Issue 356

Dialogue

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Act of contrition

Reading E356’s article about the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, I couldn’t help but find in it a darkly ironic meta-narrative of corporate exploitation. That CDPR dropped a whopper of a ball on this goes without saying, and perhaps such a talkedabout game was always doomed not to live up to expectations. But then something struck me, harking back to Edge Annual Vol 3 and an article about the unionisation of the game industry, where a comment was made that these problems (discussions around unions and crunch culture, among others) shouldn’t appear on the radar of gamers, and shouldn’t stop them enjoying the games.

Shouldn’t they? When I buy a triple-A game from an industry giant, and later find out there have been reports of high-profile sexual harassment, toxic work environments, or where mandatory six-day weeks have been worked by devs since at least 2019 (and, alas, none of these problems are new or unique to this industry), I find myself asking questions of complicity. Am I partly responsible due to buying these games that have been tainted by these stories? If I boycott companies that treat their staff like this, who am I really harming: the company or the developers? And in any case, would my boycotting actually matter? Look at how many preorder copies of Cyberpunk CDPR shipped, making its development costs back before the game even launched and all the bugs came out to play.