It turns out that post-game expansions for Cyberpunk 2077were never on the cards, developer CD Projekt Red has confirmed.
CD Projekt Red workers form union after layoffs
09.10.2023 - 19:49 / polygon.com / Projekt Red
Some staff at CD Projekt Red, the Polish developer of Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher games, have formed the Polish Gamedev Workers Union in response to recent layoffs at the studio.
The union is open to anyone working anywhere in the game industry under a Polish contract, although at present it only has a company commission at CD Projekt Red (with an unknown number of members), and will initially be focused on improving the lives of employees there. It’s part of a much larger Polish union, OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza.
The union said it was CD Projekt Red’s decision to lay off around 100 workers — 9% of its workforce — in 2023 that prompted its formation. The company has just released Phantom Liberty, the first and only expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, and is now winding down work on that game as it builds towards a new Witcher title and a Cyberpunk sequel, as well as several other projects.
“We started talking about unionizing after the 2023 wave of layoffs,” The Polish Gamedev Workers Union said in a FAQ on its site. “This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity, affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis. [...] We believe that the mass layoffs are a danger to the gamedev industry and we believe that unionizing is a way for us to preserve the industry’s potential.”
The union said its priority was to give CD Projekt Red staff a voice in company decision-making, with a view to increasing employment stability. It also wants to help workers’ voices be heard on working conditions “in the long run.”
In an interview with Polish site CD Action, union founders Lev Ki and Paweł Myszka — both CD Projekt Red employees, working in programming and QA respectively — said that the studio had actually made great strides in improving working conditions, especially in eliminating crunch. CD Projekt Red had sworn it would try to deliver Cyberpunk 2077 without crunch, but reportedly failed in this aim. It seems that, with Phantom Liberty, it has finally made good on its promise.
“While working on Phantom Liberty there was no crunch, certainly not to the same extent as with the [base game],” Myszka told CD Action (via Google Translate). “There were overtime hours only for those willing, paid or taken as vacation days. The company introduced an anti-crunch policy, which was consistently implemented and enforced. Agile [development] has indeed also been introduced, but remember that the agile methodology is a process, you cannot simply switch to Agile, you are constantly implementing it. This has actually been achieved and the atmosphere in the company is
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