With 9 years you can’t really say the deadline was strict... I’d probably chalk it up to bad managers who didn’t know what they wanted in the start of the project. Kudos to the developers for making a nice looking game.
If I had worked for months doing overtime only for the game to be released before it was ready, and seen the reaction it has got, I'd be frustrated.
I see some criticism in this thread towards DEV, but 6 day working weeks... to me it’s a classic example of incompetent managers trying to fix a project they lost control of.
I mean, you work with highly skilled people, thrilled to be part of the next big thing and all you can think of is bringing in the whip. As if people aren’t motivated enough and not doing overtime already, giving the best they can to make it work.<p>Yes, it’s the DEVs that write the bugs, but it’s hard to not get sloppy from time to time when there’s constant pressure to make progress and meet deadlines for the sake of meeting them.
It’s not DEV’s fault the intermediate deadlines apparently were just green coloured cells on an Excel sheet and did not include actual quality checks, or planning / priority reviews to prevent quality issues and excessive overtime.
It seems like management is the same almost everywhere. Bad.<p>How many executives and powerful managers are there at CDPR and how many of them have significant development experience?<p>Another aspect is the timing with Christmas.<p>I think it came down to getting $400 million now for a buggy beta version or admitting it's not done and either delaying again or offering a partial refund to preorders.<p>So the right thing to do might have been to release a beta version for people who wanted it, say it's a beta, and give people back $10 or something. Because if you say it's not finished, people are not going to want to pay the full $60.<p>So I think it comes down to money. You would need a really strong person to suggest that they do something that could reduce the income by $80 million or something. Maybe that person doesn't exist. But if they do then I doubt they would be a manager. They would be a builder.
this smells of scope creep / feature creep, and management releasing crazy promises that the devs then had to figure out how to add to the game...<p>in comparison, both the new Xbox and PS5 seem to have taken less time to be conceived, designed, developed, and released.
I really hope the CDPR can turn it around and rebuild the trust. I'm worried that the corporate rot has already taken hold of the company however.