Not a surprising behavior for a CEO or someone in high position. Reading through those documents was rough, I hope the developers can properly recover.
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Twitter: "All Aeon Must Die devs quit the studio this week after crunch and not getting paid, the trailer was outsourced"(UP: Actually quit June 22th)
- Thread starter AuthenticM
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Why is Focus speaking as if they need to investigate? According to this, they've known about this and have had all of the materials all along, and it was also Focus which greenlit pushing out the trailer for the State of Play:
The devs even seem to have audio receipts of conversations with Focus's legal team....
If true, Focus knew they sent Sony a trailer which included work made by unpaid workers.
The poster hasn't actually given any practical steps that they would take other than a hand-wavey "check the health of people" and "check IP".
Still, at the very least this would at least involve interviews/surveys with some percentage of the staff at said companies and reviews of source code / art assets etc. This in turn would require lawyers and NDA's across multiple entities. Checks like that are an unreasonable expectation for doing business at this level (i.e. some minor marketing) in any field - it's time and cost prohibitive. It would be like doing a full MOT on your car before nipping down to the shops.
Sad to say it, but the mistreatment of the employees will get no traction legally for any kind of justice against the CEO, but THIS most likely will. Someone should ping the legal department of all Adobe etc... about this game made with pirated SW and it will never see the light of day, not to mention the fine they will make the dev and publisher pay.
Really fell bad for the devs. Also what other companies I buy games from are not pulling this kind of BS and I don't even know. This industry is really screwed up.
I totally understand that, just wanted to offer my two cents on "healthiness". This is a sensitive subject and an exploding thread so sometimes shit goes sideways with misinterpretation.
In the software realm, videogames are often huge projects that require teams made up of a variety of technical and creative skill sets. It's similar to the movie industry in that way, like you say it's probably impossible for an outsider to evaluate the whole pipeline to see if the studio is stretching resources too thin. The best solution I can think of is to have anonymous questionnaires for all employees (FTE and contract) to report conditions at their studio. Probably best to do it on routine time intervals like quarterly or twice a year.
The thing is a good employer does this anyway for their own internal anonymous employee surveys (I've filled a fair few in over my career). I don't know for sure, but I'd put money on Ubi and EA doing this reasonably regularly.
I think another good solution is to have some industry body that accredits companies based on practices - sort of like CMM.
Just because someone at Focus knew doesn't mean that everyone at Focus knew. "Investigate" in this case would likely mean they're trying to figure out who knew what and what the actual order of events was; it's not them claiming that absolutely no one at Focus has ever heard of this.
Why is Focus speaking as if they need to investigate? According to this, they've known about this and have had all of the materials all along, and it was also Focus which greenlit pushing out the trailer for the State of Play:
The devs even seem to have audio receipts of conversations with Focus's legal team....
If true, Focus knew they sent Sony a trailer which included work made by unpaid workers.
Yeah, these crooks are just hoping that they can bury this story and everyone will just forget the shit they tried to pull. All of us should do our best to make sure that strategy doesn't work.
Not sure why I thought this.
Guess they're their own brand of terrible, then.
Former Limestones CCO Aleksey Nehoroshkin: “It’s about how normal people are mistreated and it’s about how creativity is exploited around the world” | Game World Observer
Yesterday, Aeon Must Die! developer Limestone Games published a press release denying transgressions alleged by the team of its former employees. One of them, the studio’s former Chief Creative Officer Aleksey Nehoroshkin, talked to Game World Observer.
gameworldobserver.com
Gamestar talked with several of the employees:
www.gamestar.de
(Article is paywalled and in German, maybe somebody with the subscription can tell us the important points)
Der dreckige Kampf um Aeon Must Die! geht in die nächste Runde
12 Entwickler litten unter menschenunwürdigen Arbeitsbedingungen. Nun kämpfen sie um Wiedergutmachung, ihre berufliche Existenz — und ihr Herzensprojekt.
www.gamestar.de
(Article is paywalled and in German, maybe somebody with the subscription can tell us the important points)