JakobFel: Some people on Twitter made a serviceable counter-point, though. With them shuttering Spokko (and The Witcher: Monster Slayer), as well as them effectively placing Gwent in an indefinite maintenance mode, they can reduce their team size from that. The problem is that I can't imagine the two games' teams had 100 people, even combined. Even so, why let them go? Why not add them to one of the main games' dev teams? "Overstaffing" for a company that's still going to take ages to release their games is not an excuse, in my opinion.
Darvond: Less than serviceable counterpoint: We know GOG is severely understaffed and could use new staff anyway. They could have filled all immediate roles and supplanted support staff or at the very least given them the option to transfer into GOG. That could have allowed maybe 25 people to remain close to the company with opportunity to transfer back in should things pick back up, and kept good will, instead of making further additional CDPR splinter groups.
I'm not business manager (as my personal view of the world would make such a position self-sabotaging), but I feel many of them underestimate the value of retention and especially the value of people who understand the internal culture of a development. Hades help you if you're someone who was trained on Kanban getting lead into the useless tyre fires of Agile.
I would have to agree. If CDPR wants to make more money, improving GOG is a great way to do that. They seemed to be interested in doing so but we've seen very little effort this year so far, sadly enough.
JakobFel: I can't imagine the two games' teams had 100 people, even combined.
Lexor: No way Gwent's core team had more than 10 people. And, by looking at the recent updates, it already feels like 1-2 people at max. The info about the changes in Gwent was released long time ago and I do not think it will play any significant role in the current wave of predicted layoffs.
My thoughts exactly, I was just offering what I saw mentioned on Twitter as a possible explanation. I don't think it's accurate. Gwent, even at its peak, probably didn't have more than 25-30 people on board. I'd also say Spokko probably never had more than that either, as Monster Slayer was a cool idea but most of the development was derived from Google Maps so I don't think it's likely that they needed much of a dev team.