Would you like to work for Rockstar?

This weekend Rockstar games studio co-founder Dan Houser gave a very broad interview to Vulture, where he mentioned that some members of the staff were literally working 100 hours a week to push out Red Dead Redemption 2. This segment of Dan’s interview caused an uproar in the gaming community and Rockstar is really feeling the heat.

A developer named Jenn Sandercock shared a story on Twitter of how she would voluntarily bring a cake to the office and have co-workers chat to each other for half an hour. “It helped moral significantly. A mini non-scientific study I did showed more bugs were fixed on Cake Day!”, says Jenn. Then one day her boss said that Cake Day causes a disruption and forced the employee to stop the tradition. Read the full Twitter thread here.

Here is a Tweet from another former Rockstar employee, who until very recently has been working for Telltale Games (what a lucky game developer):

We’ve picked some typical complaints Rockstar employees voiced about the company on Glassdoor:

—      They treat you bad. There is no company culture and you have to work a lot overtime late in the evenings.

—      Extremely long hours, lack of sleep, working weekends for 6 months at a time, a bizarre culture of fear.

—      No one can advise the management about anything at Rockstar Games, they're always right no matter what.

—      You will be working extreme overtime outside crunch time for low pay. Upper management has little leadership skills and breeds unhealthy environment. You'll have to do your job without sense of direction and lots of ambiguity. Lack of communication causes struggle on both ends to the upper management and employees.

When you finally get your hands on Red Dead Redemption 2, think about all the overtime hours the employees had to put in, to push out the game. We are not talking about the ban of the product, it is more about appreciation of their efforts, so you will acknowledge at what price this game has come.