“It’s shit” - 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".
Speaking to Marchewka by email, he says this incident “touches on a very important issue” for Techland, which is trying to improve its communication standards.
“Our job, in a nutshell, is to invent and iterate,” he explains. “When we're in the inventing phase, we have lively discussions with each other, clashing different ideas and opinions. Therefore, I can imagine that in a tightly-knit team such words could have been said. Nevertheless, this is not our standard and those phrases do not meet our criteria in any way. We always remind our employees to make sure they communicate appropriately.
“Techland takes the welfare of our staff seriously and we are always evaluating ways that we can learn and improve - that is the key to long-term success. We expect all our employees to set a good example and treat others the way they would expect to be treated themselves. To support that, we are starting a series of different training sessions [this year], including with specialists from outside our organisation. It is important that all of our employees know that we do not discriminate against anyone based on gender, colour, or sexual orientation.”
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!”
“This situation happened a few years ago and clearly words like these are inappropriate,” Marchewka says. “The person who is responsible for these words was reported to our Human Resources department and swift action was taken to ensure it didn’t happen again. We have a strong representation of women at Techland and we want them to feel supported at all times.”
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.
“
The photo in question is by a famous English artist and conservationist David Yarrow, who I appreciate for his artistry, passion, and dedication to work, and I had never considered that it might offend anyone,” Marchewka explains. “I find him one of the best if not the best wildlife photographer. That's why I hung it in my office. But I want to make sure I set the right example so if any of our employees, anonymously, report that they feel uncomfortable with it I will remove it immediately.”
While the offer to ensure his staff are comfortable is surely welcome for the hundreds of developers at Techland, you might find it difficult to report a concern about your boss when the HR manager is his wife.
Techland’s CEO originally hired his wife, Aleksandra “Ola” Marchewka, to handle interior design and construction for the company’s new offices. Before Techland, she was a freelance legal consultant, according to her LinkedIn profile. After two years as a consultant, she became the only female board member at Techland. In February 2020, she took on the role of acting chief HR officer - according to her public work history, without prior experience in HR. Does Marchewka consider this a conflict of interest?
“No I don’t,” he tells me via email. “My wife is a professional and we have a professional relationship at work.”
According to my sources, Aleksandra Marchewka is a friendly, approachable person, but her relationship with the CEO makes it hard to come to her with work-based concerns. On the flip side, she also has the CEO’s ear, and people can sometimes use that to their advantage. Convince Aleksandra Marchewka of your idea, and she might be able to convince her husband for you. Elsewhere in the company, Pawel Marchewka’s sister is head of international sales.
Just like those familial bonds in upper management, the CEO’s influence can be felt across almost every department, from the story team to art, and even marketing.
Marchewka is an ideas man, and he had some ideas to promote Dying Light 2. One plan was to drive an unmarked van down to the Mexican border and offload a pile of body bags, sparking a macabre ARG that would eventually reveal itself to be part of the game’s marketing campaign.
“In search of original solutions during brainstorming, we come up with a variety of sometimes crazy or simply impossible ideas,” Marchewka tells me. “Some of these ideas serve only to separate the imagination from limitations, and to be able to come up with unconventional and original concepts, and from there we will critique and evaluate the ideas presented. But it’s clear our team would not execute an idea like that.”
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.
“This is an idea that came up during the creative brainstorming session,” Marchewka says. “I support a working environment where everyone is free to suggest ideas and not every idea is a good one, and most of them will never see the light of day.”
So, who acts as the buffer between these ideas and their execution? Łukasz Janas is Techland’s new creative director of marketing. He joined the company from Kinguin, which is like a smaller G2A-style operation - a PC key reseller that’s extremely disliked in the Polish games industry. When he first joined the company around May 2020, the team was hopeful.
With limited knowledge of the games industry and the global market as a whole, that hope was short-lived. Many team members are of the opinion he doesn’t have the experience for the job. From an outsider’s perspective, you can see a decline in quality on the company’s Facebook page, with
gaudy Cyberpunk 2077 congratulation graphics and
a post that misspells “Christmas”.
“[There’s] the general consensus in Techland that marketing is not doing much and seems incompetent,” one source tells me.
“When projects do not move forward, you look for new solutions,” Marchewka tells me about his decision to hire Janas. “For many years we had been lacking a creative director that our marketing and PR needed. By employing Łukasz, we have gained a leader who strengthens the team, points it in the right direction, and has ambitions of a very high level of quality. From our time working together so far, I can tell that he has brought freshness, new solutions, and ideas to Techland.”
Of course, the problems at Techland run deeper than marketing - Janas is just a symptom of another issue. “The fish rots from the head.”
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.
Marchewka wants to work with the best people in the industry, and so the studio constantly hires new experts. Presumably, this also helps to refill the ranks, since staff turnover is high - in the past couple of months, at least 20 people have left Techland, a studio of 400. That’s five percent of the workforce. Over years, the churn is much worse.
“Techland has a history of hiring people for which the team had ‘high hopes’, but it ended up in nothing,” a source explains. “One such case for the designers was the hiring of Marc Albinet, a former game director from Ubisoft, that was supposed to restructure how design is done in the studio. Even he, a veteran with 30 years of experience, couldn't break through upper management that is harder to change than the spin of the fucking Earth.”
“Whenever an expert starts advising things that are not aligned with the board’s agenda, they slowly get isolated from the project and responsibilities,” another source tells me. “That leads to them leaving or eventually getting fired. To make a career at Techland, you have to be subservient.”
According to Marchewka, the high staff turnover is just a natural aspect of triple-A game development. “We have been operating on the market for 30 years and many of our employees have been with us for a long time,” Marchewka says. “Making games is tough and it is normal that sometimes there is a need to change the workplace and look for new challenges. I am very sorry that some of our employees left us and decided to find their way outside the structures of Techland but I’d always wish them the best.”
Multiple sources tell me about a cult of external consultants. They claim Marchewka trusts outsiders more than staff, and often brings outside experts into the fold. Once they’re Techland employees, there’s a grace period of a couple of weeks where their ideas are still listened to - but that trust, too, soon dissipates.
Paweł Zawodny worked as a software developer at Techland for ten years before moving into a role as chief development officer, which he held for nine years. He and Marchewka had a high-profile falling out because Zawodny wanted to introduce a traditional development pipeline to make the company’s workflow easier. After the arduous work was completed on the first Dying Light, the unanimous sentiment at the studio was: “we can’t do that again”.
The chief development officer wanted to let developers iterate within widely used game engines like Unreal or Unity before introducing those changes to the studio’s proprietary engine, Chrome Engine 6. Marchewka wanted everything to go through Techland’s own engine. “It slowed everyone down and that frustrated everyone,” says one source. “He would ask why people aren’t working faster and it was because the tech isn’t up to speed. We can work faster, but we have to go here, and you’re not allowing us to go there. The experts know what the goal is, and they should be allowed the flexibility to do what’s best.”
“Techland has its very own way of producing games,” Marchewka says. “With each title, it is constantly adapted to the needs of the project, the size of the team, and other aspects affecting our work. I think that is what most companies across the world do.”
Zawodny had brought in consultants who mapped out how things work at studios such as EA and Ubisoft, but many of their suggestions to improve workflow were rejected. One of the things that came up during that time was that the CEO can’t be involved in every milestone check meeting.
“The person trying to implement it was blocked at every corner,” one source tells me. “They had a huge falling out. He went on leave for three months and never came back.”
Marchewka sees the situation differently. “Together with Paweł, we worked to improve the development process, following the example of other studios creating triple-A games,” he explains. “It was and still is very important to me. This work continued until Paweł decided to leave Techland and it still continues today.”
Zawodny went on to found his own studio, Strange New Things, which was acquired by CD Projekt Red shortly after.
"After decades of creating titles that were dictated by so-called market demand, [we] all reached a point when we decided to do something different - something that comes from ‘us’,”
Zawodny said in a telling statement at the time. “We also felt that the way the industry giants work is outdated. We want to adapt to a new way of working and fostering teamwork - an evolutionary approach described as Teal - where there are no predefined hierarchies or roles. It’s time that we change the industry from the inside."
The current method of workflow in Techland is “a production pipeline that changes so quickly and rapidly that it might as well not exist,” according to one source. Techland has hired more producers to bring some kind of order to Dying Light 2’s production, but the old guard blocks anything the new blood attempts to implement.
“What's also strange regarding producers is they have a say in design,” a source explains. “They cannot hold the pipeline or milestones together, but they [have] time to redesign or argue about design.”
Kaksi toivetta kehittäjille; julkaisu mieluummin alkupuolella vuonna 2019 kuin loppupuolella ja Xbox One X enhanced-parannukset kehiin, kiitos. 
joko on kuopattu lopullisesti
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