While CDPR may be riding high in the wake of positive reception to Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion, it has been an extremely rough year for them overall. Back in July of this year CDPR laid off 9 percent of the entire company, about 100 people, part of three different waves of layoffs around that time which included Molasses Flood and Gwent team members.
Now, in a statement on Gamedevunion, translated by Eurogamer, it’s been announced that CDPR will join others in Poland’s game industry to unionize, something they started taking about after those 9 percent layoffs. Here’s what part of the statement says about the decision:
“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.”
“The above shows how employers tend to view their interests to be in conflict with those of their employees. While employees are the ones creating value in this arrangement, they lack any decision power in company-structure-related matters. That is why we need to organize to enter those situations on equal footing.”
CDPR management has reportedly not responded to the union, but they are indeed aware of it, with documentation submitted to them. Management has been previously blamed with most of what went wrong with Cyberpunk 2077’s release, determined to get the game out before it was clearly ready to be released, as well as management making some of the misleading statements about how it ran “surprisingly well” on last-gen consoles.
Now, it feels like CDPR has some pretty intense tasks ahead of them. After Phantom Liberty, they are starting work on a fourth Witcher game, which is meant to be part of a new Witcher trilogy released in the next few years. They have confirmed they are going to start work on Cyberpunk 2 as well, determined to develop two IPs in parallel rather than waiting for one to be done to start the other. This is in addition to Cyberpunk team members working on a live action series that’s just been announced for the game. And on top of all this, there’s supposed to be a new IP in the works.
That’s an absolute ton of demands for a company that was unable to produce a finished Cyberpunk 2077 despite almost the entire company devoted to it for years. It’s easy to see how this workload could end up strenuous, particularly with recent, significant layoffs. And despite the success of Phantom Liberty, CDPR stock has continued to slide, down 30% this month alone. In the past five years, it remains down 63%, a drop which began, of course, during Cyberpunk 2077’s launch. But even if the game itself has recovered, the share price has not, hence these cuts, I imagine.
We will see what happens with the union next, and what management may do to respond. I hope the workers get what they want and need to continue producing great games in a healthy way, and that this new supposed five-game plan is not going to break them.
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