The last couple of days for Rockstar have seen the studio in the public eye for a wide range of reasons. While its highly anticipated Red Dead Redemption 2 is launching in just under a week, the developer has come under fire thanks to a comment from studio co-founder Dan Houser about the workload being placed on employees in the lead up to the game's launch. Now, one of Rockstar's studios is making the biggest change in the wake of the discussion of "crunch" in the industry.

According to anonymous sources, Rockstar Lincoln employees have been told any overtime work is strictly optional going forward. Rockstar Lincoln is a UK base for the company's QA department, which is tasked with fixing general bugs and issues for games such as Red Dead Redemption 2. While the studio has come out to say overtime work has never been considered mandatory, the aforementioned sources stated they were told overtime work was being requested of them, and were even being scheduled to work longer days by upper management, though  they could refuse to take on the extra work.

Rockstar did share data containing the requested amount of hours of work for day-time employees between October 2017 and August 2018, which averaged at around 52 hours per week. In the last few months leading up to next week's launch, hours requested to work have then increased to 57 hours. Night-time employees came in with a few less hours being asked to work, increasing the workload from 45 to 52.5 hours, respectively.

While the issue of crunch and overworking developers in the games industry looks like it has a ways to go, a high profile studio making this type of change should be a step in the right direction. Even with the majority of development for Red Dead Redemption 2 already completed, QA testing will continue to be an important part of the game going forward to make sure any lesser-known issues are fixed as soon as possible. Plus, Red Dead Redemption 2's massive download size is evidence there will be more than enough to do in terms of QA testing, and that's just for the single-player portion of the game.

Alongside Red Dead Redemption 2's giant single-player story, which takes about 60 hours to complete, Red Dead Online will also be launching in the coming months. If Rockstar plans to treat the Wild West multiplayer portion of the game as well as it has with GTA Online, the QA team based out of London will have much to work through on a day-to-day basis, which makes the studio's move to optional overtime more significant.

Red Dead Redemption 2 releases on October 26th for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Source: Kotaku