One of the last industries that would actually benefit from return to office. I doubt anyone writes better code or produces better art after getting stuck in traffic twice a day every day.
Exactly. The main part where they'd benefit from being in an office is initial planning, story boarding, etc. That should've happened a long time ago, and right now they should be fixing bugs and performance issues, fine-tuning art, etc. That doesn't require direct 1:1 collaboration, and generally benefits from an asynchronous process where QA reports issues and the individuals fix them.
Weirdly even if this was some vindictive way to get more overtime out of people, I believe studies suggest people who WFH are more likely to work overtime because it's less impeding and the barrier to look at work is less (I don't remember any studies off the top of my head). So I assume this is just a management problem as management are usually the people having trouble when it comes to WFH
When my family members briefly had wfh they did all of the overtime. You can do a full home cooked dinner, OT, and still have time to relax after. Breaks don't feel like a waste of time you can't even finish a meal within. None of these buffoons will accept that performance went up using the same metrics that they used to complain about poor performance before covid hit though.
I would imagine those are handled more like recording sessions where it's not a 9-5 but a scheduled event. I could be wrong though I've never done it myself.
Yeah, pushing back-to-office and crunch timelines will really help, I'm sure.
When has being shitty to your employees, overworking and pushing your long-term employees with institutional knowledge out the door because they can find better jobs that allow WFH ever blown up in a company's face? /s
Forcing return to office is not doing anything to production of the game. The only thing it does is give the company an excuse to fire people to make earnings reports look better.
Yeah I'm guessing this is it. They're coming up on the end of development, which means it's mostly QA and bugfixes. All of the difficult code has been written, now it's time to start culling the expensive senior engineers while they patch the rest up. So long, there's the door.
Of course RDR3 will ramp up and they'll say "What do you mean we have to hire new people?"
I'm amazed, time and time again, at just how incredibly stupid HR decisions can be. It's like they have no idea what people do and how difficult how that shit is, and then each company has its own idiosyncrasies, in processes, in frameworks, engines, languages, etc.
I'm not even in gaming, and I see it every day, with candidates being taken onboard against the teams' advice, then being unable to do the most simple tasks in their jobs. It's terrifying, really. It's like HR have a vague sense that we do stuff with computers and we cost X per annum and that's about as far as it goes in their little brains...
Right? They’ve had over a decade. GTA V came out in TWENTY THIRTEEN. They have ZERO an excuse to be abusing their employees in the last year before release. And they gave themselves a year PLUS—didn’t they said VI was coming out “2025?” Like…how can you excuse that kind of shit?
I don’t get this. If you force me to drive through shitty traffic to get to work and to return home, I’m going to find a way to make it back. Similarly, if you try to force me to be at work 12 hours a day, I'm only going to do about 4-5 hours of real work.
Really hope it doesn't get delayed but also wish for both the staff not to have mental health issues or us to get another unpolished game released to us.
I'm not waiting. I was a fan since GTA 2, I didn't even bother finishing 5. This is going to be the last step in the genericisation of GTA.
Every fucking game is open world, the tone is less funny compared to what it was before, too many creators left, and the ones that are still there are too out of touch. Fuck it.
That's more a symptom of micro transactions and live service gaming. Do you think GTA6 would have taken this long if Rockstar didn't have the piggy bank that is GTA Online printing money for them 24/7?
Saddest thing was reaching the new part of the map of Red Dead Redemption 2 and having it be so empty, since in the past it would have been where new story DLCs would have taken place.
Not exactly the timeline you're putting out but, my son was about a year old when I remember getting GTA 4 on launch. He's in his freshman year of college now...