Programmer - "Game Maker" - Overly Analytical Enthusiast
By Yahoo Silverman
On December 10th the official Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter account posted a tweet celebrating one year (365 days) since the launch of the title. The tweet was met with both praise and disdain of varying degrees. One comment that stood out from the rest was that of DarkFlameMaster (pictured below) stating “this game is trash. lazy f***** devs and a garbage engine. I could literally do a better job. kys.”. This tweet was recognized by the official Cyberpunk account who passed what is now seen as a résumé to their superiors at CD Projekt until it reached the desks of Chief Executive Officers Marcin Iwiński and Adam Kicinski.
Blown away by DarkFlameMaster’s bold approach the two CEOs bypassed the usual interview process and immediately brought this in front of CD Projekt’s Board of Directors who took very little convincing before they agreed to offer the angry Twitter user the position of project manager for Cyberpunk 2077.
The Twitter user claimed he was not surprised by this decision and decided to accept CD Projekts offer. Additionally, once made aware of this decision, shareholders were skeptical over CD Projekts decision to hire what they now know is a 19-year-old gamer from Wisconsin that has never held a position in the software development field, let alone one as the project manager of a big budget game production.
In the weeks since their decision, CD Projekt has spent the equivalency of $25 million licensing Epics Unreal Engine 5 as DarkFlameMaster claims it to be “the best, I mean have you seen that YouTube video. It looked so good. We are moving Cyberpunk there and it will look and be better instead of bad on their bad engine. It will be a whole new game”, however the new project manager was unaware that engines were not simply interchangeable and has mandated 100-hour work weeks to get the project back on track. What the new project manager also did not realize is that Polish law requires all overtime to be paid regardless of an employee’s salary status, and that by claiming the re-launch to be “a whole new game” CD Projekt will have to pay licensing fees for all music in the game again. These decisions alone are estimated to cost CD Projekt an additional $20 million.
Recently, roughly 40% of CDPR’s developers have left their positions within the Polish publisher/studio and we had a chance to sit down with the now former lead engineer who left her position with the company just weeks after the new project manager took hold. I asked what could possibly cause her to leave CD Projekt after nearly a decade, she told me “we told DarkFlameMaster that although most of the games scripts were written in C++ we would need to re-write thousands of scripts when moving to the new engine, not to mention the fact that most of our team has sole familiarity with the Red Engine and that this entire process will be extremely difficult given the time frame” she went on to say “he told us that if we want an A+ game then we shouldn’t be using C++ and demanded that we work every day until it is done. After about a week he complained that he was exhausted and needed a vacation and that is when I said ‘pieprzyć to’ and left.”
As of writting this, CD Projekts stock is down 68%. I reached out to DarkFlameMaster for comment, he called me a cuck and hasn’t responded since. Will he be able to turn this all around? We will have to wait and see.