Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has tried to walk back comments he made about staff working 100-hour weeks on the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2 – a statement which sparked widespread criticism throughout the video games industry yesterday.
Houser made the claim in a Vulture article based on a personal tour of Rockstar Games’ Manhattan office. Astonishingly, neither Houser nor Vulture attempted to justify the extraordinary amount of work further, in an article which otherwise glowed about the game and overall visit. Here’s the excerpt:
“We were working 100-hour weeks” several times in 2018, Dan says. The finished game includes 300,000 animations, 500,000 lines of dialogue, and many more lines of code. Even for each RDR2 trailer and TV commercial, “we probably made 70 versions, but the editors may make several hundred. Sam and I will both make both make lots of suggestions, as will other members of the team.”
Source: Eurogamer Rockstar attempts to defuse 100-hour work week controversy amid storm of criticism