When Red Dead Redemption 2 was gearing towards its release, there was plenty of controversies. While most of the controversy tends to land on the video game titles, this time around there was controversy over Rockstar and the reports of how developers were forced into crunch schedule to deliver the latest installment by the studio. That ultimately led to several changes in Rockstar and even management was altered a bit with some new faces.
Now the studio has released an email to their staff alerting them of what’s changing at the company. This was reported by Kotaku who has witnessed the email and spoken to an employee. Overall, Rockstar is making an effort to remove crunch culture in their studio and it’s doing that in a few different ways. For those that may not be familiar with the term, development is forced into working long hours, nights and weekends to ensure that a video game title is ready for release. This is oftentimes a struggle with workers and morale tends to drop.
No one likes to hear about crunch in development studios but that’s more or less a reality in several studios across the globe. Rockstar is hoping to change that for their studios by making sure they are able to deliver updates and insight on what’s going on across the board. It’s also changing up the scale of their video game titles. This will likely be seen in Grand Theft Auto 6 which is supposedly their current project in development.
How this will work is Rockstar will be developing a smaller game initially to release into the market and from the developers will work on expanding the title over time. It’s obviously too early to tell just how large of a game Grand Theft Auto 6 will be and what the updates could be. However, with the studio focusing on online expansions and updates, we very well could see the same treatment for the next installment.