I've actually decided not to purchase the game at release due to this.

It's no secret that some developers don't work under the best of conditions. However Rockstar is uniquely successful. GTAV still earns ridiculous amounts of money thanks to its online mode.

So the idea that someone at Rockstar needs to work 100 hour weeks is ludicrous. And the defense that only passion and a desire to make a better game is the only reason to work so hard is bullshit. A reasonable company would take care of and support their employees, not encourage them to overwork.

I have no intention of showing a company that's willing to borderline brag about 100 work weeks any of my money.

This is a double edged sword.

If you don't buy it because of this, then it means those people slaved away for nothing.

If you do buy it despite this, then it means you're granting credence to these despicable practices.

This seems like a lose lose situation from a morality standpoint.

No.

If employees/ex-employees feel like they have been mistreated it is on them to seek compensation. Not gamers that have no actual insight with regards to the working conditions.

Sucks for those that were forced or suggested to work that much. I wouldn't want to play it if I had worked on it like they did. However, if I'm being honest, it won't change my decision to play it. I just hope they were compensated for their time at work.

I've never been a huge fan of Rockstar's style of writing or open world design, so I wasn't really planning on getting Red Dead 2 either way. There's something really weird about this boast. Like, sure, I know the Housers want to say the writing staff is passionate about the game or whatever (and I'm sure some people put in those hours willingly), but it doesn't reflect well on your studio culture when you're dropping 100 hour weeks as a good number in any context.

That said, I think there's something kinda hypocritical about certain elements of the games press wholeheartedly condemning these practices and then likely spending the next several weeks talking about nothing but Red Dead in the most gushing of terms. I'd love to be proven wrong!

I'll be honest and say I get a little irked at people complaining about having gainful employment that typically involves sitting at a desk and not having to do backbreaking labor for menial wages. 100 hours is too much even for that, though, especially if it's a regular thing. Sounds like it was voluntary so a little harder to sympathize.

Greatness doesn't come easy.

Here's a more interesting question... if you choose to avoid RDR2 based on this information, how much have you thought about the other things you buy? Do you refuse to buy electronics made in China? Or clothes made in Bangladesh?

I can guarantee that working conditions in those places are considerably worse than at any game dev studio.

I stopped buying games on day one a log time ago and won't be doing it this time either. What's even worse in this case is that these employees probably need the game to sell a certain amount of copies or rank higher than some rank on Metascore to get a bonus. So it's not only the extreme work hours, but they don't even know if they will get their full pay.

Everyone should make their own decisions and if you decide not to play the game because of this, more power to you. But a consumer boycott in this situation won’t lead to any kind of tangible change. It has to come from within the industry, it has to lead to unionization and the fact that so many people are talking about this now is a good first step.

But I don’t think anyone should feel bad if they buy the game. In the end, the work is already done, a few less sales won’t hurt Rockstar at all. In fact, it may actually hurt the employees who could have bonuses tied to sales numbers. It’s a bad situation and in this world, there’s no such thing as ethical consumption. We all make our moral decisions here and there but no one’s hands can ever truly be clean. The best thing you can do is speak up where you feel it’s needed and when the time comes, support those fighting for better conditions in any way you can.

Others have already made very well written reasons I agree with. Basically, not buying the game for this reason feels more like adding insult to injury to those that have worked hard on something I’m sure I’ll enjoy. But also, it’s sort of in the hands of developers everywhere to try and fix this issue if they want it fixed. We can talk about it and voice our sympathy, but beyond that it’s not really our problem to solve.

@druv: @defordj: Yeah, this. Man, I get this not being a hill to die one for someone. And no one, at least in this thread, is accusing anyone of buying the game of being a monster. But damn, some of the responses that just completely lack empathy are awful.

@arbitrarywater: Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? This will get mentioned once on each site's podcast during the news section. Waypoint and Kotaku will run articles. Other than that? Reviews and livestreams for the next few weeks, and two months from now there will be more glowing praise during GoTY discussions.

Even when Waypoint chose "not to cover" Kingdom Come: Deliverance, they spent an hour talking about it on a podcast.

I remember, some years ago, there was a host on the Weekend Confirmed podcast who chose not to buy Black Ops 2 because Oliver North consulted on the game. As someone who avoids "realistic" modern military shooters altogether, I respected that decision, but thought it a strange to time to make that call, since CoD has long used former military personnel as advisors.

if you are soliciting others to use this opportunity to think more about their consumption habits in general, that's great! people could definitely stand to give even a tiny little dollop of shit about this stuff, and alternative, ethical options exist for almost everything.

if this is meant to bring into question the value in raising ire around this issue instead of others, that is a very uninteresting question. this kind of ethical apathy slippery slope logic is bullshit. you can make a variety of small (individual) efforts, but attempting to negate them by asserting that, because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, you as a consumer are absolved of any responsibility for your participation therein is how nothing gets done. if you are okay with just doing whatever because fuck it, that's pathetic and weak-willed but okay. but take your "ah but your mere existence 'harms' bugs and stuff and DRIVING uses FUEL what about THAT???" devil's advocacy crap and throw it in the trash.

Honestly, deciding against buying the game because of the (alleged?) poor working conditions won't really affect anything outside your own conscience. I consider it commendable to stick to your principles.

The sad truth is that these practices are not unheard of far and wide within the industry as a whole. Like other industries before this one, workers need to organize and stand up to demand better working conditions. It's hard and demands sacrifice, but it's really the only way.

I think it's still important to denounce these issues, but I doubt people in general will stop buying the game because of it. But we need to know the amount of work and sacrifice that goes into these games, so if in the future we get the news of the new Assassins's Creed being delayed because a whole studio went on strike over inhumanly long work hours, people will show support instead of sneering and keep scrolling down.

While I fully recognize damn near every product in my house probably came from questionable labor practices, I'm perfectly okay with taking a pass on Red Dead 2 for now. It won't affect me in any deep, personal way to avoid playing it, and given Rockstar's questionable antics in the past regarding bad management decisions and my own reticence about certain plot aspects of GTAV, I'm fine with playing a lot of other good games in place of this one. I have no qualms with anyone else choosing to play their stuff, but I'm good.

I also hope that those in the games media who seem to be the most irate about this choose to turn it into something constructive by maybe focusing their creative energies on games coming out around the same time, or other projects that might not otherwise see the light. Using this as a celebration of companies choosing to put their employees first might be a fun way to demonstrate it can be done.

I canceled my pre-order and will not purchase it at any point.

Effect my playthrough? Maybe during some downtime when I'm just riding around or taking it all in I'd think about all the crunch that went in to making it, and how rough that must have been. That's it. Same as with other games I'm familiar with that had crunch (or other shitty stuff around it).

Not really interested in playing this as it is, but if I were, this wouldn't dissuade me.

Also why you say Kojima-san but not honorific anyone else lol.

Humor. *shrug*

@xanadu: oh, hah. i thought you were just super into Kojima.

There's a tweet thread going around with games that were made crunch-free:

While I don't necessarily think that a boycott will be effective at all (or even the right way to go about instigating change on this issue) I do think that us as the audience are part of the problem when it comes to the hype cycle around games and the expectations that games are released at a specific time and look at least as good as the target renders that were released like four E3s ago. Polygon has a great piece up about how all this affects the actual people making games.

Also you pretty much said exactly what I'm thinking. I bought the original Red Dead Redemption not because I was a huge fan of it, but because I was all-in on the hype train of buying whatever the Next Big Videogame was back then. These days I have a lot less free time, so it's no big deal to me to give it a miss. I know that some people get super defensive of brands/companies in the face of criticism like this but I'm just glad that more people are talking about it. Nobody's life should be burnt out because of a videogame. It ain't worth it.

There's no way I'm not getting red dead but it does make me less excited for it.

It's not going to change my decision as to whether or not I want to buy it. Of course, my decision was already a "hard no" in the first place, so It's not like it matters much; I just plain don't like Rockstar games.

That being said, I don't think hearing things like this would ever have a huge impact on my purchasing decisions. Yeah, it sucks and I think game devs should absolutely unionize, but I guess I'm comfortable enough with my conscience to say that if a game appeals to me then I'm going to purchase it regardless. Unless it's tied up with some truly heinous shit.

@matiaz_tapia: It's an analogy, ofc it's not 100% descriptive. I was making a point about how it's all about planning. It doesn't matter if it's a super complex process that comes together as a big jigsaw puzzle in the end, if you plan for it you can avoid crunch. If it's some newcomer studio it would be totally understandable that they suddenly realize they have way more work left to do than they thought, but Rockstar has been making games for 20 years. There are plenty of other industries that work with just as (or more) complex projects and do completely fine without crunching periods.

I wonder if tieing bonuses to metacritic scores is still a thing nowadays. That news came out around 2012 when Obsidian missed out on their bonus for Fallout New Vegas by 1 point, and bonuses being tied to metacritic scores appeared in a job listing for Irrational Games, but that was before the age of streaming.

Nowadays, companies have all these avenues to control their messaging to the point where the whole game outlet - developer relationship is so strained that certain companies don't even bother supplying review copies anymore & have turned towards the influencers & streamers instead. Or they produce their own streams & vids. Making sure that your game is the top streamed game on Twitch and has viral gifs floating around on Facebook & Reddit; Having big streamers talk positively about your game. That is way more important than hoping that Gabe Gurwin from Digital Trends & David Silbert from Worthplaying are kind enough to score the game highly. Frankly, that would just be a poor way of measuring how well your product will do. After all, influencers like Summit1G, Forsen, Day9 & Shroud have a way bigger reach & more sway over the gaming population at large. On top of that, viewership between gifs, vids & streams is measurable in a way that the reviews on metacritic are not. That immediatly makes it way more interesting if you are looking for a bonus-tie in.

I feel like I'm the only one who actually read the article and it's subsequent explanation. Some of the responses here are a bit over the top.

There's zero excuse for a 100 hour work week. You would literally have NO time for family or friends ( really anything else for that matter), and it's very unhealthy. I know plenty of people who pull 60-70 hour weeks but no one who boasts about 100. Not saying those people don't exist but I find that very unlikely.

Re-read his post dude cos you didn't get his point and its obvious your post was about shitty planning & management but it seems a bit naive in context of PM & SDLC. The stats for I.T. projects finishing on time is really poor (something like 70% or more don't meet the deadline).

To expand on what he said. You can plan all you want but if you've planned a feature that should take 6 hrs to implement, but it balloons to 10 hrs work because maybe you got an unexpected bug (that you might have to spend time trying to fix or gather info for a report to your manager to plan the fix in the future), maybe some code you had to use was "dirty" code and it required fixing in order to complete your feature (which means testing the other references to that dirty code for regression) or testing took longer than expected, maybe there was a code merging conflict you had to resolve, you can't plan for that. On a massive project like GTA I can imagine how bad it must snowball. Too many moving parts. You can't just point the finger at planning and/or management. There's always more than one cause for a project going over or requiring crunch.

Is this all really bad stuff to hear? Yes. Am I going to abstain from playing a game I've been waiting for for years just to take a moral stance and vote with my wallet? I hesitate to say it, but no. I like the idea of waiting for 6 months and picking it up cheap, but I have another factor of my decision here. Red Dead is bundled with the Ps4 pro I preordered, so I'll be getting it at no extra price (the amount I'm paying for it is the same as a standalone pro) and I'm not gonna go cancel that thing now. With all that said, I totally respect those that choose to hold off on it.

I don't have a current gen console, and even if my pc had the power to play it, I'm not sure I would buy RDR2, after seeing how GTA online turned out (on pc).

Crunch sucks, it shouldn't happen, but it seems a reality of most AAA studios. You might be cutting off a lot of games if that's enough to make you boycott.

@rebel_scum: But after your fifth project where this stuff happens (as you say IT projects rarely finishes on time) you start to plan for it to happen. Unless there's an unexpected growth of these problems a good organizer should've figured this out. Even if the problems are increasing as the projects get bigger and bigger that's a trend you can plan around. If a company like Rockstar still plans their games by how long they ideally will take to produce that's just terrible leadership.

The more likely scenario is that they know they won't be able to finish it in the time allotted and crunch to deal with "unexpected" problems is part of the "plan" and "that's ok".

Some of the examples I gave you are constants of software development and aren't tangible things you can plan for perfectly. They will always be present as long as man will code. Does that makes sense?

If not, we'll have to respectfully agree to disagree. :)

it won't but i really hope all those workers get a massive bonus for the hours they put in.

Would love to see this kind of discussion for things that matter a little more than "over-worked" employees for a multi-million dollar studio in nicely heated/ACed expensive offices who are probably more than paid their share in compensation than fucking asian sweatshops that constantly manufacture all your phones, clothes and pretty much everything else. this argument is stupid.

@rebel_scum: I get what you're saying. You can't plan for the fact that your database got corrupted or some simple bug took three months to track down and fix or whatever. However, if you're constantly having these issues you can plan for 6 additional months of development "because of bullshit". After enough projects you should have a decent estimate of how much time is spent on the unexpected. And you should be able to make plans for how to adjust and deal with the consequences.

Also people just saying "no" to my thread are confusing the hell out of me. I didn't ask a yes or no question.

Agreed. Maybe you could have some discussion about it and there's only so much staring at a computer screen a human brain can handle, but acting like they're treated like savages is a little beyond the pale.

Saying this as someone who voluntarily-ish works about 60hrs/week on a regular basis (but I don't really have any family or friend commitments).

@therealshepard: other thing is worse so this doesn't matter.

Ok dude.

Some amazing geniuses in this thread who think pointing out the fact that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism is some kind of burn. People should be aware of the exploitation inherent to all production under this system, and even if being outraged of this example in our shared hobby is ironic and hypocritical, it's a step in the right direction towards a greater class consciousness.

So nah, I won't be buying the horse game about the stern wildwestman who takes No Gump and shoots real good.

I think people are ignoring the "How" part of this thread but I will say that I found you shruging off the part where he (Houser) explicitly says that he doesnt expect people to put in that amount of work and there being peer pressure to do so to be very presumptuous. I'm not saying I know for sure that he's telling the truth but acting as if it's a fact that he's lying also seems like a bit much.

@boozak: It definitely has to be presumptuous when you're trying to read in between the lines. No argument there.

@xanadu: I was going to write earlier that I’ve always hated the ”There are children starving in Africa, so one one else should complain about anything else ever” mentality, but a new account with one post just smells of stirring up trouble.

I’m going to buy the game myself, don’t think this will affect my possible enjoyment out of it.

@xanadu: Reading inbetween the lines =/= creating your own news based on nothing, alright.

I'm not saying this doesnt happen a lot but I find it hard to feel passionate about it when it does.

I work in tech, specifically in hardware and software development. We make new things. We're not just reinventing the wheel. Every single project I've worked on has been delivered later than expected and has cost more than originally budgeted. The clients who hire us as part of their development team are some of the biggest in the industry. Things happen. You can make out a six month road map and then add two months buffer time to allow for unforeseen issues and it's still not going to be enough time in some cases.

These aren't just "oh the database got corrupt" again issues. These are issues that don't have answers for you on Google or Stack Overflow. They're issues that take time to figure out, and solutions might cause further issues which won't be apparent right away. In hardware you get the added bonus of there being physical components that can cause problems. We've run into delays because a tsunami hit a country on the other side of the world and we expected components to ship from that location. Components that are irreplaceable and the customer demands comes from that manufacturer. Then that turns into a month long delay because the manufacturer has allocated the next months worth of product already for other customers.

In something like video game development, you want and need to allow the developers to get creative with ideas. If you want to cut development time shorter, you say no to every single new feature or idea they come up with. "We thought of an improvement to the UI, it'll take 3-4 weeks to implement fully and another few to test" - no you can't do that. Stick to the original and worse version of the UI. "We've found a way to improve loading times, it'll take an overhaul of the database the game uses, but it'll cut loading by 50% and improve the player experience" - negative, that'll put us behind schedule.

Crunch happens in lots of industries. It sucks. The video game industry seems to have it particularly bad and I wish they didn't, I wish no industry had it. It's not just the result of bad management and planning, although those will exacerbate the problem. It's what happens when you have to put a load of money into a project, put a deadline on that project and expect a return on investment. If you don't want it to go over scope, you never allow any improvements and you stick to the original planned draft and you likely end up with an incredibly terrible product.

@jesus_phish: As long as there are consistencies you can plan around them. You're the third person now to try to explain to me why you can't plan around these issues because they're too inconsistent, while at the same time adamantly stating how consistent it is that there are issues. I don't think I can make my argument clearer.

Hell, if it's so impossible to predict the development time of a product it's always an option to adapt the movie model and set release dates well after production would be over to avoid crunch.

@ares42: It is consistent that there will be inconsistent problems.

If it was consistent that there was consistent problems, then you could plan those in. "The database is dodgy, lets add another two weeks because the last five projects it ended up being dodgy and requiring that additional time" is something you could plan for.

Acts of god or experimental results on new projects/technologies/software/hardware development, you can add buffer time, but you cannot predict how long they'll actually take to resolve.

I cannot make that any clearer.

As for the movie industry

When I worked on feature films 70-90 hour work weeks was typical. Even with so many work hours in the week I have had to skip meals before due to ‘lack of time’ and cut back hours from my sleep. A usual film industry work day in the UK would consist of 12 hours with a one hour break in the middle. However this work day might not have counted in rigging and de-rigging at the start and end of each day and In my jobs case (continuity) I had an hour of paper work after wrap. This left many film crew members working 14+ hours every work day for 6 days a week.

https://www.amyclarkefilms.com/blog/film-set-work-hours

The crew call time was at 7 a.m. and we wrapped at 10:46 p.m. — fourteen hours and 45 minutes after subtracting our one-hour lunch break. And some had an even longer day: Our actors, including guest star Teri Hatcher, showed up for hair and makeup at 5 am, which meant that hairstylists and makeup artists, as well as someone from the transportation department and the set production assistant, also showed up to meet them and were there until wrap, giving them a total of sixteen hours and 45 minutes.http://www.vulture.com/2012/05/how-long-are-the-days-on-a-movie-set-polone.html

@the_nubster: Sorry to hear that my opinion is upsetting to you, you're right I have no empathy for the employee's situation as I've never worked in the game industry and would never work 100 hours a week for anyone/anything. Their situation is too alien for me to really empathise.

I do however have sympathy for them, I hope that they sort shit out so that they aren't expected to do work such long hours (unionisation seems like a goer) but that's on them to do for themselves. I just wanna play good games, people have to fix their own lives.

You asked numerous questions, at least a couple of which can be answered by yes or no. Also, I'm pretty sure that given the context it can't be too hard to figure out what those mean.

Anyway, crunch is not ok. I can understand it might be necessary in some very specific circumstances, but we've reached a point where it's now part of the 'culture' of very big companies and even has executives brag about it. This needs to stop. That said, it's really not my problem. There's only one party that can effect change if the management won't, and that's the workers themselves.

I support the bullshit being called out, but if a game's good I won't enjoy playing it any less. I don't buy games to 'support the devs', neither do I refrain from buying to 'vote with my wallet'. If a game appeals to me and I think it's worth the money, I'll get it. If that makes me a bad person... well I never said I wasn't one.