Hacker News Reader

Comment by valryon | Hacker News Reader

For Red Dead Redemption, wives of the developers has written several open letters to show the world the horrible condition their husbands were facing.

You can easily find this story, like on Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RockstarSpouse/20100107/4032/...

View on HN

FWIW, GTA is developed by Rockstar North, rather than San Diego (which produced RDR), meaning they at least benefit from the additional employment protections offered in Europe (vs the US: things like 5+ weeks of paid holiday, etc).

I can only speak to anecdotal evidence, but I've hired several engineers who previously worked at Rockstar in the UK and haven't heard anything outside of the ordinary.

I would gladly do overtime for a game like that, it would be completely worth it.

EA's sports game studios, or Korean/Chinese outsourcing/free2play sweatshops are places where it really sucks.

They way they chose to compose that open letter meant I could not take it seriously at all. (And my partner is in employment law so I have an above casual interest in these kind of things in all industries.)

So Rockstar San Diego is 100% male then?

Have you entirely missed the point?

It is signed "Determined Devoted Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees."

So either it is 100% male OR the female staff are either unmarried or do not have the same complaints.

The fact that they're not represented in this letter doesn't mean they don't have these complains. They may not have voiced them, or voiced them privately or elsewhere.

If I write a blog post about how I feel I'm being exploited by my employer, that doesn't necessarily mean my colleagues don't feel the same.

It is possible, but this looks like it was written on behalf of a large group of people and it seems strange to sign it in such a gender specific way.

It's not strange if you consider there were no female programmers on the team. Demographics is a different point all together.

It also isnt strange if it is literally the wives of people who did it, those who are waifuless did not have a wife participate in the document.

Perhaps the husbands were not involved? This just seems like such a weird as hell point to pick up on. Why does it matter?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com