This week, Red Dead Redemption 2 developer Rockstar Games came under fire when comments made by co-founder Dan Houser led to renewed concerns about the studio's "crunch culture".
Although Houser later clarified that only he and the other developers in the four-person narrative team had worked 100-hour weeks, the comments were enough to spark backlash on social media.
Following the controversy about the way that Rockstar Games makes its games, the company has now lifted its social media ban, allowing its developers to discuss their time working on Red Dead Redemption 2. Vivianne Langdon, a tools programmer at Rockstar San Diego, tweeted:
Phil Beveridge, a senior code content designer at Rockstar North also tweeted:
Another Rockstar developer to tweet about crunch is Rockstar North tools designer Tom Fautley who said that while some colleagues have gotten "closer to that [100 hours in a week] than is healthy," no one has been "forced" to do so. Moreover, Fautley added that "I am asked, encouraged and expected to work overtime (both nights and weekends) when coming up to a big deadline." Fautley is "happy enough" to be working at the studio but thinks it "should be better."
Understandably some are skeptical about the tweets coming out of the company. The internal Rockstar memo lifting the social media ban reportedly said that employees don't need to "sugarcoat" anything when tweeting about the studio's working conditions. But employees may also be biased towards speaking positively about Rockstar for fear of retaliation.
Moreover, Rockstar is a very big company with teams all over the world and these tweets only represent a fraction of experiences at the studio. This means that some may well feel overworked or pressured to crunch but it isn't reflected in the social media posts.
There are also raised eyebrows given that these tweets directly contrast the experiences tweeted by ex-Rockstar developers in the last few days. The infamous "Rockstar Spouse" letter from 2010 in which the partners of Rockstar developers slammed the working conditions at Rockstar Games has also been on many people's minds.