Trouble at MS's Undead Labs

[the-pi-guy]

https://kotaku.com/state-of-decay-3-xbox-series-x-s-sexism-microsoft-undea-1848728682

Undead Labs doubled in size, but lost its charismatic founder. It's working on the ambitious sequel State of Decay 3, but after several years is still trapped in pre-production. And recently it's faced allegations of mismanagement, burnout, and misogyny as it's struggled to live up to its promise of being the welcoming, diverse, and inclusive Xbox first-party studio it touts itself as.

At first, some employees were worried the Microsoft acquisition would change the indie studio for the worse. Now they worry the $2 trillion company's incredibly "hands-off" approach allowed dysfunction to fester, leaving some of the studio's more vulnerable employees to fend for themselves. As one former developer put it, "We were afraid they would come in and change our culture but our collapse came from within, and we could have used [Microsoft's] help."

[Legend]

That's not good.

[BananaKing]

The initiative having trouble, and now these guys.

Its interesting though that these guys are having trouble because MS is extremely hands off. After the Bethesda and aquisition and all eyes turning onto the Activision one, undead labs probably fell down the ladder in terms of importance.

[kitler53]

The initiative having trouble, and now these guys.

Its interesting though that these guys are having trouble because MS is extremely hands off. After the Bethesda and aquisition and all eyes turning onto the Activision one, undead labs probably fell down the ladder in terms of importance.

so this is a hot take without any evidence to back it up but....


...years ago we kept hearing about MS mis-management by trying to get to very hands-on with their studios and wrecking the creative culture.   Spencer more recently has made some vague statements about learning from their prior mistakes.  Now we're hearing about MS mis-management by way of being completely hands-off and offering not support whatsoever allowing bad local management to go unnoticed.

seems to me MS swung the pendulum from one extreme to the other and still hasn't really figured out how to properly support the development process of video games.  I'll wager hands-off is more often than not better than being heavy-handed.   ...but it's still not the optimal level of support.   the optimal way is to have a home button at the bottom of every thread so i have a 1-click way to return to the topics...