Twitter: "All Aeon Must Die devs quit the studio this week after crunch and not getting paid, the trailer was outsourced"(UP: Actually quit June 22th)
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Do you know how long and at what cost such an audit would take? And for every company involved (there's a whole chain of suppliers - how deep should they go?) This is not a reasonable position to take.
Reminder: Support Unionization. That way,we'll have fewer incidents these that these crooks can get away with.
first experience in vg industry and a master degree in banking affiliation apparently.
he is not just shady as fuck, he probably has no fucking idea what he's doing.
bearing in mind the time at which that tweet was made, he is still probably asleep and has no clue of the shitstorm coming his way tomorrow for breakfast
he is not just shady as fuck, he probably has no fucking idea what he's doing.
bearing in mind the time at which that tweet was made, he is still probably asleep and has no clue of the shitstorm coming his way tomorrow for breakfast
You're right.
Having third-party auditing to ensure the health and safety of developers shouldn't be considered.
Just leave it to the Studio and Publisher. Because that's clearly working.
Three checks-and-balances is better than two, you say!
Exactly, Sony must demand that publishers allow a team of auditors to interview developments teams. Of course, those auditors must be flown fly around the world to conduct these interviews, so that they can inspect the working environment of the developers that aren't under their employment.
Then Focus can have their 60 second trailer.
Just read everything, yeah, legal action needs to be taken, this is abuse of all kinds. I'm not hopeful anything will come of it.
Jesus, what are you blabbering about?
1) If Sony shows a game at their heavily curated event, shouldn't they take at least a few steps to ensure everything is kosher with the team behind it?
2) Auditors - even amidst COVID-19 - can still interview employees, can they not? Have you tried a thing called Zoom lately?
It's not hard to at least briefly audit the games you showcase and highlight as synonymous with your brand.
This sucks for the devs. This is one of the great thing about social media being able to call people on their shit immediately
i'm not sure why you are doubling down on this while still avoiding the main point. Third party auditing costs resources, money, travel (given current situation), and remember the game is not platform exclusive. so aside from publisher and studio, who else would have any stake in performing that edit? who else would even have the right to audit them?
it's not like any editor actually paid for the thing and has the right to have any look at it.
if a studio and a publisher approaches a major editor, i doubt they will accept their business to be closelyinspected.
The audio of the CEO rejecting the resignation reminded me of literally all my shithead bosses. This sucks, hope the devs get whats theirs.
Do we boycott? Is that the move here?
Do we boycott? Is that the move here?
There would be nothing to boycott. This game will never come out
Costs, Resources, Money of a massive publisher > Ensuring Developer Health
That's literally all I get from your argument.
Assistant Narrative Director's Testimony
Holy hell the Assistant Narrative Director's account is the motherload of the worst stuff, as she is speaking out as person who was in power:
I recommend reading her entire account because these four excerpts aren't even everything. I couldn't screenshot it all.
She was one of the good ones for sure.
Damn. Just damn.
I recommend reading her entire account because these four excerpts aren't even everything. I couldn't screenshot it all.
She was one of the good ones for sure.
Damn. Just damn.
you're missing the point again, and you are putting words i never said into my mouth.
Noone ever said any sort of audit or control should not be done. it is actually even preferable. But since in the publishing chain there is no one above the publisher in that specific case, this is as far as it goes. Now there are public/legal instances for this.
If sony or any other editor bought anythng in there (the IP, or an exclusivity, or even the studio), then yeah, probably they would have had regular reports, audits, to see where the game is headed.
your initial point was that sony should have known. but in the current case, if sony would have gone to them to have regular reports, the studio would tell them to fuck off, and they would be right, sony is not entitled to know.
do we have a common ground?
Have you considered the implications of what you are asking for? Audit's are really expensive, time consuming, not to mention you are asking companies to give Sony access to personal records etc? Private information like salary and health data? Interviewing staff?
No company is going to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on a company wide personnel audit before showing a trailer on a blog post. That's the kind of thing that happens during an acquisition.
Holy hell the Assistant Narrative Director's account is the motherload of the worst stuff, as she is speaking out as person who was in power:
I recommend reading her entire account because these four excerpts aren't even everything. I couldn't screenshot it all.
She was one of the good ones for sure.
Damn. Just damn.
this is downright terrifying....
and this is actually very bad management. handling a team by fear is a proof of failure, always.
I think a plausible explanation is that the trailer had been booked for SoP way in advance and this news might not have reached Sony in time in order for it to be pulled. That, or they received assurances from both the devs (what remain of them) and the publisher
What kind of audit do you even think would catch any of this. Like maybe its several months ago that this deal went through, at that time everyone at the studio says everything is fine to Sony because what else would they say. Just talking to the developers isn't going to reveal anything, the developers aren't going to say anything bad that might ruin there chances of this one time deal that could make them going through. How would Sony asking to talk to the developers not be classed as extremely invasive, most developers/publishers would tell Sony to fuck off. What other investigations can they do that aren't extremely invasive and time consuming(I can't think of anything they could do that would find this stuff). If they do it for this then surely they must investigate every single game that they publish on their store.
What your asking is not possible, unless you only want first party games on the console.
Best case scenario: The game gets shoved off to another studio.
Worst case scenario: Aeon DOES die.
Worst case scenario: Aeon DOES die.
She really did push back at him on that. Since most won't click the link I want to post this exchange she shared. X: Her Y: CEO
She really went to bat for that team and it killed her health. There's some grim stuff in the full testimony.
Yeah, its the complete opposite of what you should do, how are there people this stupid still walking around and in charge of business's.
already looked him up on linked-in. likely has no idea what he is doing
Is it Focus Home Interactive that is the bad guy in all this? If so, I'm staying away from their games.
Sweet mother of Christ.
There's no reason to expect Sony knew about any of this when they agreed to put the game on State of Play.
unless they were completely hoodwinked by the management at LSG, i dont see how they didnt get at least a whiff of this
maybe the covid lockdown distracted them, but all the same itd be a pretty fucked thing to ignore if they knew
Agreed. Terrifying is a good description of the horror show described there. I really hope that once the full truth comes out Sony will drop the game like a hot potato. But at the same time, I don't get the rest of you people insisting that Sony should have vetted this company before they included it in the SoP.
Like, no.
Just listen to what you're asking in your outrage. You want a company to do a deep investigation into the behavior of every single other company it does business with? In an ideal world with unlimited time and resources, yes. Not in this world. That won't happen, and it's unfair to insist that any company should do this. I don't think I'm being anti consumer or pro big business by saying that. That's just common sense.
Been taking my time to read some of these accounts and fuck me, you hear about the shitty working environments in the videogame industry but this one takes the cake. Deliberately stress workers? Christ.
Really hope those developers land on their feet, what a shit situation. And those in charge better not step foot in a studio again.
Really hope those developers land on their feet, what a shit situation. And those in charge better not step foot in a studio again.
We don't have common ground. If I'm a Brand Manager or Studio Liaison with SIE, I'd want to know about the health of the employees behind the game we're showing. Moreover, I want to know that what I'm showing is legally sound from an IP infringement standpoint. And of course the studio and publisher isn't going to tell me to fuck off - because I'm their best shot at mass awareness among consumers. Will they lie? Maybe. But will I at least have a paper trail of attempting to gather a report? Yes.
So let me reiterate. The studio heads shouldn't have been shitty. Focus should've known. And Sony - a major vessel for third parties to showcase their games - should have audits in place. Especially given how toxic this industry is behind the scenes.
So no. No common ground here it seems.
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The tweet in the OP has about 100x the retweets of Focus' announcement tweet. They certainly succeeded at putting a spotlight on this.
Get the impression Focus was hoping to slide the game out from underneath this collapse somehow.
But nope, this is something Focus will have to deal with now.
Zero expectations as Focus has been stalling at best so far, but hopefully they'll do what they can to help out the employees wronged by Limestone Games' abusive and incompetent management. Those people, and especially the CEO, Yaroslav Lyssenko, should not be allowed in such positions.
Get the impression Focus was hoping to slide the game out from underneath this collapse somehow.
But nope, this is something Focus will have to deal with now.
Zero expectations as Focus has been stalling at best so far, but hopefully they'll do what they can to help out the employees wronged by Limestone Games' abusive and incompetent management. Those people, and especially the CEO, Yaroslav Lyssenko, should not be allowed in such positions.
