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Inside Rockst*r Games

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Rockstar is well known within the industry as the worst place you could possibly work. People who've worked with ex-Rockstar employees have always known. When the EA Spouse thing came out, a lot of us wondered when something would finally break about Rockstar.

But Rockstar has a secret -- that secret is that they are sued regularly over working conditions and abuse, and they always settle. The settlement comes with a gag order, however.

Genius, I guess, in the evil way.

I've been lucky enough to work for a fantastic company for the past six years, and any overwork has been entirely my own decision, and mismanagement has been minimal and more conceptual than actual. Someone high up will make a silly decision about something, and then teams will transparently handle and incorporate it while minimizing impact on people's work environment.

I had no idea about Rockstar. I've heard for years about EA's shenanigans and thought they were the worst.

Why do people allow themselves to be treated that way?

For the same reason that anyone ever stays in an abusive relationship, because that is exactly what working for Rockstar is. Some people are strong enough to realize that they need to break free, others simply buy the statements coming from abuse and believe that they aren't good at their job, that no one else will employ them, that the rest of the industry is just as bad, if not worse.

What disturbs me most about Rockstar is more about the physical working conditions though. I think everyone working at a job will eventually deal with the kind of poor management and emotional abuse that was described in this article. But I've heard stories about offices that are in the middle of nowhere, horrible neighborhoods, musty and poorly ventilated. I heard one story of mold on the walls, and another about the company not paying to heat or cool an office space.

I honestly can't explain how rockstar continues to hire people, except for the appeal of working on a rockstar game. Personally, I have enough good friends and coworkers who are ex-rockstar that I have boycotted rockstar games. I cannot in good conscience continue supporting the company.

I think the game industry has some of the same trouble as Hollywood--- a ton of people who see it as their glamorous life dream, and are willing to work in bad conditions in hopes of somehow becoming the next Will Wright.

I worked at a very well known animation studio in a kind of Intern position for 8 weeks (I worked on a movie that rhymes with 'Fungle Book Three'), and my short experience sounds very similar to this bloke's. The most prestigious companies that everyone is happy to brag about working are sometimes the worst to work for? I've had nearly 10 jobs and this was _the worst_.

What causes it? Talented people continue to work there and middle management and infighting rips everyone to shreds. I worked during 'crunch time' which apparently 'happens on every production'.

The most psychotic thing from TFA is where a higher up pulls him in to a meeting room to accuse him of "questioning their authority" over a private email saying "I know the schedule is unrealistic, but guys we shouldn't be watching youtube videos during work hours". Who does that?

"And this was the sort of place where that sort of thing was the norm — the building process and the pipeline was inefficient to the extreme, yet no one who directly managed such things seemed to care — or was competent enough to recognize it."

Well, I think the last part is universal - nobody could easily diagnose or evaluate that situation. It took W. Edwards Deming years to create a method to first convince himself that it could be done, and then more years to convince others. This is made worse by intellectual work, where standards of quality are less obvious than "length at 100mm +/- 0.01mm". I'm not saying that standards do not exist, that is a trope that must disappear, they're just less obvious.

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It felt like a very unreal situation — working for a supposed “top-notch” company only to discover that some of my coworkers (including senior artists and management) wouldn’t even have been hired as interns at other companies I’d worked at. I’m not exaggerating.

Is Rockst*r considered a top-notch company? I know their output is quite respected but like Mel Gibson there is a difference between looking good on TV and being Good. Mostly it sounds like a bad case of hero worship.

Rockstar is not. Their output is quality because they are willing to spend five years on a single game, because they have the money to, and they are perfectly willing to make people redo their work a hundred times until it is acceptable.

From everything I've heard from somewhere in the range of 5 friends who are ex-rockstar, from almost all their studios (I've known people from North, Vancouver, San Diego, and Toronto), most of their games could have been done in half the time given some proper management and organization.

Really, it's a company where if you want to go home on a weekend the top guy will literally scream at you about being a pussy.

My favorite story was from Rockstar Vancouver, where one of the suits from the main office flew out to oversee their work. He came in on July 1st. On arrival to the studio, he called a meeting with all the leads who were there, and proceeded to yell at them about how few people were at the office, which culminated in "What do you think this is? A fucking holiday?"

Well, July 1st is Canada Day (basically the same as the US's July 4th in terms of import). Guy was lucky anyone was in the office at all.

But just one of many stories that highlight the sheer incompetence and malice with which Rockstar runs their companies.

I guess the articles impact is that it's surprising that a company with a track record of producing high quality games would have so many alleged issues on the inside.

Of course, whether or not you find it surprising is down to experience.

That is the thing though, the rockstar that is famous for pretty much everything rockstar is famous for is in Europe ( Edinburgh, Scotland to be precise.) So it is a little disingenuous to say he is working for a company with a history of quality. He works for a company that was bought by a company with a history of releasing quality products not quite the same thing.

Except Rockstar San Diego has delivered some great content including the game this article seems to be about. RDR has won multiple 2010 "Game of the Year" awards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Redemption#Awards), had great reviews, and incredible sales.

It's also the same studio that produced the Midnight Club series, one of the best racing series and the one that really brought the open terrain racer to market.

It seems like a relatively small studio, but one that has a very solid track record -- at least if you just look at the games it produces.

I could be wrong but I believe "RockStar Games" is one of those studios/companies that got so huge from their initial success as a small studio and innovators that the company size exploded into several satelite divisions/studios/etc, until the point where it becomes just another Big Corporation.

Personally I can't believe how anyone who works in game development can sign up for such an experience knowing all the horror stories and "crunch time" requirements that are out there. It seems to take a huge act of willful delusion going into it to think that you're going to come out the other end with a positive experience.

There's an expression about how those in charge only have the power that the people below give them, I can't understand how the rank-and-file in game development are so willing to go from 40-hour to 72-hour work weeks without any extra compensation.

There are better options out there for you as an employee.

I've not worked at a game studio, but I have worked at an interactive design studio, and the basic story is the same. The artists, Flash devs, and creative directors put up with a mind-boggling amount of mistreatment[1] from management in order to build up a professional portfolio. There was a high level of turnover in the creative department, however, because once a portfolio was built, the designer would attempt to find greener grasses.

[1] 12 hour days were pretty normal for a lot of folks, and our poor Flash dev, who was pretty darn good, often worked for days straight.

I keep hearing stories like this from different studios, and most of the time, they're studios that released games I really enjoyed. I would assume the stories are exaggerated or untrue, but they always ring true with my personal experience in game dev as well.

I think stories like this are rooted in the fact that the feedback cycle for large-budget video game development is completely broken. For small game projects with small teams and small budgets, you could at least attempt to assign blame for failures and credit for successes to the team members responsible for the result of the project. But when a game project runs for multiple years, with hundreds of developers and tens of millions of dollars spent on development, it becomes increasingly difficult to assign blame for any particular detail. This is worsened by the fact that the success of a game is ultimately up to the whims of the market and other factors outside of the developer's control (like whether any competing titles are released at the same time).

The end result is that leads and executives are effectively insulated from the results of their decisions, which is why they can lead a project that ends up years behind schedule and burns through employees with 72 hour work weeks and not get fired. And ultimately, for a large game publisher, it doesn't matter if a few projects run over budget or fail completely as long as they get enough hits that bring in massive amounts of revenue.

I'm starting to suspect that 90% of commercial games only ship through an act of God, when an angel descends from the heavens a week before gold master to mysteriously fix 50% of open bugs and get the lead designer to stop using meth. Were this the case, it would definitely explain how certain studios like Bethesda always seem to get 'unlucky' and have their games ship with crippling issues and lots of rough edges, despite the fact that people love their work.

The bit about the removal of free sodas and donuts reminds me of: http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...

You would be surprised how many known bugs an average game has when it ships. I'm sure the last week before GM is a very hectic week for those individuals that are determined to increase quality without breaking the game, but there are only so many hours in a day.

Also, I think you confused Bethesda with Obsidian Studios. They both ship buggy code, but fans seem to be more forgiving of Obsidian.

Since the site has hit its quota, I'll post my reply here:

I had the same experience, just ten years earlier. I was the lead programmer of resident evil 2 for the N64. Project was on time, under budget. Client was so happy it got Angel a little title called "Red Dead Revolver", which R* took over from Capcom when they bought Angel.

You want to know how we got the RE2 deal? I'll tell you: Chris Fodor and I noticed that you could spend 5 days a week totally fucking everything up and not get fired. You could lose Nintendo as a client by utterly failing to hit any deadline - and not get fired. You could be lead of a project that didnt ship, and then be lead of another project that didnt ship, rinse, repeat.

So we decided to spend monday working on our job, and the rest of the time working on a tech demo. We then presented our ideas to the programmers at the company. Of course, only a few senior programmers voiced their opinion, and their opinion was "that wont work". So then we ran the demo of it working.

Diego showed up a week later with a choice of two titles, one of which was porting RE2 to the N64.

I was fired a few weeks after we shipped.

I used to believe that the role of an employee was to maximize the value for shareholders. I still choose to believe this role, which is basically why I am only employable at start-ups, where it is still true. At any other company, the role of the employee is to maximize the value for the employee and the other employees that think likewise.

So welcome to the world of start-ups. You're now unemployable by most everyone else.

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