Rockstar employees were working "100 hour weeks" for RDR 2 [UPDATE: Rockstar's response]
- Thread starter Odesu
- Start date
But that's the issue - properly incentivized, people will do just about anything. Most people (particularly young, ambitious people) have a very poor understanding of their limits and the long-term impact of their decisions.
Like, how much money to sell your organs? How much money to become an indentured servant? How much money to give up a year of your life?
As a society, there should be protections in place to protect people from themselves as best we can. Because the people making these choices - my health and happiness or my future security - shouldn't have to make a choice at all.
Why? I love what i do. I spend all my free time practicing my trade. Why wouldn't i also want to get paid for my time. Im going to do it anyway. And honestly if you dislike even doing 35 hours why do it at all?
I normally work 40 hours per week. I can't even imagine going for more than 55 if I have a more demanding work. 100 is madness.
This is a disgusting business practice. I get that crunch time kinda comes hand in hand with game development (and it's still a bad practice that should be avoided at all costs) but this is too much and you'd think a studio that has made a move to work on one game at a time across ALL its branches in the world would do better.
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I used to study for 10 hour days mon-sat. Did that for 6 months. 10am start to 8pm finish.
And I would go home and many evenings do a further few hours.
While it wasn't as intense as crunch probably is, I was working very hard and constantly. Learning web development.
But that was pretty much all I did. I took a break from reality to learn. I was single with no one else relying on me. I'd get him at 9, eat, exercise, and if I didn't get caught up in study again I'd be in bed by 11. Up at 6:30. Repeat.
So for people with families, hobbies, active social lives, etc... doing intense work like that constantly, there'd be no room for anything else.
And I would go home and many evenings do a further few hours.
While it wasn't as intense as crunch probably is, I was working very hard and constantly. Learning web development.
But that was pretty much all I did. I took a break from reality to learn. I was single with no one else relying on me. I'd get him at 9, eat, exercise, and if I didn't get caught up in study again I'd be in bed by 11. Up at 6:30. Repeat.
So for people with families, hobbies, active social lives, etc... doing intense work like that constantly, there'd be no room for anything else.
Now they get a living wage for a capped 40 hours a week full-time work and the appropriate entitlements.
Look who gives a shit if it "worked well for you and not for others". Someone can justify it it all they want but at the end of the day, it's possible to envision something better than this reality.
People can rest their laurels on the thought that it benefited you at the end of the day if you work in a field gracious enough to grant the right compensation. But there can be something better than 100 hour work weeks. It can exist. It shouldn't be this way.
People can rest their laurels on the thought that it benefited you at the end of the day if you work in a field gracious enough to grant the right compensation. But there can be something better than 100 hour work weeks. It can exist. It shouldn't be this way.
You'd like to think that, but allegedly the tools for Destiny 1 basically made doing something like moving a pickup a 24 hour job because it took like 8 hours to import a map into the editor (which sometimes failed for no reason), another half hour to load it up, 2 minutes to your work then a 15 minute compile and export job. They'd set the import going overnight then do the work the next day, then afterward that's basically it for any in-map work you can do that day.
Because I need money to live. I've long accepted that I need to work and that there is nothing out there that I wouldn't hate to be forced to do all week just so I don't starve or end up under a bridge. Unless you want to pay me to play videogames and hang out with family and friends and drink beer all day, because that's what I would do 24/7 if I didn't have to work.
But to each their own, I guess. What I'm trying to say with all that is 100 hour workweeks ain't no way to live.
This is what happens when you live in a bubble, kids.
These AAA companies arent fooling anyone when they touting their 100 hour work weeks as it all being a labor of love or something to brag about. Your burning out and killing your employees so you can dump your million dollar making games a few months earlier.
If your business requires your treating employees like shit to operate, then your business deserves to get shut down. No business is entitled to existence.
12-14 hours per day, 6 days a week for almost a year. Get the fuck out of here with that shit. That is a complete nightmare, holy shit.
Fuck people justifying this bullshit. I loathe the "dying for your art" argument in cases like this, because the production pipeline is dominated by capitalist principles, not auteurs willingly bleeding their time and energy dry for the sake of something they love.
Though the life-committed-artists walk amongst this group, a vast majority of these people in question are not slaving away 100 work hours per week because they're embolden with creative passion and energy fuelling their workmanship. They're people told they basically have to work 100 hours per week, or exist within a culture of expectation for working 100 hours per week, entirely because a publisher decided a creative work needs to be out by a certain date on a calendar.
That is literally the only reason. Not because of some majestic, brilliant, godly sense of craftman ship. Not because of artistic commitment and passion. But because of profit/loss projections for the fiscal year as per shareholder expectations. Rockstar's creative works are littered with incredible detail because of the enormous budgets backing an equally enormous production pipeline. Because money has lead to the manpower and scope that allows for this kind of detail to be added to an already enormous game. And the awful reality is this budget comes with a dreadful caveat; the work must be completed by a certain date, under certain expectations.
And that's the absolute shittiest part of people justifying this. It's this embarrassingly false image of a handful of creators slaving away over their creation because if love for their work. Adore the effort put in collectively all you like; the hundreds of people doing this absurd overtime are doing it because they're forced to, not necessarily because they want to, or because they couldn't accomplish the same standard of quality and detail with a normal development cycle.
Though the life-committed-artists walk amongst this group, a vast majority of these people in question are not slaving away 100 work hours per week because they're embolden with creative passion and energy fuelling their workmanship. They're people told they basically have to work 100 hours per week, or exist within a culture of expectation for working 100 hours per week, entirely because a publisher decided a creative work needs to be out by a certain date on a calendar.
That is literally the only reason. Not because of some majestic, brilliant, godly sense of craftman ship. Not because of artistic commitment and passion. But because of profit/loss projections for the fiscal year as per shareholder expectations. Rockstar's creative works are littered with incredible detail because of the enormous budgets backing an equally enormous production pipeline. Because money has lead to the manpower and scope that allows for this kind of detail to be added to an already enormous game. And the awful reality is this budget comes with a dreadful caveat; the work must be completed by a certain date, under certain expectations.
And that's the absolute shittiest part of people justifying this. It's this embarrassingly false image of a handful of creators slaving away over their creation because if love for their work. Adore the effort put in collectively all you like; the hundreds of people doing this absurd overtime are doing it because they're forced to, not necessarily because they want to, or because they couldn't accomplish the same standard of quality and detail with a normal development cycle.
Some people working there might find it glamorous / cool to have such work conditions. Hardly anyone would do it against their wish, I presume.
That's abhorrent. Jesus Christ. This is a company that makes billions a year from their properties. They could afford to release this game late spring of 2019.
Which is insanely bad for today's standard.
Yes tools are getting better and more efficient by the day but the complexity of game-making is increasing too, especially for ambitious titles like RDR2. You can do a simple game ten times faster now than 10 years ago, but if you want to do a game that is ambitious by today's standard it's still gonna take a long time and be a hell of a lot of work, even with the amazing tools we have today.
Thank God for the European Working Time Directive here in the EU. This is a regulations and government issue over and above an industry issue. No one should be working that much, regardless of job. It's unhealthy and dangerous.
I hope the UK keeps all the public protection laws when leaving the EU intact.
Meanwhile in Sweden: https://www.equaltimes.org/swedish-researchers-examined?lang=en#.W8R8_KTTXYV
I hope the UK keeps all the public protection laws when leaving the EU intact.
Meanwhile in Sweden: https://www.equaltimes.org/swedish-researchers-examined?lang=en#.W8R8_KTTXYV
"Normal reality" if people think this is limited to game development its not. Flowers, food produce, amazon etc etc
This is in Germany too. So yeah while it sucks its pretty common.
I work in Germany and that law is so easily abused it might as well not exist.
From the same article:
Seems like they are constantly hiring.
So who's up for setting an example against these disgusting business practices and boycotting RDR2?!
No one?
That's what I thought.
No one?
That's what I thought.
14 hours average?
That leaves you with very little time.
Are you serious right now?
Do you have a job? Because the glamour you're picturing is not likely the case. That's not healthy, nor does it leave you with a lot of time to do much else outside of work.
Agreed one hundred percent.
This myth that everyone doing crunch is doing it because they love their work and not because they don't have a choice is some real bullshit and I kind of resent Naughty Dog for helping make this a common argument.
I interviewed with some EU countries, this is not true. Especially in the tech world. People were working as much as Americans. You have better vacation time at least!
Skipping this game for sure now, sadly this probably happens to many games I love, but oh well.
Hopefully the industry gets better instead of worse.
Hopefully the industry gets better instead of worse.
Regardless of it being a stupid amount of hours, I would be willing to be anything they're not even paid close to acceptable for it anyway.
Honestly, I'm sick of these threads.
Not because of the subject matter - it's just crazy working that amount of hours.
I'm sick of the gaming community claiming to be horrified by these kind of working conditions and pressures and then not voting with their wallet.
If you're horrified by this kind of thing, if you don't want to be party to it, if you want to help actually change things for these developers and those like them, do the right thing: don't buy the game.
Not because of the subject matter - it's just crazy working that amount of hours.
I'm sick of the gaming community claiming to be horrified by these kind of working conditions and pressures and then not voting with their wallet.
If you're horrified by this kind of thing, if you don't want to be party to it, if you want to help actually change things for these developers and those like them, do the right thing: don't buy the game.
In the GTA VR video by Corridor Digital, the guy that resembles Trevor from GTA V who is played by the guy who played Trevor, Steven Ogg says to the person who is experiencing the virtual reality version of a Grand Theft Auto-esque game that resembles real life a lot that the people behind the VR version are "underpaid, overworked social rejects just sitting by their lonesome wasting away in front of their computer screen". Now, this video is now over 20 million views and it seems Rockstar hasn't changed at all ever since the video premiered back in 2016.
So yeah, this is a major issue by Rockstar Games and it's just one of the reasons that video game developers needs to be unionized and I absolutely agree that everyone is typing right now about it. It needs to happen right now.
By the way, here's the video I was talking about:
So yeah, this is a major issue by Rockstar Games and it's just one of the reasons that video game developers needs to be unionized and I absolutely agree that everyone is typing right now about it. It needs to happen right now.
By the way, here's the video I was talking about:
I know a lot of the developers got paid a ton of money to work on the game, but those hours are still painful to think about.
I'm not buying it but even if everyone in this thread didn't buy it, it wouldn't even raise an eyebrow.
I worked QA on San Andreas and it was the same back then but the most I did was 85 hours a week, just work, go home to sleep and come back to work again, after 2 weeks of that I felt physically dead inside. Can't imagine what it's like doing 100 hour weeks for much longer.
Oh it would. This forum has more influence than it often realises.
Yet no one will care and gobble this shit up. Even outraged people here will buy the game.
Because we are not the one's responsible to fix this.
This community is what, 40,000 users? That's a drop in the bucket. And not all 40,000 even have an interest in RDR2.
Boycotting doesn't work at this level since it's so pervasive.
This is absolutely insane and not something to be proud of, employees health are at risk when doing this, in no way this is good.