’s mostly about Q&A and engineers, programmers – but it’s not that heavy; of course, it will be extended a bit, but we have feedback from the team; they’re happy about the extra three weeks, so we don’t see any threats regarding crunch."
Now, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier reports that an internal email has been sent out to staff, in which Kicinski apologises for those remarks, saying "I had not wanted to comment on crunch, yet I still did, and I did it in a demeaning and harmful way… What I said was not even unfortunate, it was utterly bad."
Crunch has long been a topic of contenion during Cyberpunk 2077's development, with the company coming under fire as recently as last month for seemingly enforcing a six-day work week for the last few weeks leading up to the open world RPG's launch. Previous delays to the game have also resulted in crunch, though at the time Kicinski claimed that the studio would "try to limit crunch as much as possible".
The investor call also seemed to imply the latest delay to the game may be due to ensuring the game runs well on current gen consoles the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, with Kicinski saying: "The game is ready for the PC and runs great on the next-gen consoles, and could be shipped on the scheduled date on those platforms. However, even though the game has been certified on the current gens by both Sony and Microsoft, some very final optimization processes for such a massive and complex game require a bit of additional time." Sadly, it's also transpired that the delay has also resulted in some unsavoury types sending death threats to the developers working on the game.
Cyberpunk 2077 is currently scheduled for release on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Google Stadia and PC on December 10.
Wow, CD Projekt Red's Adam KiciÅ„ski just sent out an email to staff (passed to me) apologizing for these comments. "I had not wanted to comment on crunch, yet I still did, and I did it in a demeaning and harmful way… What I said was not even unfortunate, it was utterly bad."
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) October 29, 2020
