Hi, CDP developer here.
Not only this conversation never happened, but this is just the last in a long list of very toxic behavior from the upper management toward us developers.
First of all, I can confirm this conversation never happened, if anything the developers have been crunching no-stop since May 2019, where the management was like "oh shit we need to make the game, we must hurry", mind that we were barely out of alpha at that point and even though most developed pointed out that was impossible to do the whole game ALMOST from scratch in one year.
If anything, people have been dreading the inevitable 2 year death march since long before the crunch started because they know it's just how CDP rolls, dick around in pre prod for ages and then rush everyone and work devs to the bone to make up for the time lost, and none of them was looking forward to it.
We asked "what's the plan if we can't deliver in the set deadline" and up until December the answer from management was "we have to, there is no plan B", so here you go, first year of crunch there, of course, first a 2 month delay and then another 6 months of delay, and - to give a picture of how low is the level of communication between the management and developers - we found out both times ON TWITTER and other social that the game was being delayed, with a mail from Adam following few hours later.
Same happened with the Gold release, and any other announcement since June 2019.
People getting riled up right now about the crunch, just so you know, many people have been spending the week ends in the office and doing 16 hours per day pretty much since June 2019, some departments even as far as a year earlier.
Every time this was addressed you'd get the usual copy paste spiel about "we are fueled by passion, we are rebels, this is not for everyone and other such copy-paste slogans" which was a cool way to say "We have no idea what we are doing but we have infinite cash and we fix everything with more crunch"
Conversations end up mostly like this, the management saying that everything is great and cool and we have to believe in the project, our questions and doubts being brushed aside.
At the end of the day feels like CDP management is completely detached from the reality of us developers.
And this is only a brief summary of the issues pertaining crunch, there is much more that could be said, but I believe that other issues could be resolved internally over time as the studio grows, this however is not something that I think can be ever resolved for a simple reason.
That directors and leads in Warasaw are the people that did this shit for W3, are the people that survived that hell and are ok with it. And the management simply doesn't care.
After all most developers get a yearly bonus that is a pittance, while the upper heads rack up hundreds of thousands of zloty in bonuses. (in euro / dollar they get A LOT still) so eveything is fine.
And probably this is what makes it preposterous, no one in the studio benefits or cares to release earlier, many people just want to do their job, get paid and possibly not have to sleep in the studio (which happened, and not scarcely, especially in Warsaw).
The people that want the product OUT asap are the board and the marketing directors, and they don't give a flying fuck about the work balance.
I mean, they even changed the crunch allowance to Uber (from Przysne, a polish delivery service) because it doesn't ship for free so you're discouraged from ordering too much.
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