According to over a dozen current and former employees, Life Is Strange developer Deck Nine’s management has long let a toxic work culture fester at the studio, including protecting multiple abusive leaders, encouraging crunch, and allowing bullying of individuals advocating internally for more authentic representation.
What a shit-show. As for the nazi bullshit, you should be able to look at your versioning system to find out exactly who inserted the assets. That someone hasn’t already lost their job is troubling.
Game asset development is one of the places where versioning systems are least used. Not only versionong “binaries” is taxing for the system, but even game code itself (¹) is often not version tracked, or controlled at all, with more of a “cowboy coder” approach.
It all stems from most non-online games (²) being sold “as is”, with no intent of supporting them long term; the moment a studio/producer gets the money, they stop caring about their user base, until it’s time to promote the next game. Even games with post-release DLCs, are regularly developed this way, and they end up as a giant clusterf… mess.
If Deck Nine was the “lowest bidder”, with 70-80 hours a week “crunch” months, chances are they cut corners on everything, starting with proper asset versioning.
(¹: engine code is a separate thing, which gets suported across multiple games, so tends to be properly developed
²: online games, and games with microtransactions, tend to be kept in better shape, since their income depends on them working for more than a single playthrough)
What a shit-show. As for the nazi bullshit, you should be able to look at your versioning system to find out exactly who inserted the assets. That someone hasn’t already lost their job is troubling.
Game asset development is one of the places where versioning systems are least used. Not only versionong “binaries” is taxing for the system, but even game code itself (¹) is often not version tracked, or controlled at all, with more of a “cowboy coder” approach.
It all stems from most non-online games (²) being sold “as is”, with no intent of supporting them long term; the moment a studio/producer gets the money, they stop caring about their user base, until it’s time to promote the next game. Even games with post-release DLCs, are regularly developed this way, and they end up as a giant clusterf… mess.
If Deck Nine was the “lowest bidder”, with 70-80 hours a week “crunch” months, chances are they cut corners on everything, starting with proper asset versioning.
(¹: engine code is a separate thing, which gets suported across multiple games, so tends to be properly developed
²: online games, and games with microtransactions, tend to be kept in better shape, since their income depends on them working for more than a single playthrough)
Very informative. Thanks!