CD Projekt RED's Colin Walder, engineering director for management and audio, has shared a few thoughts on how the Polish developer's next Witcher RPG, codenamed Polaris, will improve on the cataclysmic development of Cyberpunk 2077. There's not a lot to share at this stage, of course, but what there is sounds like a step in the right direction.
There's a side mission in Cyberpunk 2077 that involves abducting a notorious union-breaker. One wonders if any of the people who worked on that have joined the union founded by CD Projekt RED employees this month. The union is part of the larger Polish worker's organisation OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, and comes in response to CD Projekt's firing around 100 employees in July due to "overstaffing". Its membership is anonymous and open to people in the industry who aren't employed by the Witcher and Cyberpunk studio, but are thinking about forming a union in their own workplace.
"We started talking about unionizing after the 2023 wave of layoffs when 9% of Reds (that is roughly 100 people) were let go," reads an official FAQ from the group. "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."
Following a series of layoffs earlier this year, staff at CD Projekt Red have formed a union for the entire Polish video game industry.
This year has been an incredibly rough one for developers across the board, with wave after wave of unnecessary layoffs across multiple major studios. CD Projekt Red was no different, with July seeing the third round of layoffs within three months at the Cyberpunk 2077 and Witcher 3 developer. Now, staff at CD Projekt Red have formed a video game union called the Polish Gamedev Workers Union that all members of the Polish games industry are encouraged to join. It has the express purpose of improving "workplace/industry standards in a way that has legal power and amplifies" voices of the workers in question.
In an FAQ on the union's website, it's explained that discussions of a union began after the layoffs at CD Projekt, which amounted to roughly 100 people. "This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity, affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response," reads the FAQ. "Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.
Turns out that Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is hiding a little reference to The Witcher 3, and one that should be music to your ears.
Some mild, fairly early spoilers for Phantom Liberty ahead!
It just seems like CD Projekt Red can't help but reference itself. There's already a Witcher reference in Cyberpunk in the form of an arcade game called Roach Race, but that one's in the base game. However, as spotted by IGN, it seems that there's a brand new reference to be found in Phantom Liberty. It can be found after a certain point during the mission Lucretia My Reflection, when you're guided to a wall-mounted phone in an abandoned building, the main purpose of which is to get in contact with Solomon Reed.
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