Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: Rockstar Crunch

The topic regarding work conditions and benefits for employees has been hot among video game industry-related discussions years now, but it’s become even hotter in the last month. Pin that on how Telltale Games unceremoniously laid off their employees after their financial hurdles reached a ceiling, resulting in the release of all the developers outside a small skeleton staff. It didn’t take long for several employees to hit social media to discuss the poor work conditions, which included the dreaded crunch time and the number of them who didn’t receive severance pay for the hours and hours of overtime they put in. It’s highlighted just how bad work conditions are at several gaming companies.

Worse, Telltale subsequently laid off the remaining splinter staff after they presumably finished work on Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix. While they’ve confirmed that The Walking Dead‘s Final Season will finish after all with Skybound Games, details about the relationship are still very preliminary. There’s also no word on whether the new team will be paid well for their work, but hopefully they are.

With these discussions happening, this definitely wasn’t the time for any company heads to talk, let alone brag, about crunch culture at their company. A shame someone didn’t inform Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser of this while discussing Red Dead Redemption 2’s development. In a feature for New York Magazine, Houser mentioned that several in the company have been working 100 hours a week in the months leading up to the game’s completion. While this is unfortunately common among in the game development world (and in the overall tech industry), it rubbed people the wrong way upon realizing Houser wasn’t criticizing the practice. He used this to brag about how polished the game will be as a result.

This set off a firestorm of criticism about how overworked employees are for game development crunch periods; doing the math, this amounts to Rockstar’s staff working around an insane 14 hours a day. Given the Telltale testimonies described above, this was insensitive at best. It’s sadly been the case at Rockstar for a while. Crunch time was so insane in the lead up to Red Dead Redemption’s release that the spouses of several Rockstar San Diego employees wrote a joint letter complaining about the long hours their husbands had to work, and how some of their benefits were cut alongside that. This issue, clearly, was never fixed.

After discovering the bad press, Houser provided a response to Kotaku when asked. He claimed his comment was “related to how the narrative and dialogue in the game was crafted,” and that he was only referring to four people who habitually do this in the final weeks. But the aforementioned letter shows how crunch time doesn’t only apply to a few people, though Houser notably didn’t say there aren’t other employees working 100-hour weeks.

Former and current Rockstar employees have also chimed in, with one saying they had to quit working there despite tolerating long hours at companies before, and a current QA member saying she was currently working 80 hours (she later locked her account). There’s also a thread documenting the crunch culture that occurred during LA Norie’s development, and while that game was only published by Rockstar and developed by Team Bondi, Rockstar was involved in this tale. The RDR2 development has likely gone through a rough time, and other members of the team are still going through it, given that the Online component isn’t completed.

Meanwhile, Jason Schreier, who wrote the Kotaku article, is currently collecting a fair set of interviews for an article about crunch culture at Rockstar among both former and current employees. It should be a good, if sobering, read.

It’s worth noting that employees won’t get any benefits from working overtime, thanks to most game industry jobs being salaried positions. Houser also said “no one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard,” but “forced” has several layers. If any employee had to, say, work overtime if they wanted to keep their benefits, that wouldn’t completely fit the definition of “forced” since they don’t have to take those benefits. But bosses often know employees will work for them, so they often don’t have a real choice. It’s a devious “decision” for employees, and employers keep getting away with it.

All this news makes me feel a little bad for posting about how incredibly polished the game looked from the gameplay trailers and details from the previews, despite mentioning how it could be the result of overworked employees. It’s not an assessment I wanted to be accurate, despite the high likelihood of it. There’s a good chance they’ll be proud of the work they did here, but they won’t look back on the entire development experience positively.

It’s tough to imagine the gaming industry shifting away from crunch culture given how ingrained it is with so many developers, but even if a goal seems insurmountable, it’s still worth striving for. Red Dead Redemption 2 will release for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 26th, one week from Friday. It could be difficult for some of us to look at the remaining advertisements, let alone play the game knowing the figurative lives lost on it. The launch trailer will arrive tomorrow.