The human cost of Red Dead Redemption 2 (Eurogamer)

[Otter]

fatslob-:O said:

Azzanation said:
I respect RDR2 and thank the employees for the masterpiece they created but human rights should never be broken. A happy work place is a good workplace.
Things some people tend to miss. Its acts like this that ruin companies. MS already poached the lead director from Rockstar to work for there newly created studio. Staff will jump ship and Rockstar could possibly fall if they continue this method on making games.
Reason i bring this up is i saw the exact same thing happen to Rare in the N64 days. During the development of Perfect Dark, Rare staff were leaving the company. Rare were also guilty of doing the same thing in the past by overworking there teams, and look how that panned out for Rare in the long run.
Quality should never be a human sacifice.

Rare suffered because of poor management, not because of employee turnover. The former Rare employees who went on to form Free Radical Design didn't last all that much longer with a release like Haze and being acquired by Crytek who are also now in trouble ... 

@Bold The statement you make is nothing more than a platitude. To create quality products one must simply invest in many man-hours towards it. Just as it may be unjust for an employee to be exploited it is absolutely unjust for the consumer to accept sub-par goods and services for their own hard earned work. You can not have both pro-consumerism and employee welfare ... 

This is way too much hyperbole. Quality doesn't require excessive overtime, poor working conditions or expense of employee welfare. This exact quality game that's sitting on metacritic with a score of 97 could have released in fall 2019, potentially to an even better perception due to better execution of ideas from a well rested workforce and more efficient workforce- this is scientifically backed ;) 

The question here is time... and time cost money. Not every game can afford significant delays (which is where I think the actual dilema arises-indie studios/studios that are struggling) but we know Read Dead and Rockstar can. Unfortunately such significant crunch and forced overtime is something they know they can get away with, so why delay when you can overwork your staff and save a 20m+ on employment costs even though you know the delay will only make a small dent in your overall profits.

Here's at least one studio doing something crazy ambitious and not employing a culture of "cruch"

http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2018/10/media_molecule_doesnt_crunch_reckons_its_too_90s

Essentially their needs to a rebalancing between developer ambitions, publisher budgeting and scheduling. Unfortunately developers are being pushed in the arms race to outdo each other in scale and spectacle, whereas I think diversification is far more important for 90% of game studio.

A game like The Journey is higher "quality" in terms of reception and technical performance than the likes of Mass Effect Andromeda, quality can't simply be attributed to man hours.