Rockstar Crunch

Started by the-pi-guy, Oct 19, 2018, 10:34 PM

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the-pi-guy

Several days ago in an interview, a Rockstar Dev said they were often working 100 hour weeks.  

'We Were Working 100-Hour Weeks,' Red Dead Redemption 2 Head Writer Says, Then Clarifies

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The polishing, rewrites, and reedits Rockstar does are immense. "We were working 100-hour weeks" several times in 2018, Dan says. The finished game includes 300,000 animations, 500,000 lines of dialogue, and many more lines of code. Even for each RDR2 trailer and TV commercial, "we probably made 70 versions, but the editors may make several hundred. Sam and I will both make both make lots of suggestions, as will other members of the team."
When asked for clarification:

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There seems to be some confusion arising from my interview with Harold Goldberg. The point I was trying to make in the article was related to how the narrative and dialogue in the game was crafted, which was mostly what we talked about, not about the different processes of the wider team. After working on the game for seven years, the senior writing team, which consists of four people, Mike Unsworth, Rupert Humphries, Lazlow and myself, had, as we always do, three weeks of intense work when we wrapped everything up. Three weeks, not years. We have all worked together for at least 12 years now, and feel we need this to get everything finished. After so many years of getting things organized and ready on this project, we needed this to check and finalize everything.

More importantly, we obviously don't expect anyone else to work this way. Across the whole company, we have some senior people who work very hard purely because they're passionate about a project, or their particular work, and we believe that passion shows in the games we release. But that additional effort is a choice, and we don't ask or expect anyone to work anything like this. Lots of other senior people work in an entirely different way and are just as productive - I'm just not one of them! No one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard. I believe we go to great lengths to run a business that cares about its people, and to make the company a great place for them to work.
Due to the backlash, Rockstar allowed employees to talk about their working conditions.


Rockstar grants permission to current devs to talk about company on social media | ResetEra

 
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https://www.vg247.com/2018/10/18/rockstar-working-conditions/

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...ees-to-speak-out-on-100-hour-week-controversy





 Wesley said:  
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The email saying we were allowed to discuss this was sent to the entire development staff; all studios, all roles, all levels of seniority. We were told there were no limits on what we could discuss with regards to conditions/hours. I really don't have anything to add to the Tweets in the original posts, other than to say that it's just been frustrating knowing that industry friends/students might be put off working for R* because of all this guff.Click to expand...
Kotaku R* QA Studio With Hardest Crunch Told Today That Supposed Mandatory Overtime Is Optional | ResetEra

 
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https://kotaku.com/rockstar-qa-stud...that-1829876472/amp?__twitter_impression=true

 
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Rockstar Lincoln, a UK-based studio that has been handling a lot of the quality assurance testing for Red Dead Redemption 2, is swearing off an approach that many employees say they had interpreted as mandatory overtime.

 That change comes a result of a studio meeting at the end of a week full of unusually public discussion about the work hours put into the creation of what is likely to be the hottest big-budget video game of the last several years.Click to expand...
Way more at the link.  
Still there's been a lot of backlash.  

Legend

I have no idea who to believe but Rockstar has always been known for their crazy amount of crunch.

the-pi-guy

I have no idea who to believe but Rockstar has always been known for their crazy amount of crunch.
I'm sure the answer is somewhere in the middle.  

I think since Rockstar has opened up the conversation that they are confident they are doing better than they have in the past.  

Overall I'm sure there's more than a few people working way more than they should be, but it's probably less people than Era thinks.

DD_Bwest

ive heard so  many different reports,  i feel it probably comes down to the team and the leaders of them.  

the-pi-guy


darkknightkryta

I was skimming through this on my phone (A different article popped up in my news feed).  Seems like, the Red Dead 2 team managed to stave off crunch.  Not sure about the GTA team.  If they managed to not get into crunch, good for them and all game directors need to meet up with them to figure what they did.