Last Friday, Rockstar Games released its turn-of-the-century American opus Red Dead Redemption 2, a stubbornly slow-paced and absurdly detailed triumph that has expanded the boundaries of what is possible in a virtual world. And yet many questioned whether people should buy it.

In an interview with New York published ahead of the game’s release, Rockstar’s co-founder Dan Houser made an ill-judged comment: “We were working 100-hour weeks several times in 2018.” The games industry is infamous for its demanding work culture – developers often boast about their hours – and in another year Houser’s remark might have passed without comment. But 2018 has marked a turning point, because high-profile studio closures and a number of stories in the games press have shone a light on working conditions that prioritise long hours over employees’ welfare. The idea that games have a human cost has settled in the minds of players. We must hope this is the first significant step towards reform.

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Rockstar has defended itself robustly. It invited employees to speak out on social media about their experiences with the developer, and many of the accounts were very positive. It released numbers claiming that the average week consisted of 41-43 hours, rising to 50-60 in especially busy periods. Houser said in a statement that “no one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard”. The company pays for overtime and offers bonuses. It has changed its policies, making it clear that extra hours are not mandatory.

Kate Edwards (@geogrify) This has been a long time in coming; #gamedev professionals need to WAKE UP and smell the future. Your days of being exploited must end. Protect yourself, and protect the future of the profession. Act collectively. Organize. #Unionize. https://t.co/5RSnO3bXng

I have spoken to various Rockstar employees in recent weeks. Many were devastated that this episode has damaged the perception of Rockstar and of a landmark game that took seven years to make. They have said that a lot of people with terrible stories about what it’s like to work at Rockstar left the studio years ago, that Red Dead Redemption 2’s development process was a significant improvement on Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5, that it’s a great place to be and that they love their work. “Reading all of the press around it has been a total bummer on what should be an exciting week for us,” said Keith Thorburn, a music developer at Rockstar North. “We all remarked upon how we’d found a very healthy work/life balance on RDR2, which has always seemed like the holy grail of game development! Did I work overtime? Yes, but never excessively and always by choice.”

Others – especially those working in QA, or game testing, at Rockstar’s small Lincoln studio – told a different story. “There were always meetings where it was drummed into you that if we didn’t get this game out on time, we’d risk losing our jobs and letting everyone down,” said one former Rockstar Lincoln employee. “During my time there no one refused the extended hours, I think through fear of being fired. After every big game there was a period of reflection [and] it was often mentioned that we’d ‘never crunch that hard again’. But, if anything, it got worse every time.”

Mandatory or not, these kinds of hours aren’t healthy, and the open secret of the video games industry is that they are hardly uncommon. I have listened to countless senior developers boast about how hard they and their teams work. Looking back, I wish I had been more critical of that attitude.

The games industry is young, and attracts passionate people who will willingly put in the extra hours. But it also pushes out people with other obligations, especially women. It has become a bigger problem as video game creatives have grown up and started families, a preoccupation reflected in various recent games about parenthood and absent parents, among them God of War and The Last of Us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Absent parents … God of War. Photograph: Sony

God of War’s creative director, Cory Barlog, told me that as an animator on the original God of War in 2003, he “ended up staying until 2 or 3am every day, working six or seven days a week. Willingly.” A career in video games meant he was never around much for his young son. “I’m trying to be better for my son,” he said. “And regretting every moment I’m not spending with him.”

Meanwhile, as fortysomething creatives find themselves unable or unwilling to work as long as they once did, a younger generation that has grown up in the shadow of the 2008 recession is suspicious of the expectation that you should spend your life working. There is a growing movement towards games industry unionisation in the US and the UK right now, which I dearly hope will be successful and help protect workers left out in the cold when the studios that employ them shut or downsize. Every time this happens, other studios post their openings and voice their support. But does anything change? Do video games really have to be made at such cost to people’s security and happiness?

Play Video 1:23 Red Dead Redemption 2: why are people so excited by it? – video

For a long time, players rarely thought much about what it took to create the games they loved. Now they are becoming more sensitive to the welfare of developers. As a journalist I have seen how game development can chew people up and spit them out without even putting their name in the credits. It’s not just about overtime, it’s about the idea that people are owned by the companies they work for: that they should be smiling emissaries on social media, and sign agreements preventing them from ever talking about their employers. This needs to change, across the board.

I don’t believe that boycotting all games is necessary. (If I had worked for years on a game, nothing would make me sadder than the idea that people weren’t playing it.) But it is necessary to stand up for workers’ rights, and think about them when we play. Draw attention to them when they speak out, on social media and elsewhere. Demand that they are well-compensated. Support their push for unionisation. Sixty-hour weeks should not be applauded as a sign of dedication to players’ needs. I hope that in the near future, we can play even the most technically ambitious, demanding games knowing that not a single person had to sacrifice their happiness to make them.