Rockstar devs say the company has made overtime voluntary as of today

After a week of controversy around crunch practices at Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar, the company has lifted restrictions and allowed employees to speak out. Many of the comments on social have struck a tone around ‘it’s fine’ to ‘it’s not that bad,’ though a far more negative report has come out today. Either way, it sounds like Rockstar plans some changes in the wake of this conversation. An anonymous QA tester at the company’s Lincoln studio says “overtime is NOT optional, it is expected of us,” and that any missed overtime must be made up on another day. “This usually means that if you want a full weekend off that you will have to work a double weekend to make up for it.” This tester says work weeks have typically been around 60 hours, but have on at least one occasion gone as high as 80. Most of that overtime has been paid, but hourly employees apparently aren’t paid through lunch and dinner breaks - despite working through them. That means each overtime day has roughly an hour-and-a-half of uncompensated labour.