Today, IGN Approved a massive report on workplace culture, crunch and hiring practices at Bungie, the development studio behind it determination and the original gloriole Series. The report features dozens of stories from current and former Bungie employees describing a deeply toxic corporate culture and the studio’s slow evolution towards something better. For many, however, this progress is not coming nearly quickly enough.
Much of the report focuses on the game’s narrative team, which apparently saw employees face 60 to 100 hour weeks. In addition, there is a toxic culture in which managers and team leaders reportedly regularly abuse their employees. Meanwhile, Bungie claimed to be on Twitter, Blogs and Job interviews equally, to make significant progress in eliminating crunch across corporate culture, like delaying content to create better working conditions and improve the conditions for marginalized employees.
At a particularly illuminating moment, the report discusses the community’s extremely aggressive response to it Fate 2the first extension, The curse of Osiris. The story of the expansion was brutalized by the fans, which resulted in managers increasing the pressure on the narrative team. As other parts of the company moved away from the crunch, the game’s storytelling staff doubled in size to desperately produce something that would meet the incredibly high demands of audiences and shareholders alike.
Per IGN‘s report and Bungie’s own blog, the studio’s previous strategy to eliminate crunch has been to cut features and content that would take too long to complete, and delays if necessary. This is a good solution at face value. Don’t do things that you don’t have the time or resources to do. In practice, however, this resulted in the narrative team hiding their crunching practices to avoid additional feature and content cuts. The fear was that without these added features or the fine-tuning of the narrative, the team could experience more public and private backlash.
In a blog post In response to the feature, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons outlines a handful of steps the company has taken to address the concerns it contained. Delays aside, the CEO claims fired poor actors, restructured teams, and apparently re-evaluated his hiring and promotion processes from the ground up. The post also describes inviting a third party to review fair employment practices. Parsons continues to list the company’s diversity statistics at all levels of the company, with around 20% of the total workforce being women and another 20% belonging to other marginalized groups.
Despite CEO Pete Parson’s claim to create an improved work environment, change on site is much slower. Bungie is still a for-profit company, and that means getting things done as cheaply and quickly as possible. When promotions and promotions are tied to the success of your work in the marketplace, you work with a team that ends up being cut down to avoid scarcity (as were many of Bungie’s marginalized members, e.g. IGN‘s report) means languishing in a lower salary bracket with significantly fewer opportunities for advancement.
Combine these structural flaws with a group of managers known for berating employees, promoting crunch, and consistently making racist and sexist remarks, and you have a corporate culture that is actively ruining the lives of their employees. In the report, Bungie employees admitted that they have a relatively tolerable place to work when compared to other studios. However, being relatively better in hell still means you are in hell. The increased pressure on employees and executives alike required by corporate standards will almost inevitably create a workplace culture that encourages crunch, competition and discerning bosses. Bungie’s claim that it has a “We will not tolerate assholes” policy can only go so far without making significant structural changes. Still, some current and former employees are hopeful about the future of the studio and its ongoing changes.
In his blog post, Pete Parsons, CEO of Bungie says:
As CEO, it’s my job to consider both the past and the future and to be responsible for everything here and now. When we speak to the team at Bungie, read the stories, and see reports both familiar and newly emerged, it is clear that we still have a lot of work to do.
I am committed to it. We are not yet the studio we have the potential to be, but we are on our way. And we will not let these efforts rest or slow them down because we recognize that the path of inclusivity, diversity and equality is in itself the goal to which we all strive. This is critical to realizing our vision and realizing the potential of the welcoming, equitable home of creative and technical excellence that Bungie should be.
If Parsons really wants to create a better place to work for his hundreds of employees, he’d better be ready to show up at the negotiating table in due course.
Bungie is the newest major studio on allegations of ongoing harassment, sexist and racist practices in the workplace, and a complete lack of essential action to resolve these issues. It joins the ranks of Quantum dream, Ubisoft, and the studio’s own former publisher, Activision Blizzard. Each of these studios and publishers have been the focus of a reckoning in the video game industry, where decades of practices and structures are finally being questioned by the employees they are subject to.
It is these fundamental, structural concerns, along with an industry-wide billing with bad actors, who drove Activision Blizzard employees to unionize. I can only hope that their contemporaries at Bungie, Ubisoft, EA and across the AAA and independent scene alike will follow suit. It’s fucking time.
.
