Thanks for the great background, OP.

I won't support Rockstar's toxic work culture. $60 is way too much money going toward a massive company that has been exploiting in broad daylight for over a decade. There are so many other, more interesting games to support.

More generally, I don't see myself buying any games from their studios unless something drastic happens.

I was probably not going to buy it anyway, but this has put me in the "definitely not buy it"-camp.

As to what @fear_the_booboo writes here, he's right that voting with your wallet isn't really a good way if what you want is structural change. In some situations it can work, and I applaud you for doing it, but policing every company is difficult for consumers, especially with global supply chains and such.

Definitely vote with your wallet, but to really support change: support unionization efforts. Vote for the party or candidate that supports stronger unions, stronger work regulations, and a stronger position for workers so that they have the power to say no.

I'll still get it. I mean the majority of my clothes are made by asian kids in sweatshops so I lost my scruples a long time ago.

Unfortunately I think I fall of the side of "I am already a consumer of so many products every day who have horrible labor policies". I also don't think anyone knows the full picture, we know what the bad end of it would look like, but no one has an ironclad account of the real situation.

I had terribly long hours in a music studio working unpaid, and if someone didn't want to listen to the album because of that, it would make me feel worse that the hard work wasn't at least being enjoyed. Admitting that it's an issue is important, and I would appreciate the sentiment, but this is a sizable, far reaching, and overwhelming issue that needs to be addressed in other ways.

This all makes me feel much better about skipping RDR2 and buying Hitman 2 instead.

This problem is not particular to Rockstar Games or the development of Red Dead Redemption 2. It seems that most games go through unbearable crunch periods before launch, and people working in the industry are probably used to it by now, which is an unfortunate situation. But I know that even with good planning and maintaining schedules, big projects have a tendency to pile up a lot of surprises or need for polish when the deadlines start to loom.

Also, as others have pointed out already, when tackling poor work practices in the gaming sector I would first pay attention to the people lower down in the supply chain. The people making the hardware and especially those procuring the minerals for their construction are in much more perilous situations than the developers working in reasonably well paying jobs in developed countries. I'm not trying to say that toxic work culture in game development is not a problem or that the work stress of the developers is not important, but the media time these issues gain as opposed to the environmental or social impacts of the industry in a larger frame seems out of balance.

Does anyone know of some good examples of big game companies which have done crunch right? I think it would be healthy to bring these examples to the forefront during these discussions, to provide a way forward to teams and companies struggling to finish their games in a timely manner.

I've had to work nearly or over 100 hour weeks every now and then to finish projects or help with staff shortages many times in my working life. It can be very draining, especially if the situation becomes protracted. At least the people at Rockstar Games can, hopefully, feel that their work has gone towards a project that will be remembered for years to come and one which will bring happiness to a lot of people. A sentiment I've not exactly been able to share when stuffing children's feet into cheap plastic shoes during holiday sales or worse.

So, in short, these latest news and comments will not prevent me from buying and playing Red Dead Redemption 2. However, if an example of a developer whose work practices could set an example for other developers was brought to the forefront, it might persuade me to buy their game even if I hadn't considered a purchase before.

It's an ugly, bullshit situation and reflects horrendously on R* and on the industry as a whole, especially since they've been drubbed for this exact same issue multiple times in the past with nothing apparently changing. That said, I'm still picking up the game for several reasons, and if that makes me a shitty selfish person so be it.

Primarily, I've been going through A Lot Of Shit and depression in my life recently and the prospect of finally playing the sequel to one of my favorite games ever has been a big motivator in getting through the past few months. Since, as others in this thread have pointed out, boycotting really won't make any dent on these business practices since so much of this is an industry-wide (even society-wide) issue and depends largely on internal changes that we have no direct control over, making myself markedly worse-off mentally in service of an empty gesture seems to just be adding more misery into the world with no upside.

Additionally, I'm friends with a programmer on RDR2 and after the times spent talking about how excited I am to play it and how much he's enjoyed working on it (prior to the crunch time...haven't talked to him recently, for obvious reasons), it would feel like kind of a slap in his face and all the effort he put in not to play it.

I can't find a source offhand, but I've heard Bethesda Game Studios is pretty good about this. They have very low staff turnover, too.

Time to Unionize.

I couldn't blame anyone for wanting to play the game. It would be worse if all that hard work went to waste. But I don't think we, as consumers can sway the internal practices of a company, especially as the the demand for higher fidelity productions increases.

But, like most workers, they have the power to change it from the inside. A lot of courage and organization is necessary but I think they could make a positive change from within.

Insomniac Games is kinda the big exception - they frequently get named one of the best places to work in the US. That isn't a recent trend, either, that's something that's been going on for a long time now. Oh, and they're also one of the most dependable developers out there, delivering games with a relatively high frequency and most of the time hitting a high quality mark.

Otherwise, I can't really name any other developer that has been confirmed time and time again as a reasonable place to work. At their E3 conference, Bethesda showed a trailer of some of the people that work for... I think it was id software? Anyway, they seemed pretty happy to work there, but then that was a publisher patting itself on the back. Still, patting yourself on the back for providing a good place for your employees to work is infinitely better than patting yourself on the back for turning your employee's lives into a living nightmare because all they have time for is work, work, work.

Does anyone know of some good examples of big game companies which have done crunch right?

"Doing crunch right" is "not doing crunch at all". I understand that things sometimes go pear-shaped and you wind up having to crunch to get a project out, but the ideal and the goal should be that crunch isn't a thing at all. Instead, we have publishers and studio heads and other bigwigs bragging about ridiculous work weeks. That's bad. "Crunch" is a mark of management failure and nothing more.

Stories like this single-handedly pushed me away from ever wanting to develop video games professionally unless I can be part of a successful indie studio that isn't beholden to any publisher. Or Valve. Or Insomniac. The chances of that are slim to none, so I'll take a boring old steady decently-paying office job, thank you very much.

It's project life, like a ship build. Once that's up, you're wondering what you're working on next and if that next thing will bear any tangible fruit.

I'm on this planet for a few decades if I'm lucky, and then I'll die. If I see a game I want to play, I'm going to play it. I can't let shit like this get in my way. If that's problematic or callous...I don't care.

I use this phone that's made by people who don't have any right's! Works pretty well do! Turn's out we made this system where underpaying / not giving your employees any rights works pretty well for most of us, i know it's pretty shitty. But i am glad that at least there's some motion for more livable work life balance, we'll get there eventually i guess. At least the country where i life in got some solid "work regulation" so much that there's a big anti union movement building up in the population, it's weird. But yeah in the end a happy employer makes a better product.

I thought Dan Houser said that it was only a few workers who did that willingly? (including himself) Whether that's the truth or not who knows.

Either way as long as everyones getting paid (overtime etc.) it doesnt bother me.

I'll probably just buy the game used, although admittedly a lot of gameplay mechanics being praised in the media has already been dampening my interest in the game. So I might not buy it at all.

uh, it made me decide not to buy the game.

Honestly it won't effect my enjoyment at all. I empathize with the people who may have been overworked but I can't say that's on my mind when I come home from a long day at work and want to enjoy a video game.

I agree.

Realistically, voting with your wallet won't make a difference. Any consumer boycott will be like a bug splattered on the windshield of the speeding Mack truck that is this game: 100% inconsequential. It's out of the consumer's hands. The game development industry is going to have to self-correct.

Just going to throw this out there because I have not seen it in anyone's mini-manifestos, but I hope people realize that 100 hour week crunches exist to meet your expectations.

If you think this is an outrage, imagine if they where to miss the dead line. Worse even, if they where to cave to demands and change the deadline to placate the critics. I think the result would be nothing short of chaotic cannibalisation, metaphorically speaking.

Not at all. I don't see reason why should I care about it more than all the other companies and their working conditions.

They don't though. 100 hour crunch weeks exist because of poor planning and leadership. It's like saying someone staying up to 4am to finish some essay in high school happened because they were expected to deliver the next day. It didn't, it happened because they kept putting off until later. For a game that's been years and years and years in the making there's no reason why there needs to be a massive crunch at the end. This is an industry culture thing, nothing else.

I wish that I could object enough to not play the sequel to my favorite non-Metal Gear game of all time, but I think I'd need to hear more from the employees. I heard of similar stuff int he past, but if its truly just a 3 week period then I don't see this as that terrible. If its common practice throughout the year then thats unacceptable, family and life is always more important, but I liken this crunch time to a deployment of sorts. This is assuming that the statements regarding the duration of the crunch and lack of compulsion are true though. am i bad?

Awful working conditions didn't affect peoples love of the witcher 3 and it wont here.

I don't necessarily put onus on the consumer here but the fact people don't really care is part of the problem in a sense of there is very little consequence to rockstars actions here. The important part is that this conversation stays active even if you buy the game or not.

nah. if Im not playing this game Im not even going to engage with video games and websites like this related to covering them.

I'm not sure yet. I was already wondering why I'm not as excited for RDR2 as I thought I would be, and all this stuff seems gross. I'll probably wait until Xmas at least and see what's what.

Unfortunately I don't see any meaningful change coming from consumer-driven actions in this situation. Me not buying the game isn't going to change the work culture at Rockstar, and me convincing 300k other people to also not buy the game is unrealistic. Game devs need to unionize. I don't know enough to know exactly what that looks like, but current practices seem unsustainable.

i've worked 100ish hour work weeks as a software developer, and if a customer told me they wouldn't use software i worked on because i worked too many hours i would be very bummed.

edit: also, nothing could put me off working in the games (or any other software) industry more than the threat of unionization... most people that work in the games industry make enough money and have in-demand enough skills that job security is not an issue. i worked in a union for 7 years and i always felt like people were trying to micro-manage me and it was frustrating. now i have a salaried job, and i work longer hours, but i'm way happier. maybe just the perception of freedom is enough to make people happy, but i'm fine with that.

edit2: crunch is not a phenomenon exclusive to games, and it is not always avoidable, and it is not always because of bad management and planning. sometimes there is feature creep, or ambitious ideas are thought up mid development. planning can alleviate crunch time to an extent but it will always be there, and i have always found the hardest part of developing software not to be the actual work, but to accurately estimate times.

It has no zero impact on my decision. I will still buy and play the game and honestly, as mean or cruel as this will sound, two hours in I'll probably have forgotten all about their crunch until a talking head pops up on twitter or youtube to tell me more about it.

I have no problem with game devs getting better treatment. I have no problem with them unionizing. I haven't a clue why they haven't done it in the last 30+ years. Or maybe the world needs better labour laws. I have no issue with games taking longer to come out but I also understand there's a business aspect of it and at some point the people funding these games want their investment to be worth while.

People have pointed out Iron Galaxy as a studio who don't commit crunch. Their last game that was fully developed by them was Extinction. It was slammed for being under baked and dull and repetitive. It was also a full priced game, it in fact cost the same amount of money as RDR 2 will cost. Even without crunch, Extinction could've done with more time in the hopper. But it didn't get it because at some point it needed to be released to make money.

As others have said - I also work in software and hardware development. We've put 1000's of hours into products that the customer then turns around and decides they wont use. We still got paid for our work but it feels pretty shit to know that all that tech is now sitting in a warehouse somewhere with a blanket over it, never to see the light of day.

That is not how it works, sadly. The reductive answer is never really accurate.

A final build is a lot more complicated than homework. It is truly a monumental task to bring it to the finish line and people, like for most things in this industry, don't appreciate it.

Many people in the industry would blame it on periodic milestone demands from publishers, but the problems are myriad and change from studio to studio. Sometimes, yes, a producer fucked up the schedule. Tho in all honesty I'm not a programmer, I'm a concept artist and we don't crunch at the end of a project, we crunch between publisher milestones, so In part my perspective is second hand.

If I had to describe it tho, it would be a kin to making a puzzle, where different departments build the pieces on the own, testing them periodically and then assembling it all together at the end.

The biggest reason it is so it's because it's not one linear task, its a ton of multidirectional tasks that have to come together into something that functions. If you where to keep it to your homework analogy, it would be like trying to get everyone's homework, from different schools and make a book out of it. In order for that to work, you do need to wait for everyone to finish their assignments...that's why there's such a rush at the end.

Disclaimer, nothing I'm saying justifies abuse. But it helps the discourse to not underestimate or simplify a complicated problem. it's definitely not homework and it's definitely not something you can sum up to a single word.

I was kind of already on the the side of buying it, but after reading some of the responses in this thread I'm definitely...probably going to buy it.

To everybody saying "well, I already buy a lot of things produced under likely horrible labor practices" — every bit helps. You don't have to be perfect. Nobody is, and perfectly ethical consumption is impossible. But you — we — can try for something better, one decision at a time.

I like that they consider that stat brag worthy. They seem like an awful company to work for. But I also own Apple products and they are awful too. And, for that matter, there are probably countless products and services I use that enforce awful business practices. So it's hard for me personally to fall down hard on one company when the problem is systemic in nature. Also I'm a hypocrite and will gladly enjoy services/products despite what I know and assume (rightly or not). But at least I'm aware of the hypocrisy, so there's that? I mean, the alternative is to live off the land and not engage with modernity at all and I don't see me doing that.

It's interesting enough that you said this, because Schreier himself said he was already working on a piece about the working conditions of Rockstar.

I have a huge stack of games in my pile of shame. I won't miss this one.

It's probably not much different from most other games. Maybe not to that extreme, but still more hours than should be allowed.

I will hope that things change in a way that Rockstar employees can be happy with if they are interested in such change, but I can't sympathize too much. This is how our world economy is currently set up and I would love for it to change but I find game developers to be in a pretty cushy position. My industry, bars and restaurants, also has crunch built into its infrastructure, but our crunch is random rather than expected and our crunch leaves many of us with addictions to alcohol or drugs, severe anxiety and many other conditions that come with an industry that demands you give the same level of service to a MAGA hat wearing, loudly buying $150 bottles of wine, party of fifteen group of assholes as you would a group of broke ass college students attempting to have a nice double date but unable to afford to tip appropriately as you would the three people at the bar that just want to see what you'd do with some bourbon and an amaro and are overly generous with their time and money at the end of the night.

I fully recognize that I see things from that perspective having done this for over ten years, but I also fully recognize the ego reward and the camaraderie that comes with polishing even one of those shifts off, let alone a conference weekend when thousands and thousands and thousands of people descend upon your city for a weekend and you do the amount of work and sales in four days that you'd normally do in nearly a month. And the sort of secret sauce that all those people will have come through our place and had a good time - some will have not, and they will likely Yelp about it while the ones who enjoyed themselves won't because that's the way the world works - but missed exactly how fucking hard it was for us to get through and enable that good experience for them and we just have to ignore that that's the case and push through anyway. I imagine video game development is very much the same, except that it comes with guaranteed income and health benefits and at least some indication of time off or paternity/maternity leave, whereas this industry's pay is completely non-guaranteed and any form of insurance is purely a personal investment and taking time off for any occasion is a choice to spend money without making money for that period of time.

So I recognize that the people who make my life hell - and make my life possible, in terms of wages - don't usually recognize that their expectations weigh heavily on myself, my coworkers or my managers. Just as I recognize that in turn I will listen to an album, or watch a movie, or play a video game and not think too much about how much sweat equity or emotional labor was put into it. If people want to talk about it, I will listen, and I genuinely wish that creative industries could find ways to provide more comfort to their employees than they currently do. But at the end of the day the art is the art for me, as I've realized it is for most people, and I'm still going to eat the pork secreto if it tastes as delicious as it does whether the chef in the back is on his second hour or his twelfth.

Honestly it won't affect my enjoyment of the game. I don't think I can conceivably not play this game because of the working conditions. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to play many games because it sounds like this isn't exclusive to Rockstar.

I have my own reasons for not being bothered by this (the main one being that I don’t remotely believe anyone regularly worked 100 hours per week), but if it were me, and I did actually put that much effort into a project, I’d be pretty pissed if it turned out to be a failure.

I will be doing the same thing I do with most Rockstar games - eventually buying it on all available platforms.

It won't, at all. I will buy the game as soon as I am able, I will play it, I will enjoy it, I will get my fill of it, and then put it down, as I have all the other games made by RockStar over the years.

The thing is, not buying the game doesn't hurt the people responsible for the bad practices and work environment. My single purchace, or lack there of, isn't going to hurt anyone actually but even a mass boycott would only hurt the people lower down. They would suffer greatly and unfairly long before it even caused the people at the top too bat an eye-lash.

Is the working environment at games companies an important topic to be worried about and actively try to combat? Yes. Does that mean I shouldn't play games? No.

And really, if your willing to not play a game for practices like this, you should be giving up essentially all games. AAA games get made this way, every major company that produces games functions in this way or with similar, equally important, issues. Even Indie games made by a few/one person suffer from working over-time or issues related to little guy in a pond with big fish kinda issues.

I'm not trying to discredit people whom decide not to buy RDR2 because of this. To each their own. I personally just feel like it makes no sense to Boycott this game, just because its getting tons of coverage and so the bad stuff related to it has come out, when I am aware of similar issues related to just about every game I own/have ever played.

I have to draw the line somewhere. Also, unrelated but reaching a similar conclusion. My empathetic and anxiety/worry filled brain is already spinning enough plates of concern when it comes too the world today. The last thing I need is to take one of the few mechanisms I have to unwind, relax and recover my sanity and turn it instead into another spinning plate of the "This actively takes away from my life, but there is nothing I can do about it". variety.

I would be more moved by these publications commentary on the plight of the workers if they were not going to spend the next month covering the game, its release, the subsequent DLC and the months of online bullshit. I guess it is ok to make money off of these peoples backs after the fact, just not during.

Was it not clarified that he was referring to the 4 key writing staff, himself included?

I know myself and others that have worked ridiculous long days / weeks at jobs due to being passionate about it, none of it was forced. If he is talking about 4 key (and likely very well paid) members of staff that seems similar to a band talking about spending "Entire Days" in the studio to record their new album. A passion for the craft.

We know there are issues at Rockstar and other companies in the gaming industry with regards to working conditions / hours and it for sure needs to be addressed. But to base a discussion on this out of context quote seems.....odd.

This is very true! No one has the energy to be the moral arbiters of every good they consume, and we shouldn't be expected to! As long as we support things that create a more equitable system! If, at the voting booth, you support policies that structurally give employees more power (economic security, support for unions, labor and environmental regulation), I don't think you have to be ashamed of not being a perfect consumer (because, again, no one is).

As disheartening as the workplace culture at Rockstar seems to be, I haven't cancelled my pre-order and I don't plan on doing so. I love the games they put out too much to speak with my dollars on this. Crunch culture isn't exclusive to Rockstar, unfortunately: most developers probably use it in some capacity since it's been an accepted practice for decades. It's an industry-wide issue that needs to be fixed. Developers deserve much better treatment than they receive. The sooner they can unionize, the better. But the most likely result of a Red Dead boycott would be a lot of people losing their job, not getting better benefits from their bosses. I'm not sure there is anything we can do from the consumer side of this transaction other than point out the problems and say "This shouldn't be happening".

It won't affect my purchase one bit how many hours the staff worked. I littarly couldn't care any less if they worked 25 hours a week or 100 hours a week. However, I can not for the life of me see how anybody could be forced to work 100 hours a week. Like I'm talking legally here. Arnt there laws in place for stuff like this? Surely you can not get sacked for not working 100 hours??? I know if my employer said I had to do 100 hours or else I'd tell them to fuck right off and I'd try to sue the shit out of them if they fired me for it.

Which is probably why most people will buy this game without that much heartache because as shitty as it is to hear about the people working at Rockstar, there is quite a big difference between working 100 hour weeks in an air conditioned office building with full medical coverage etc, and working 100 hour weeks in a factory line making cents on the hour with little hope of the hardship helping you move on to something better.

damn, its almost like you're proud of how little you understand this subject

@kcin: eh? Why on earth would I be proud about anything and how do you deduce that? I have no idea about shit like this I just know I wouldn't let it happen to me. Is that Ok?