I had a manager who did this for me. Literally told me to go home when I was at the office late, or sick, or that one time I showed up on crutches. When I later took on leadership roles in the same company I kept up the same tradition. I’ve lost count of the ways this has improved my life, my workspace, and the quality of the stuff we work on. Sometimes leadership is about is to helping others recognize when they are overcommitting, or when they just need to take a break. Especially here in North America where the default is to believe that overwork is good work.
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I think something that we also fail to see is that the companies have all the statistics and live data that are telling them that the audience who complain the loudest are not playing the games. Listening to someone yell in your ear about a product they are not going to buy is a waste of time and there’s no need to take action on it. And we get in a loop with inaction leading to more reaction and youtube hot takes (That generate huge money for the take generator and if they also lean to the far-right. It’s easy to get young people in by hating on EA and then saying that EA puts in content “no one wants” like Women in FIFA to really get that hate train running)
At the same time I’m highly skeptical because I’ve seen threads full of people howling they work “100 hours” and developers should “Feel privileged” to work on an IP like RDR on twitter so the chances of this sticking feel slim when Rockstar are like Teflon.
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i’m trying to wrap my mind around a 100 hour work week. i can’t. i’ve been in places where i had to work, say, twelve eight hour shifts in a row without a day off, and i was pretty brutally frazzled towards the end. i wouldn’t work a 100 hour week for anything less than $20,000. cash
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I hear people saying not to boycott the game cause it invalidates all the effort the development staff are putting into the game
My only reaction is…
Nothing is worth working a 100 hour week. Not being a doctor in the emergency room. Not being a relief worker in a war-torn country. Not being a cancer researcher.
If I could strike Red Dead Redemption 2 from the face of the earth for even daring to think for even a second it’s in the realm of being worth having 100 hour work weeks, I would.
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Watching game devs drag Rockstar has been very cathartic.
“Crunch means management failed to plan and scope their product,” Phoenix Labs art director Katie De Sousa said. “I don’t understand why this is something people brag about. ‘Haha look at how shitty we are at estimating work! 100 hr weeks because we don’t know what we’re doing and don’t care about our employees! Buy our game!’”
The criticism of Rockstar even gained traction outside of gaming, in neighboring tech circles. Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson took Houser to task, saying, "Imagine bragging about pushing your workers to 100h+ weeks while also claiming to be proud of how sensible your work practices are.
Especially on a sequel to an original game that brought the families of workers to plead with management for leniency.
One thing I’m wondering about is how many of these posts by game devs are in self-interest. I think it’s basically like different companies telling EA during their microtransaction scuffle, “Yo, you are fucking this up for the rest of us.”
Is this devs saying, “Hey, you’re getting more and more people talking about games unions. Shut the fuck up.”
I’m sure that most of these devs, like the Night in the Woods guys, definitely have their people at heart when they say this stuff against Rockstar, but I wonder about the others… Cory Balrog is one of those game directors who talks a good game, but is it possibly God of War was made without crunch? Rockstar’s 100 hour weeks are easy to point at because they’re extreme, but what are they compared to as ‘normal?’
I dunno, just things to think about.
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I’m not sure an accelerationist lens is the most useful one to view these dev comments with. Is it possible they’re looking for a status quo of incremental changes? Definitely possible. Is it productive to say (edit: as a counter-point to incrementalist managers joining in this condemnation) “100 hour work weeks are actually good because it pushes unionisation” … erm, I’m really not sure that’s a good position to start from to try and gain insights into why other team leaders are speaking out.
This has been a rolling conversation going on for years and project/department leads have always talked about pushing themselves to the point of harm on projects in, let us say, conflicted terms. Here’s Clint from 2015 with an example of that (talking memory loss and endless 80 hour weeks):
Ye, so that’s something that you might read as a relic of how we talked about these thing over three years ago that’s actually talking about working conditions 13 years ago (and something the industry has attempted to address to some extent, as you can see in public reports such as the recent one from Sega on reducing overtime to under 20 hours a week). Or it’s another piece showing this sort of interview talk of work coming from self-imposed crunch being tied to pride in what shipped.
One thing that someone like @patrick.klepek might be researching for another piece or adding to the list of questions to ask at the next E3 of those interviewed on this topic: Do your European workers get asked to sign an opt-out agreement for the Working Time Directive? How much of the studio working on this game have typically signed such an agreement (either at the studio’s request or self-initiated)? Does the studio have the hiring latitude to fully comply with Article 6 of the WTD if all staff were to not opt-out (this means 48 hours is the legal limit for a work week and workers can’t exceed it as an average)?
Having studios on the record about that legal stuff (and insert various regulations from other regions, I primarily know EU labour law), even if many will dodge or even be unprepared to answer, would be useful for knowing what is the scale of the issue. We know Sega are slowly reducing overtime but we don’t know if they’re only moving them to 70 hours a month of overtime - which would still require their European teams (as many of Sega the publisher’s development staff are inside the EU) to opt-out of the legal protection against excessive overtime.
That’s not what I’m saying, though. I never stated I think the 100 hour work weeks are good, and I never have throughout this thread. Obviously, Rockstar’s moves here push for more Unionization, that’s just the effect of dropping a statement like the one he did. That’s the reaction. By no means is it good that these practices are happening, but this story has a lot of eyes on it both inside and outside of the gaming sphere.
That is attention a lot of devs probably don’t want just by sheer proxy. I think Jeff Gerstmann talked about this on the Bombcast, but when the Belgium government started to get involved with the Battlefront 2 Microtranaction scuffle, you can tell studios were looking at them basically with the mindset, “You are going to ruin this for the rest of us.”
I’m not agreeing with that mentality, I’m just stating that mentality probably exists, so I question how much these devs ACTUALLY care about labor practices. They scold Rockstar to make them seem like the outlier, and that this issue isn’t a universal one throughout the game development sphere.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that was what you’d literally said. Just that is the accelerationist reading of the situation (managers are self-interested and can only support incremental change, radical change will come through things getting so bad that radical change is forced). “These managers are trying to block more radical change” builds upon that reading and I’m just not sure there’s much value in reading developers commenting on this with that lens (based on the years of conversations around this topic such as the one I highlighted and the actual questions these leads could be asked as follow-up to quantify the issue in their own studios more clearly).
Development from the story in Kotaku, as the company’s HR has amended its social media policies. I have excerpted some below, but worth reading in full:
Typically, Rockstar tells all of its employees to refrain from discussing work-related matters on social media, but last night, the company’s HR boss sent out an e-mail to staff at several of the company’s studios saying they were allowed to speak up if they felt frustrated by the narrative that had circulated. The move has led current staff to share mostly positive things about their employer.
“In the time that I’ve been at the studio, work practices have definitely improved,” said Phil Beveridge, a coder at Rockstar North. “Crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2 has definitely been a lot better that it was on GTA V, where I was pulling a month of 70+ hour weeks (while being told by my boss at the time to go home…)”
“I have never worked more than maybe 50 hours a week (and that’s a rare occurrence), but I generally work about 2-6 hours of paid overtime per week,” said Vivianne Langdon, a tools programmer at Rockstar San Diego.
“I have been at Rockstar for two years, and worked on RDR2,” said Danny Bannister, a vehicle artist at Rockstar North. “I have never worked anywhere close to 100 hrs a week. There was some crunch sure but nothing ridiculous. We worked hard on the game but we weren’t being abused. I think the most I did on RDR2 was 60 for one week.”
(Just to conceptualize that, 60 hours would be five 12-hour days or six 10-hour days.)
“As a worker at Rockstar North, I should probably add my voice to the conversation going on around crunch,” wrote tools designer Tom Fautley. “We do crunch. I’ve not seen anybody forced to work 100 hour weeks, but I’ve definitely seen friends get closer to that figure than is healthy. I am asked, encouraged and expected to work overtime (both nights and weekends) when coming up to a big deadline. The most I’ve ever worked in a single week during my nearly-five years here has been 79 hours, but that was not recently.”
I have my own thoughts about this, but I do think the story is right to note one thing: that this move has led to a number of mostly positive stories emerging, the reasons for which are worthy of focusing on.
I think there’s a pro-Rockstar angle (the creation of which was the point of this policy change) which is that “oh, people are saying that it’s fine, so it’s fine”. While I do respect that and don’t want to discount these folks out-of-hand, I do think we should not, as some are, taking this as a good reason to sweep this under the rug. If absolutely nothing else, the only reason we have employees able to speak about their own working practices is because Rockstar feels like its reputation is under threat, which is happening because they’re being held to account of their history of crunch and overwork.
I’ll leave the thread open to further discussion about this, but felt it was worth noting that particularly.
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If a hypothetical employee had some dire stuff to spill about crunch culture at RS, but they still wanted to keep their job, I guarantee HR saying “naw it’s totally fine to talk about your experience” is not going convince them to talk, bar under cover of anonymity.
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As I said in the other thread on this topic, it’s definitely worth linking the increase in workers feeling able to (and having the HR nod to) openly discuss their workplace conditions with the pressure generated by the earlier news stories reporting on the interview.
Also oh wow (clicking through for some of the tweets that had 2-3 favs when they appeared on my timeline to now having hundreds). Hope everyone caught up in this is able to mute and ignore if they need it (as I said in the other thread, many of these R* workers are not Twitter-famous so are waking up to being boosted way beyond rendering-engineer-Twitter and finding a lot of new followers/interactions).
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This is part of what it comes down to for me – of course nobody is going to come out and condemn Rockstar too strongly. At most, you’ll slap them on the wrist – anything stronger is very likely to lead to consequences, informal or otherwise, in the workplace. Even if it doesn’t, the potential for it to do so is there.
This section from the bottom from Kotaku does give me some hope for a story to come out in the near future about this. I imagine it would not be mentioned if it was likely to be killed:
We’ve been looking into and reporting on workplace conditions at game studios for years now, and specifically Rockstar for a few months. For that story, we have been granting anonymity to both current and former employees in order to ensure they feel comfortable speaking candidly. We’ve heard a wide range of experiences and will publish the story when it’s ready.
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Apparently someone tried to interview a dev working for Rockstar India and mentioned it was to talk about management practices relating to work hours and crunch.
That dev deleted their profile.
Willing to bet actual negative criticism of Rockstar isn’t going to come from this policy change because every single person working there knows what the actual deal is.
Super Best Friends posted a bit from their most recent podcast on the issue, and I feel like their perspective is useful because Matt and Woolie used to work in the industry as testers and I believe Q&A (not entirely sure). I’m not sure about Pat.
They also point out that management is the core problem that crunch even happens at all in this industry, because management is supposed to be competent enough to avoid crunch, there’s a lot of poor management at these companies that need crunch, and management is ultimately the deciding factor on if crunch happens, which is why we see it just about everywhere.
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So, while this newest story is interesting and perhaps sheds light on new perspectives, I would wait for Shreier’s expose to come out. He apparently got ‘dozens’ of current and ex Rockstar employees to go on the record, and that is with journalistic protection.
These posts could be completely genuine, but they could also be fabricated to make the company look good too.
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This tweet thread is from a few days ago, but Scott Benson does have some very valuable thoughts to add to this discussion (which are helping to frame my above):
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I can say categorically that at least some of the highlighted posts are definitely genuine and not any sort of fabrication. They are posts by real people who have been part of the development community for some time. It is definitely not astroturfing or anything like that and these posts should be read as that: the views of developers expressed on social media.
As seen in some of the comments highlighting issues (79 hours in one week? Repeated mention of crunch as part of the company culture.) these are not just glossy pictures of working there. Sure, we haven’t heard from everyone but a level of suspicion regarding those who have spoken about this seems a bit excessive. It might be time to talk about that other topic, “why developers are reluctant to say anything (discussions both technical and otherwise) on social media because of the potential to blow up”.
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Sorry, I shouldn’t have said fabricated. I guess I mean… Not in good faith, perhaps?
I think it just comes with the program of people being like, “Yeah right…” When employees are asked to ‘speak their mind’ on their employers. You’re probably right, and we should take these at face value, but these are pretty soft ball responses, even the 79 hour one.
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I doubt these accounts are false, but I’m also sure anyone with significant complaints isn’t going to be making them because everything about industry culture teaches people to NEVER rock the boat or they will never find work ever again for the rest of their life in said industry.
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I’m honestly growing more and more skeptical of my decision to purchase this game on release day. I pre ordered from Best Buy so I had to put the minimum $5 down, but $5 is easily given up. I think I agree with Schreier’s point of “well if you want to boycott RDR2 then you can’t just ignore all other cases of poor labor practices in games”. But then how do you boycott most games largely and then as a weird backwards round about way not support and at least reward those developers who had to work on the game that much with at least your $60.
I’ll honestly probably wind up buying it but feel guilty along the way like I do with most things. It’s my main mode of operation.
like, to be sure, the people who made the game aren’t going to see any extra money from the sale. You aren’t really rewarding devs by buying the game.
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