CDPR is a Polish Company. Poland has pretty strict labor laws governing overtime pay. Like they have to get paid extra by law. CDPR has zero say in this, outside of like complete wage theft which would get them in actual legal trouble. Thanks for playing though.
Are all of their developers working inside of Poland? Does Polish law apply to offices outside of the nation itself? How exactly does Polish law
define overtime? Does it specify the increased rate? Are their employees forced to sign away that legal right in order to be employed?
The number of possible loopholes is significant, and you're not a Polish lawyer. Even if you were, however, capable of bringing evidence to the table, that wouldn't really matter, because it's not the key issue.
Fair enough, I'm not going to argue science is wrong. My point is that calling an extra day a week crunch like it's forcing people in the office for 120 hour work weeks is ridiculous. This isn't crunch. This is normal fucking overtime. The sort of overtime most people have to do for their jobs. I mean I worked 6 days a week for up to a year and I don't remember people going on Twitter calling my company a bunch of slave drivers who should be jailed. It's just fucking insulting that in a world where most people work 50-60 hours a week people get up in arms about a game company taking people's Saturdays away for a month. This isn't a crushing amount of work. It's one and a half months of extra work.
Or they're trying to meet expectations of fans and not release an unfinished product that needs a big ole day one patch. At this point they have 3 options, delay the game again likely pissing off their fans and possibly missing key sales around December, release a game with significant bugs that they need to fix with a big patch day one or week one, pissing off their fans and risking ruined first impressions or three tell their workers to do a few extra days of work at their peak time in order to have the game finished on time. I'm not sure why option 3 is seen as some grand act of corporate malevolence. Most businesses assign extra shifts if they need to have extra people, and yes this is usually attached with "do this or get fired" because otherwise, people wouldn't show up because they'd just not want to. That's how having a job works.
You are arguing that science is wrong. If you don't want to do that,
stop doing that.
Take the boot out of your mouth, and consider that maybe you should be angry that your employers were demanding an unreasonable amount of work from you, rather than trying to polish leather with your tongue.
Consider the following: CD Projekt Red have said, repeatedly, that the game is already finished. That it is ready to ship, and has been for months now. That they could have shipped it, but they wanted to make everything just right before doing so.
Their marketing campaign started with what boils down to "It'll be done when it's done". You remember
this? Timestamp, 2:07. Coming: When it's ready.
It has been seven years, and you think an extra week or two would be too much to ask? Don't be so utterly ridiculous.
You think it matters when this thing comes out? It's an 18-rated game, highly anticipated. It doesn't need Christmas to sell well. It is not aimed at a child audience, it does not need parents buying it as a gift.
And, since you
seem to keep forgetting, Crunch does not get more work done. This will not get the game out faster, and it will not make the game better. It may, if fortune smiles, not make the game actively worse, but it will absolutely not result in a better product.
Overtime
is crunch. When a worker whose work is done mentally is pressured into working more, with less time to decompress, their work will suffer. Mistakes will be made that would not be made otherwise, and correcting them will consume time until either no benefit is gained, or the result is a net loss.
Eight hours, the standard work day, is already two hours over the mark. Research indicates that six hours is the limit. One day out of seven is not sufficient to recover.
