Kotaku has today published an in-depth report on the working conditions of Rockstar Games spanning their eight studios (including the Australian arm) across Red Dead Redemption 2 as well as Grand Theft Auto V, L.A. Noire, the original Red Dead Redemption as well as other titles.
The report was published after Kotaku spoke to 90 current and former Rockstar employees as well as the Head of Publishing, Jennifer Kolbe.
The entire report is insanely deep and well worth your time reading, but there was definitely a sense that most employees felt that they had to work 70-80 hour work weeks out of fear. They even went as far as saying that they felt like they wouldn’t receive their bonus or be cut from the studio all together if they didn’t work these extravagant work hours.
“For some people fear is a great motivator, for others it just incites rebellion,” said one employee.
Others also stated that they hadn’t faced these kind of issues and had only experienced regular 40-50 hour work weeks.
Another major takeaway was the fact that employees feared leaving mid project due to Rockstar’s policy that if you don’t stay till the end of a games’ development, your name won’t be recorded in the credits. This is an interesting one as Rockstar today published a list of every employee globally that had played a part in the game. This extends beyond developers.
The report also goes into the work conditions that employees had endured at Team Bondi in Australia (who worked on L.A. Noire). It also goes into a lot of detail about how work conditions differ based on the locations of the studio and other extremely interesting details.
Red Dead Redemption is out on Friday for PS4 and Xbox One. It’ll be interesting to see how this has an impact on potential sales (if any at all).
