I'm probably running against the grain here but in my opinion, I find Jason Schreier's reporting to have a sanctimonious tone to it.
"A critical flop might help show Naughty Dog that this isn’t the best way to make games, that this level of sacrifice isn’t necessary, that maybe the project isn’t worth losing all of these people. That perhaps, no matter how many Game of the Year nominations they win or how high their Metacritic scores climb, all the individual hairs on Joel’s eyebrows or the grains of sand in a burlap sack just aren’t worth the cost."
Ok thanks Jason! You go and project manage a world renowned video game and tell the world how its done 'properly'.
That being said, the bulk of his reporting on the Last of us 2 appears to me to be balanced and he does a good job of explaining the competing aspects of crunch about the joy of a project, the creative freedom for those developers, the team mentally of pushing through on such a highly crafted project like the last of us 2 against the obvious downside of persistent hard work over a period of time.
I can understand the frustration of game developers who have worked really hard to create something so awesome only to end up in a conversation about how exploited they are. Crunch isn't good, but its not solely bad either and my criticism of Jason is that his reporting begins to identify the complexities of the issue but just reduces it to 'I hope they have a critical flop so they learn their lesson'. - then suddenly the studio is getting hammered on twitter.
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