Revealed in a report by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, CD Projekt Red are enforcing six-day working weeks as we approach the November launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
The command came in an email from the developer's studio head, Adam Badowski, who said in a Twitter reply that the order to crunch was "one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make."
He stressed that employees will be compensated for working overtime, and that all employees would share in 10% of the company's 2020 profits.
While Badowski claims that the team "understands that push", the studio has been criticised for "not humane" crunch conditions in the past, particularly on global smash hit The Witcher III: Wild Hunt.
Crunch is a well-known issue in the games industry, and has affected some of the world's biggest studios. Despite employing over a thousand people, CD Projekt Red are having to push hard to make their November 19 release date.
According to Schreier, this additional overtime burden reveal is not a recent occurrence, but does renege on a previous promise.
Cyberpunk 2077 comes to PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One on November 19, 2020, with Stadia, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions to come in 2021.
If the adventure offered by The Witcher 3 was spread over very long hours, the campaign of Cyberpunk 2077 should be intentionally shorter.
