If their main concern is layoffs – which it sounds like, at least from the article text, though I don’t know if that’s just the author’s take or not – I doubt that the union is going to have much leverage. CDPR isn’t laying people off for fun; the whole industry is seeing a major decline in investment at the moment.
Video Game VC Funding Slumps as Publishers Battle Covid Hangover
Funding opportunities dry up with game companies cutting jobs
Total peaked when people were still indoors because of Covid
VC groups invested $700.3 million in gaming in the third quarter, the lowest total since the second quarter of 2020, according to data from PitchBook. The industry attracted more than $2 billion in every quarter for two years ending in mid-2022.
The past few weeks have been marked by layoffs and studio closures by game companies. Epic cut 830 jobs, while Sony Group Corp.’s Naughty Dog and Worms maker Team17 have also let go dozens of workers.
The Swedish video-game holding company Embracer Group AB, which bought up dozens of gaming companies starting in 2020, is now canceling games, eliminating jobs and closing studios. The company is looking to sell Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment.
Since the beginning of 2023, there has been an abundance of layoffs that have hit the tech and gaming industry like a storm. Disney, Take Two, Unity, Twitter (now ‘X’) and even Microsoft have faced massive layoffs since January, and CD PROJEKT RED is the latest to follow this unfortunate and growing trend.
That’s how employment works. Calling them slaves is ignoring the fact that they have agency and compensation, unlike actual slaves.
No job is permemnent, it would be ridiculous to expect otherwise, but it varies between industries. Gaming is a low-frequency project-based industry, you know there will be lots of work while in development, and once that’s over, there’s not going to be as much work to do.
I believe this sentiment is taken not because of the actuals of the situation, such as waning work and ended employment, but because at the end of the day when everything is done and packed up it seems like the “boots on the ground” made just enough to scrape by, while the ceos/x suites fly away in private jets to jump out and golden parachute to their mansion.
Single employee doesn't have much negotiating power and shit flows down hill.
Shit industry practices are management's poor planning and workers have to take it.
If they got royalty share for their work like pre streaming TV shows staff did, this system would make some sense. Currently worker is getting a shit deal for the "privilege"
If they (the boss) knew the job was temporary, then they (the workers) should have known that going in and had been given proper compensation to make up for the looming layoff with plenty of heads up time to prep for the next job hunt.
The formation of a union tells you that the boss did not share that tidbit with the worker. Thus the problem, as the money keeps rolling in for the fatcat for the next decade, the workers who actually did anything of value are starting from scratch at a new job after losing insurance, healthcare, rent and food money, any chance at a raise, etc etc etc.
How else should it work? Almost any other way, is how. With honesty and respect for the people who actually did anything of value, is how.
I mean, what are their salaries? I genuinely don’t know, one would assume that a specialised job like that would command a pretty solid salary, and the assumption would be that working on a project like this would get them to the top of the list for applications to other companies.
I don’t know how the job was advertised, but seeing how the industry works from the outside, I would never assume a job for life at a game studio, but you could still count on security after working on a project like this.
I work a steady job, it’s hard, and the pay is okay for me, I suspect a game dev will earn several times what I do, part of which is due to the short term, or at least risky nature of the roles, the rest would be down to the specialist skills.
I don’t really think that forming a union signifies that at all, I’d say it’s more likely down to the ongoing working conditions.
Because you can always go and get a warehousing job or similar, it’s steady, but kinda boring and lower pay.
The money may keep rolling in for those who invested the most and took the largest risks. But that’s irrelevant IMO. You take a job for the pay that’s offered, and it lasts as long as it does, how long that is depends on the kind of role.
I’m making assumptions, but I think everyone here is too. But I do particularly resent the ‘slaves’ comment as it is disrespectful of the employees, and diminishes actual slavery which is bigger than ever.
Your first paragraph is so wrong its funny, then hurts, then wraps back around to being funny again.
Game development is pretty infamous for being paid like shit, where management gets you to do it as a passion project or dream job. They likely did not make much more than you do, with almost guaranteed worse hours given how normal crunch time is in the gaming industry.
A lot of game developers abandon game design, even after making massively successful titles that are beloved for decades, because they literally cannot afford to keep the job.
I think it is just a new modern game so therefore hyperbole demands it much be either the best thing ever or trash. A lot of people said RDR2 was “dated” design as well. I think they both have strengths, same with Cyberpunk. I think only BG3 is a step forward for RPG storytelling, Cyberpunk, Starfield, Red Dead all have issues, but they allow the player to get immersived in their worlds and at the end of the day that’s all that matters.
Oh man this discourse has been absolutely typical Gamer garbage on the various subreddits. Every day a new thread with thousands of posts not reading the article but rushing in to say the same thing. It’s weird because they are very different games and it also feels like Im taking crazy pills because while I have not played cyberpunk(Im waiting for it go get super cheap on sale before I bother with it) I remember the launch being an absolute shitshow and the general consensus on the story being “meh”.
Suddenly starfireld comes out and now Cyberpunk is heralded as the greatest at everything. Like you dont have to pick a team you can just like what you like. I get bethesda sold out to microsoft and is now under scrutiny, and I get that the same vocal posters let themselves get wrapped up in hype, but this is excessive.
Yeah I don’t get it. Cyberpunk is getting serious rose-tinted glasses. I hear PL has greatly enhanced it but it just dropped and CDPR has been fixing the game for what? 3 years? That was a rough initial 18mo in particular.
Part of me almost wonders if it’s been elevated because it’s frequently featured on those benchmark videos that have gotten so popular lately. Heavy use of ray tracing, frequently updated to get new features, very tweakable, and thousands of videos using Cyberpunk as the standard for hardware to be measured by just puts a bug in your head.
Look make no mistake, the game visual is a feast. But that’s not enough to make up for all the other shortcomings. At least not for me. After the initial heist mission, which was unbelievable by the way, I just got so bored. 
That being said, I’ve heard enough praise for phantom liberty that I am considering jumping back in. I’m not quite sure I’m ready to pay for DLC though after what was delivered initially.

CP was shit and unplayable on consoles at release and more-or-less buggy depending on hardware but fully playable on PC. It did not live up to the grandiose marketing promises but it is a wonderful game for what it is. Interesting world, varied quests/gigs/jobs with interesting decisions to make, super fun weapons, and now a fun skill build mechanics.
Phantom Liberty is peak Cyberpunk, but the game itself is great - at release and now even more. Does not excuse the pathetic release though and deceiving marketing. At least they did something with it.
It seems weird that you are judging Cyberpunk without ever having played it. Saying that the general consensus is “meh” is not accurate at all. The game had bugs and it had some technical and gameplay issues that made its much more mature brethren seem better or more well thought through. That’s true.
There’s a huge BUT here though. The storytelling and main questlike through Cyberpunk, at launch, was pretty freaking spectacular. I say this as someone who readily acknowledges the issues with the game at launch. Yes, they have addressed most of those issues, and the game feels better now, but the same story from launch-day is still there and is a rather compelling and great experience. I’m on my second playthrough of it now with the PL expansion and so far it’s been so much better.
And this is all to say nothing of the truly jaw-dropping level design and aesthetics, AT launch, that the game is still sporting. I remember saying when I first played this at launch that I really hope they release some more expansions for this game because the environment is so richly detailed, it feels like I’m running around in a dystopian nightmare.
Like I said I’m basing my assessment on both games by the response the community gave and reviews Ive read and seen. I tend to do the patient gamer thing and wait for big steam sales before buying a game(unless its something I really want and sometimes I know indy games are already cheap and grab it at a lesser sale). Cyberpunk had a similarly criticized launch with the multiple daily 1001 posts on reddit and much like starfield has people who defend it you had people defending cyberpunk as well.
But from the outside looking in it was literally the same. You had the people who let themselves get spunup by the hypemachine absolutely let down when the game didnt live up to the hype.
You had the people who were chastising the bugs and “dated mechanics” how the game “didnt feel alive” and the “driving physics suck”
You had the hardcore CRPG fans for whom the only true RPG is: Baldurs gate 2, Morowind, Fallout 2, and special mentions to fallout new vegas. They’d come in and criticize lack of options and choice and blablabla.
You had the youtubers clowning on the game like Dunky showcasing a bug-fest.
And among people who actually reviewed the game the community consensus I saw was polarizing. Some did love it but a lot of people expressed it not living up to potential.
Again I cant say for sure(maybe next winter sale will be my time to shine) but it’s feels like this outrage cycle was targeting cyberpunk for a while and then one day it just stopped. And now that its time for the community to throw their poo at something again cyberpunk is the hero of the story.
So sorry for the rambling but in short my post is less a personal judgment of cyberpunk and more a “the community hated this game and had little good to say about it, and now it’s their precious baby and starfield is the bad one”. I know its not happening here but I figure rather than spitting into the wind on reddit I’d complain about this weird online discourse here.
I think the reason you saw the response you saw is that a lot of the players who bought Cyberpunk on the PC early on were too busy PLAYING the game to talk about it online. If you were a console user though you had little choice though, the console versions of Cyberpunk were awful at launch and deserved much of the scorn they received, I am not certain on stats, but I’m positive that most of the game-breaking bugs were on the console. Yes, I noticed some bugs on my first playthrough on the PC, but it wasn’t as dramatic as what I saw people posting regarding console Cyberpunk.
Beat the game within the first week of release (on PC). There were no serious gamebreaking bugs, and you are correct, the story is essentially unchanged between release and now. The story was always great.
The criticism of Red Dead had little to do with the impressive systems that they built for the world and a whole lot to do with how they took that freedom away from you in missions. There was very much a way they could have kept the linear story that plays out the same way every time without cutting to a hard fail state for using your brain. That's the part that felt dated, especially contrasted against the actual cool, innovative stuff that exists in the same video game.
i feel red dead is amazing to look at but playing it is so boring id rather watch paint dry. the last time i played red dead was to just do the drunk saloon mission again, which is also where i stopped playing the first time
Idk, maybe it’s just that I’m comparing too much of the Witcher 3, but the story and importantly sidequests in Horizon Zero Dawn are mediocore at best for where I’m at atm. I’d concur it’s better than Bethesda though.
The Witcher 3, to me, made Bethesda games feel dated. The structure of the game is nearly identical, but when you arrive at your quest, it never plays out entirely straight forward, much like the Witcher source material. Cyberpunk does follow along those same lines, even if it never quite hit the highs that Witcher 3 did.
HZD is very Ubisofty, but done right, as in it’s not littered to the brink with pointless collectibles and can actually be completed. It’s way more action than role-play or story focussed but that’s not a bad thing in itself. I think of it more like Tomb Raider, and for that kind of game HZD has plenty and very good storytelling.
When you work on something for longer than 5 years, the tech and expectations from competing games will run ahead of you.
And you can’t just rewrite the story and engine and map and characters every time you get delayed.
So you should just shoot every AAA project that lags more than 5 years on the spot. It’s way too late for it at that time. And start from market analysis, not just rewriting everything in the ‘current engine and style’.
This is such a weird take because Cyberpunk's storytelling was a series of Grand Theft Auto phone calls occasionally interspersed with "UR DYING V, I'M KEANU REEVES AND IM GONNA TAKE UR BODY LOL". There wasn't anything interesting about Cyberpunk's storytelling. I believe a Bethesda game could be more boring than that, but it doesn't retroactively make Cyberpunk great as a result.
It blows my mind that people praise cyberpunk. They skipped straight past the character building and introduction to the city and its characters with a fucking 30 second cutscene, and then you just start getting calls from people you’ve never met like they know you. It didn’t interest me at all.
Ah so they didn’t just blow past the city and character introductions with a cutscene and then you start getting calls from fixers you don’t know, who talk to you like you have an existing relationship?
Tell me more about the incredible storyline that introduced you to the city and its inhabitants at the start
Mine was “car chase for a lizard” then the guy I just met dies, who was apparently my best friend because we played 2 missions together
V, someone in their twenties, maybe early thirties, had no life, friends, or business acquaintances or knowledge of the city before the player comes into the story.
I suppose the game should have been 25 hours longer so you could have a sit down meeting with each fixer, get to know them, maybe have some tea with them. Maybe a walking tour of Night City so that everything is spelled out for you would help?
People spent 8 years making Cyberpunk their entire personality. Of course they are going to make it seem like the best thing since stuffed crust pizza.
Ah not liking something makes me the bad guy because apparently it’s my whole personality.
Nope. Just talking about something in the thread where there’s a discussion about it. Happens to be I agree with many others that it was an overhead disappointment propped up by marketing money.
Felt the same way about it. The plot device of the character potentially becoming Keanu really broke all motivation for me. Why would I complete the main plot if each mission made the infestation worse? I made this character, why would I be interested in watching them become someone else’s Gary Stue? I wanted to be my Gary, not theirs.
The story would have been much improved by dropping Johnny Mnemonic Silverhands and instead having the partner, whose name escapes me because I only got to know him through 2 missions and a 30 second montage of us getting to know each other, as the ride along personality. Instead of him taking you over, he’s fading away and you have to save him.
Throw in a heroic sacrifice from your semi AI partner at the end or a plot twist him into a villain Tyler Durdening your ass while you sleep and it could have been something magical.
The theme of cyberpunk is that you have a literal anti corp terrorist in your head, and how that is affecting V’s psyche. Like there are points in the game where you choose some dialogue options and the game is like “is that V’s opinion or Johnny’s”.
I think they should have not played up the “if left unchecked, he’s going to kill you” sense of urgency bit though. But basically every open world game has the same problem with how do you reconcile having an open world, but also have a plot that needs moved forward. Like they can’t just outright game over you if you just do side quests for a in-game week or so.
That’s where starfield actually gets it right. You aren’t the “chosen one”, you are just a guy. The main plot of the game has no sense of urgency, because it’s fully driven by how much you dig into the artifact mystery. Any one in constellation could be doing the same things you are doing, and getting the powers and finding more artifacts, they all have seen the same visions you have when they first touched one. Again, you aren’t special.
Bethesda has put themselves in an awkward spot by promoting niche and deep RPG mechanics for so long, and then becoming such a AAA developer with entire keynotes dedicated to previewing them that they no longer want to risk making deeper complex mechanics because they’re scared of “confusing” the base audience.
I want to say they need to take Starfield as a wakeup call, in comparison to games like BG3. But they don’t need to, because Gamepass numbers are practically imaginary sales numbers, and we’re just going to hear about how well it sold for the next half-decade.
This article speaks right out of my soul, when comparing Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 2.0.
The quest qualtiy itself is comparable, but the delivery of Starfield makes it solely my job to create immersion (which I can and will do), while Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 grabs me by my balls and drags me into the world.
Spoiler for a small quest in CyberpunkWhen the barkeeper leans slightly forward, looks carefully right and left to make sure no one is listening and then tells me he suspects his wife sees someone else, I smell his parfume and I notice he relaxes his hurting back by stemming his arms onto the desk, because he is doing a double shift. Having Silverhand commenting on every step of the quest and turning it into a noir detctive story, making fun of me, added more immersion to a “follow person, report back”-mission. That I then can just call the quest giver on the phone, as a normal being would feels life like.
A similar quest in Starfield:
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
They might have fixed it by now but a certain little fortune teller has a very similar issue in an elevator in cyberpunk.
After helping him out I had a certain Ripperdoc showing which arm he operates with by raising it. Only his arm rotated backwards as if his elbow was turned around 180 degrees, arm clipping through his biceps.
But at least in Cyberpunk I’ve got the feeling that a bug like this is an honest oversight, whereas Starfield gives me the feeling that Creation Engine (2.0 these days?) should have have been killed, burned and buried after Skyrim. Each game since (and including) Oblivion I’ve felt like I’m looking at limitations I already noticed in the previous game built with Creation Engine or NetImmerse/GameBryo.
I haven’t played starfield and don’t intend to but I played cyberpunk on launch thanks to a covid scare and even on launch it was a good game to me. Had it’s problems but I got 300 hours out of it before the year ended.
Questgiver: “Hello, I don’t know you stranger, and I don’t trust outsiders. Can I help you? Oh, you want a quest? This evil company in Neon does bad shit and I need you to inject this virus and make sure it doesn’t get back to me. Also, the mayor here is evil AF. Don’t say that out loud, he has ears everywhere. I trust you stranger with my life. Have 8000 creds for picking up my mail, and 2000 creds and a unique purple gun for blowing up half of the city.”
They’re good at that. I remember trying Skyrim when it was new and we all didn’t know there would be like 15 rereleases and it felt weirdly dated. I couldn’t really put my finger on why, it just felt old.
I've been seeing a ton of cyberpunk ads since starfield was released just shitting on starfield and talking up cyberpunk. This seems like a smear campaign. Frankly if your a fan of sci Fi and video games. You should probably try both when they're on sale.
Cyberpunk put ALL their money into marketing, and they’re heavily investor-pressured into showing the game is better received than it actually is. I still firmly believe that a large percentage of the praise is astroturfing. Especially when they downvote everything negative without a response
Ok here’s a response. I pirated cyberpunk on release fully expecting it to be buggy. I enjoyed bits of it at the time but I stopped because it was too buggy and unpolished.
This is CD Project Red’s track record, but somehow everyone forgot about how bad Witcher 3 was. I expected this 2.0 update eventually and I’m glad they started another marketing push, so that I can know it’s time for the game to actually be ‘done’. Obviously they paid streamers to show the game, that’s no secret. But also it looks genuinely better, just like Witcher 3. So I’ll probably actually buy it next time it goes on sale, after pirating it to see if it’s worth it now.
Meanwhile Starfield looks exactly like the milktoast Skyrim reskin I expected it to be, with nothing really standing out. Bethesda has been slowly comodifying their games since Morrowind -> Oblivion then followed an obvious template since Skyrim. It really shows in their boring designs.
Cyberpunk was trying to do too much, but Starfield isn’t doing enough.
Fair point about starfield, I haven’t played it yet but have heard many negative things.
But your point about cyberpunk, in response to me is “It was too buggy to enjoy on release and I haven’t played the late, updated version” , but you’re glad it’s being marketed on every platform?
The only thing I don’t like about Cyberpunk’s writing is that everyone seems to be deathly allergic to pronouns, even when it would clearly make the dialogue flow better.
I’m talking more about the dialogue between V and other characters where they just adamantly refuse to begin sentences with the words I/me/my/etc. It begins to wear after a while.
Well, the player can choose which gender V is, plus there’s a lot of catering to gender fluidity.
It’s definitely a conscious choice, but I can’t say if it’s to not have to record more variations of dialogue, and maybe NPC’s use it less so not to draw attention to them not knowing V’s gender.
That said, nothing that really bothered me, although I still haven’t gone through the entire game.
But maybe it’s just how they picture 2077? Just look at recent history and draw an exponential curve and assume pronouns just went out of fashion?
I mean, it really doesn’t have anything to do with V’s gender, it’s literally just that they start every sentence like, for example, “…Thought” or “…Look like” instead of “I thought” or “You look like,” even when the VO is enunciating in a way that sounds much more emphatic than the dropped pronouns would imply? It makes the dialogue feel kind of disjointed at times.
Granted, I’m using the female V voice, I have no idea if the male VO runs into the same problems, but I imagine they’re reading off of the same script, so it seems likely.
Ffs buddy, learn to let it go. I mentioned the two games in my previous comments already. Then I mentioned I would like an actual Starcraft 3 from Blizzard. You don’t need to point me at anything, just accept someone else wishing for something and move on.
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Aktywne