News of mass layoffs, terrible working conditions, and strikes over said conditions has unfortunately become quite frequent in the gaming industry. This time, it’s the GreedFall 2 developers declaring a strike, with the workers’ action coming just three weeks before their game was scheduled to ship in early access.
Earlier today, members of the Parisian game studio Spiders published an open letter through STJV, an independent game developer union based in France. The 20-page document was addressed to the studio’s management and detailed the myriad of issues the GreedFall 2 developers will be striking against, including gender pay parity, lower wages than industry standard, lack of transparency or employment security, and more.
The letter and strike reportedly follow an internally published open letter and call for action as far back as January that was largely ignored by management. Since then, the devs allegedly had to deal with doing extra uncompensated work beyond their job descriptions, sudden changes to benefits arrangements, and inadequate accommodation for external factors like the summer heatwave or the Paris Summer Olympics.
The letter also claims poor management of production cycles was to blame for the postponed releases of the studio’s next titles. Steelrising was “released late after an insufficient debugging and optimization phase,” while frequent in-house budget reworks are now being held responsible for GreedFall 2 delaying its early access multiple times.
Furthermore, the letter states early access for the game wasn’t in the schedule at all until a deadline was suddenly imposed upon the devs midway through production. Apparently, burnout from overwork, a lack of transparency in schedule, and loss of knowledge from high turnover has culminated in a “painful” early release.
The letter was also skeptical about the studio meeting its full release date next year, given “production is underwater” and “there is so much left to do.”
So far, management at Spiders has allegedly refused compromises, tried to suppress calls for action, and been uncooperative as a whole. Hopefully, the public nature of the open letter will lay the grounds for better negotiations instead of anything as drastic as the mass layoff at Bungie last year. In the meantime, it might be smart to temper any expectations about GreedFall 2 and the studio’s as-of-yet unannounced second project.
