Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser’s „100-hour week” comment ignited a controversy.

Rockstar lightened its social media rules, allowing the developers to share their work experiences on Twitter. Before we do, we’d like to quote a tweet regarding this situation: „We were told we could say good and bad things and not to sugarcoat anything,” Wesley Mackinder, a Rockstar North-employee, said.

„I have never worked more than maybe 50 hours a week (and that’s a rare occurrence), but I generally work about 2-6 hours of paid overtime per week. I’m “non-exempt” so my overtime pay starts at 1.5x salary and scales to 2x after 8 hours of OT in a week or 12 hours in a single day, following California law. Also, I have only been asked to work on weekends once or twice in my entire time at R* on the Tools team,” Vivianne Langdon, a programmer at Rockstar San Diego, wrote.

„I haven’t worked a 100 hour work week in my life. I’m thanked for any overtime I am asked to do, and it feels like in those circumstances it truly was an unfortunate situation,” Zoë Sams, a Rockstar North programmer, wrote, regarding Houser’s 100-hour week he did for three weeks with the three writers.

„I know plenty of people who never do overtime, and leave on time every day to spend time with their family. One of those people has been working here for over 15 years. That isn’t saying that overtime doesn’t happen. On average, I’ll do somewhere between 40 to 45-hour weeks, and that can go up to around 60 for a week or two when deadlines loom. But this is of my own accord, and part of me being a perfectionist with the work I do,” Rockstar North’s senior coder, Phil Beveridge, added.

However, there are negative experiences, too: „We do crunch. I’ve not seen anybody forced to work 100 hour weeks, but I’ve seen friends get closer to that figure than is healthy. I am asked, encouraged and expected to work overtime (both nights and weekends) when coming up to a big deadline. The most I’ve ever worked in a single week during my nearly five years there has been 79 hours, but that was not recently,” Tom Fautley from Rockstar North says.

„[We] probably [had] 12-14 hours days, six days a week. Sometimes we were given the choice of which weekend day we wanted off. Probably lasted for a year, as the crunch hours go on way past release to cater for post releases/DLC etc.,” an ex-Rockstar employee wrote. He worked on Grand Theft Auto V.

Jason Schreier from Kotaku thinks we shouldn’t judge too early: „We all crave simple narratives, so it’s tempting to draw conclusions like “These employees said they hadn’t crunched hard so the rumours must not be true” or “They must be lying” but the reality is, as always, far more messy and complicated. […] Current and former employees have told me lots of different things. Rockstar is a complicated company, and one’s experiences might differ drastically depending on their office, their department, and their managers.”

Rob Nelson, co-head of Rockstar North, told The Guardian a few details. In the entirety of Rockstar, the average work week is between 42.4 and 45.8 hours. The high point was in July, at 50.1 on average. 20% of the employees work more than that, up to 67.1 hours, going by their self-reported hours.

The situation is complicated indeed, so Schreier is right: we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

Source: WCCFTech, GamesIndustry