[Administrator]

According to a blog post by Rockstar Spouses (wives of Rockstar employees in the San Diego Studio) at Gamasutra, Rockstar San Diego employee's have not been receiving the respect, compensation, and do diligence that they deserve. It appears the entire studio is working on Red Dead Redemption and trying to make sure they reach their deadlines no mater what. In reality sometimes releasing a product on time and working excessive overtime will not yield the best return on investment. I am sure many of you remember the EA overworking their employee's situation a couple of years ago. If you do not remember, please refer here and here for stories on the topic. I can understand working overtime as sometimes that is what it takes to get ahead of the competition but you have to be given time to rest and recuperate or you will not be able to excel to the best of your abilities mentally or physically even if you want to. It appears that EA has learned from this previous mistake and appears to have some pretty happy employees, which if anything does comes up I am sure they will be more open to talking to the management internally about the issue now.

With the executive job comes the responsibility to make sure projects are completed on time and within the budget. To do this, certain things must be managed and scheduled carefully or it could cause major problems and tends to send projects off budget and pass multiple deadlines hurting the management and employees all together. One thing I have noticed with these multiple half finished projects with some companies is that they do have the ability to successfully fund multi-million dollar blockbuster products but some of the producers seem to end up inadequately allocating resources (people needed to do the required job and the actual time needed to complete the job). Which normally trickles down to subpar research into the market, and poor knowledge the work required for completing certain jobs on time. Which the end users of games rant about on many developer and fan communities regularly when an unfinished game is released in the gaming industry. Now I know the goal at the end of the day is to make an excellent product and money but there are many ways to do this without causing high health problems to those doing the hard work to make the money.

If you want to get the best work out of someone or a group of people you have to respect them, pay them well, and make sure you treat them as a team member. A happy, healthy and stable worker is better and more productive (and costs less) then a stressed out, tired overworked worker. I am not sure why the San Diego studio is run the way it is but things like this should never get to this level for any company. As it's hard to get the best productivity out of workers if everyone is stressed out and not receiving what they are owed from the beta tester all the way up the studio lead which should be monitored by the higher up corporate executives to make sure they are allocating resources appropriately. Hopefully things will get sorted out shortly so management and the employees can get the game out and make a large return on their investment for the Rockstar Stockholders, Executives and employees.