Article 413HV Rockstar developers speak out about “100-hour weeks” comment

Rockstar developers speak out about “100-hour weeks” comment

by
Kyle Orland
from Ars Technica - All content on (#413HV)
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Enlarge / Are developers being asked to push themselves too hard to make games like Red Dead Redemption 2? (credit: Aurich / Getty / Rockstar)

Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has drawn criticism this week for an interview where he said "we were working 100-hour weeks" on the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2. The ensuing conversation, which now includes many current Rockstar employees speaking publicly for the first time, has reignited a long-running argument about how much "crunch time" (if any) should be expected from developers in the run-up to major game releases.

The controversy started Sunday, when a rare interview with Houser and fellow studio co-founder (and brother) Sam Houser ran on New York Magazine's Vulture vertical. Dan's statement that "we were working 100-hour weeks" several times in 2018 is treated as almost a throwaway line in the context of other numbers highlighting the immensity of the game: 300,000 animations, 500,000 lines of dialogue, and "several hundred" edits for every trailer. It's a theme that runs throughout the interview, where the Housers brag about the game's 2,000 page "main story" script, 1,200 SAG-AFTRA actors, 2,200 days of motion-capture work, and 192 separate "interactive" musical scores, for example.

"We always worked ourselves to the bone," former Grand Theft Auto developer Navid Khonsari notes in the Vulture piece. "We all thought we were making badass shit, so it didn't matter how hard we worked."

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