LEGO Star Wars: Skywalker Saga delays reportedly lead to "broad crunch"
While we may be used to thinking that delay is a good thing for developers, giving teams enough time to create their best games without resorting to overtime, that’s not always the case. According to a recent report, that’s exactly what happened to several TT Games employees working on LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – despite multiple delays in the game.
According to a Polygon report, more than 20 current and former employees of TT Games have expressed dissatisfaction with “tight development schedules, the company’s austere culture, and outdated development tools” while developing The Skywalker Saga. Some even said they remembered “breaking down outside of working hours because of the workload and some of the stress they were under.”
“It was a very soft-spoken extortion,” a former employee told the outlet. “‘If people don’t start working overtime, there will be problems.'”
Unfortunately, the staff also pointed out that none of these issues are new to TT Games. One former employee even said that crunch has been a “premeditated” strategy for the studio due to the type of games they make, which are mostly licensed children’s games and “stocking stuffers,” which have “holiday-imposed deadlines.” Events or the release of certain films. While some employees believed things might have gotten better when the studio was acquired by Warner Bros. in 2008, multiple management changes and poor results from employee satisfaction surveys had little impact on the company. However, One change that did happen was the switch to a new engine called NTT – and with it came greater dissatisfaction from the studio’s developers.
Although employees expressed their interest in using the program they already knew and more efficiently using the Skywalker saga into production, TT Games insisted they go with this new engine. According to employees, not only were they unfamiliar with NTT and thus found themselves spending more time on tasks that were previously easy, but the program was also unstable, prone to crashing and causing jobs to disappear. Combine that with the studio putting a lot of pressure on developers to make The Skywalker Saga the greatest Lego game of all time — “go for 85 points,” TT Games told staff, referring to the game’s potential Metacritic score — – Caused a severe morale crisis in the studio.
To make matters worse, some employees also raised concerns about gender inequality at the studio, claiming that TT Games was a “hostile environment for women to work in, with female employees being bullied, commenting on their appearance, and being withheld for promotions and contracts. A recent government report appears to back up some of these claims, as TT Games has been dubbed as one of the “worst game studios for women in the top quartile in the UK”, with women making up just 2.4% of the highest paid staff Only 8.7% of employees are in the mid to upper hourly pay quarters.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, TT Games’ internal structure has undergone some changes, with new management coming in and at least 40 employees reportedly leaving the company in 2021 alone. The studio has since agreed to switch back to Unreal Engine for future projects and, according to some employees, has gotten better at monitoring overtime.
After a three-year delay and five years in development, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is now set to come out on April 5. While both current and former members of TT Games have said they think fans will be “happy” with the end result, it now seems safe to say that the developers paid a considerable price for it.
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