Gizmo_Duck
blathering blatherskite!
Some excerpts:
It’s shyt” - that’s the kind of feedback developers at Techland get from their leaders, the inner circle around CEO Pawel Marchewka. Interviews with ten current and former Techland staff, all of whom requested anonymity so as not to risk their careers, depict a studio marred by autocratic management, poor planning, and a toxic work culture that trickles down from the top. As one source claims, “The fish rots from the head.”
Over the course of my investigation, multiple people independently shared a story of an artist who turned in some work that management disliked. The feedback they received was "pedalski", which translates to "too f**got-like".
According to those I spoke to, however, this is far from an isolated event. In another meeting, the team was discussing the "modern dark ages'' - one of the core design pillars of Dying Light 2 - and one lead blurted out, “At least they knew how to deal with women back then!”
While my sources confirm this incident did see an intervention from HR, it’s not clear if the culprit was reprimanded in any meaningful way. On top of that, it’s hard to feel like complaints about sexism are being taken seriously when the main feature of the CEO’s office is a photo of a naked woman next to a cheetah.
Another idea that was floated, just around the start of the pandemic, was to send out medical test kits. People would test themselves and get results back telling them whether or not they were susceptible to the game’s fictional pathogen. Because the kits were for real diseases, though, you might also find out you have something seriously wrong with you. Elsewhere, the team considered working with the United Nations to create a video advertisement. This advert would have a UN spokesperson talk about a place where people are scrambling to survive, fighting over water. It would reflect what’s happening in developing countries, as well as Flint, Michigan. The twist? It wasn’t a real city at all; instead it would be the fictional metropolis from the game.
You can trace it all the way back to 2011 and the original trailer for Dead Island. A huge success for publisher Deep Silver turned into a curse for Techland. It was a CGI trailer, played backwards, that had very little to do with the content of the game itself. But it put Techland on the map. Marchewka has been trying to recapture that bottled lightning ever since. He’s even floated the idea of doing it again - creating a trailer for the studio’s other games and playing them backwards.
Whew...these people seem like they’re ready to burn the building down
blue collar
