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."

Impressively scaled "badass work" or not, many people were disturbed by the idea that Rockstar employees were being pushed through a week's worth of work days lasting over 14 hours each (assuming no weekend breaks). That kind of sustained overwork is common enough to have a widely accepted shorthand name around the industry: "Crunch." And the problems for employee health and well-being brought on by that kind of sustained crunch have been heavily discussed for years in and around the industry. The International Game Developers Association cites research showing that level of sustained overwork is actually damaging to productivity.

Off-handed talk of "100-hour weeks" on RDR2 prompted many developers to share their own stories of how crunch has negatively impacted their lives during their time in the game industry. "My first job in Games we had a leaderboard where we tracked who worked the most hours in one week on the project. I made it to 3rd place... with 118 hours," Iron Galaxy CEO Adam Boyes wrote in a representative example.

Other developers took issue with the prideful, almost bragging tone of Houser's comments, which suggested the long work weeks were worth it to create "this seamless, natural-feeling experience in a world that appears real, an interactive homage to the American rural experience," as Houser put it. "This needs to stop being a point of pride, no matter how bittersweet you make it sound," Creative Assembly developer Pete Stewart wrote. "I don't want devs to work 100-hour weeks, even if the end result is a game of the year. No game is worth that kind of burnout."

Speaking out

In the wake of those kinds of reactions, Rockstar issued a statement to Kotaku, attributed to Dan Houser. The statement clarified that the "100-hour weeks" comment only referred to the four-person senior writing team, which put in "three weeks of intense work" to finalize everything at the end of the game's seven-year development process. That level of "intense work" was temporary and not expected of the entire staff, the statement said:

More importantly, we obviously don’t expect anyone else to work this way. Across the whole company, we have some senior people who work very hard purely because they’re passionate about a project, or their particular work, and we believe that passion shows in the games we release. But that additional effort is a choice, and we don’t ask or expect anyone to work anything like this. Lots of other senior people work in an entirely different way and are just as productive—I’m just not one of them! No one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard. I believe we go to great lengths to run a business that cares about its people, and to make the company a great place for them to work.

Some were skeptical of those words, especially considering the public accusations that Rockstar employees were routinely overworked during the development of the first Red Dead Redemption. So Rockstar has opened the discussion up to the current employees themselves, lifting a ban on speaking about work policies and experiences on social media.

The wave of employee comments (as collected by employees like Miriam Bellard) paint a much healthier picture of the work culture at Rockstar. Employees who have shared their thoughts on Twitter are nearly unanimous in saying they've never worked 100 hours in a week, nor been pressured to do anything close. Most say that light overtime is common and sometime encouraged before deadlines, but they say it never exceeds 50 to 60 hour weeks at the maximum.

Most of that extra work time is driven by personal devotion and not management pressure, according to multiple Rockstar employees. Many also expressed dismay at the way Houser's "100-hour weeks" comment was being portrayed in the media.

On the other hand, Rockstar North tools designer Tom Fautley wrote, "I've not seen anybody forced to work 100 hour weeks, but I've definitely 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... has been 79 hours, but that was not recently."

Many employees suggest that excessive crunch was a bigger problem at Rockstar in the past. "During my first few years here, it was a lot worse," Rockstar North scripter (and five-year company veteran) Owain Davies wrote. "There were several 70+ hour weeks. The worst it ever got I think was just shy of 80 hours. It is getting better, but it still absolutely happens. Normal crunch for me nowadays is more like 50-55 hours, and I've not personally had it as bad as other colleagues I know."

Senior Code Content Developer Phil Beveridge concurred that "work practices have definitely improved. Crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2 has definitely been a lot better than it was on GTA V, where I was pulling a month of 70+ hour weeks (while being told by my boss at the time to go home...)."

That gels with former Rockstar employee Job J Stauffer, who wrote that his time working on Grand Theft Auto V was "like working with a gun to your head 7 days a week. 'Be here Saturday & Sunday too, just in case Sam or Dan come in, they want to see everyone working as hard as them."

Some employees also point to social pressures for developers to push themselves harder to match their colleagues. "It's easy to fall into that trap, if you leave on time, and see other people still working, or read a comment about a 100 hour week, to feel guilty," a Rockstar North employee with the handle @palbudster wrote on Twitter. "To question if you're doing enough, to start staying longer... if I'm not alone in that, and in fact that anxiety is fueling how much overtime we work? I expect that's an industry wide problem, and not a criticism of Rockstar."

Others still point out that there can be a fine line between overtime that's "forced" and overtime that's just encouraged by the wider workplace culture. "Veterans in the industry, the few that survive the crunch for any length of time, and this is something I myself have been guilty of over the years, begin to wear their ability to crunch like a badge of honor," Fate Tectonics developer Alex Bethke told GameDaily. "[That's] further reinforcing the bad culture and directly and/or indirectly saying to newcomers, if you want to have even a chance of getting to where I am you need to sacrifice everything."