Former CD Projekt Developers Take Lessons From ‘Cyberpunk’ Debacle
Rebel Wolves has around 90 people, with no plans to grow to the 1,000-plus team size often seen at video-game studios elsewhere in the industry
www.bloomberg.com
Rebel Wolves has around 90 people, with no plans to grow to the 1,000-plus team size often seen at video-game studios elsewhere in the industry
Lessons from Cyberpunk
When Konrad Tomaszkiewicz left his director job at CD Projekt SA in the spring of 2021, he took a long break and then eventually realized that he didn’t want to work for a large company anymore.So he decided to start his own video-game studio, called Rebel Wolves. Backed by funding from China’s NetEase Inc., he and his team are working on a fantasy roleplaying game set in a “narrative sandbox,” where players can choose to pursue quests in a non-linear order.
Former CD Projekt Developers Take Lessons From ‘Cyberpunk’ Debacle
Rebel Wolves has around 90 people, with no plans to grow to the 1,000-plus team size often seen at video-game studios elsewhere in the industry
“I missed the every-day contact with the rest of the team,” Tomaszkiewicz told me in an interview. “It’s totally different work than 500 people.”
Staying small is one of the lessons Tomaszkiewicz took away from his 17 years at CD Projekt, where he was director of the critically acclaimed roleplaying game The Witcher 3 and then head of production on Cyberpunk 2077 — a much-hyped game that was released in such a glitchy, disappointing state that Sony Corp. yanked it from the PlayStation Store for six months.
Some of the reasons behind the game’s failure, as we documented at the time, included technological challenges, a rushed deadline and a team so vast that individual units felt siloed and disorganized — all problems that Tomaszkiewicz said his new studio aims to tackle.
As CD Projekt pursued bigger, more ambitious games with massive worlds and high-fidelity graphics, it expanded rapidly and became less efficient, he said. Armies of producers were responsible for managing communication across different disciplines, while individual contributors found that their creativity was more restrained.
“If you are a programmer or a designer, when you have 20 more colleagues on your team, your area of where you can work is quite narrow,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “When you work at a company like ours, you don’t have 20 colleagues, you have five colleagues. You need to do more but at the same time you have a bigger impact on the game.”
Rebel Wolves is also working on the popular Unreal Engine rather than creating its own technology from scratch, which was one of the biggest hindrances to Cyberpunk 2077, I previously reported. Tomaszkiewicz and his team are aiming for a narrower scope — a game that players could perhaps complete in a few dozen hours rather than a few hundred.
Another key lesson from the CD Projekt days is to avoid announcing too early, in contrast to Cyberpunk 2077, which was revealed eight years before it came out. That lingering buzz ramped up the pressure for the team as they watched their release date continually slip.
“I think we are very determined to look for any ways we can to reduce the pressures on the team,” said Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, Konrad’s brother, who joined Rebel Wolves earlier this year. “Video games are extremely complicated to build, especially the type of games we’re building, and it’s very difficult to predict where we will land.”
Roughly two dozen people at Rebel Wolves followed Konrad Tomaszkiewicz from CD Projekt, according to a LinkedIn review, even though the circumstances of his departure were problematic.
The former director left CD Projekt in May 2021 following a monthlong company investigation into allegations that he was bullying colleagues. Although the company found that he was not guilty, he wrote in an email to staff at the time that “a lot of people are feeling fear, stress or discomfort when working with me” and apologized, vowing to work on improving his behavior.
Three years later, Tomaszkiewicz said one of his goals with the new studio is to improve his bedside manner when delivering feedback, especially to subordinates. He said that he needs to “have more empathy” when speaking to colleagues — another trait improved by moving to a smaller team.
“It’s totally different work than when you are far from them, when you have this proxy with a lot of leaders, coordinators, producers,” he said. “You’re also sitting with everyone in the same space…it’s a totally different thing.”
As a manager at CD Projekt, Tomaszkiewicz was also responsible for asking employees to work extended nights and weekends — a practice, known in the industry as “crunch,” that the company behind Cyberpunk has spent years trying to alleviate. Rebel Wolves, too, said it is trying to avoid forcing employees to work overtime.
“Our main policy in the studio is team first,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “When we’re making decisions here, first of all we’re thinking about what we can do to make the team motivated and happy.”