"We were working 100 weeks," senior writer Red Dead Redemption 2, then clarifies

It has long been an open secret in the video game industry that the prestigious developer Rockstar adopts overtime and a new quote from the company's co-founder, Dan Houser, about Red Dead Redemption 2 caused controversy this morning by suggesting that it took 100 hours a week. In a new elaboration to KotakuHowever, Houser said the quote had been misinterpreted, stating that such a workload was not required at the studio.

In an article published yesterday by New York Magazine On the subject of Rockstar's ambitious cowboy game coming out on Oct. 26, Houser talked about working "100-hour weeks" before completing his work. Red Dead Redemption 2.

Here is the complete quote:

The polishing, rewrites and reissues made by Rockstar are immense. "We worked 100 hours a week" several times in 2018, says Dan. The finished game includes 300,000 animations, 500,000 dialog lines and many lines of code. Even for everyone RDR2 trailer and TV commercial, "we've probably made 70 versions, but publishers can make hundreds. Sam and I will make a lot of suggestions, just like the other members of the team. "

When requested by Kotaku to elaborate, Rockstar sent a statement, also attributed to Dan Houser:

There seems to be some confusion in my interview with Harold Goldberg. What I was trying to say in the article was related to the way storytelling and dialogue in the game were designed, which we mostly talked about, and not about the different processes of the game. 39, larger team. After seven years working on the game, the main writing team of four, Mike Unsworth, Rupert Humphries, Lazlow and myself, had, as we always do, three weeks of intense work when we finished. Three weeks, not years. We have been working together for at least 12 years now and feel we need it to finish everything. After so many years of organization and project preparation, we needed it to check everything and finalize it.

More importantly, we obviously do not expect others to work this way. In society as a whole, we have executives who work very hard simply because they are passionate about a project or their particular work, and we think that passion is reflected in the games we publish. But this extra effort is a choice, and we are not asking anyone to work in that direction. Many other seniors work in a totally 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 that we put a lot of effort into managing a company that cares about its employees and makes this company a great place to work.

Rockstar includes not only the Houser office in New York, which also houses the rest of the management team, but also several studios in California, Boston, the UK and elsewhere in the world.

To put things in perspective, a 100-hour week would be equivalent to about 14 hours a day for seven days. The deleterious effects of this type of time have been well documented.

Excessive overtime (or "crunch") has long been a reality in the video game industry, a fact we have written a lot about. While some companies have taken steps to reduce or eliminate serious problems, many have not, with some great video game creators insisting that the only way to create the best games in the world is to make hours. additional. In fact, some of the best video game studios in the world, like Rockstar, Naughty Dog (Unexplored) and CD Projekt Red (The witcher), are well known for kissing crunch.

In early 2010, while Rockstar was preparing to release the first Red Dead Redemption, a group of spouses of employees from the Rockstar studio in San Diego, who was the main team of the game and who is on this upcoming game, wrote an open letter describing the working conditions at the studio. The claims, which affected the entire video game industry, included an average workday of 12 hours, mandatory Saturdays and a reduction in benefits.