Rockstar Games reviews

The rumors are true. You will be treated like a slave. Project is first, your life is second or third or eleventh. Crunch for show is the norm. You are forced to be there long hours even when there is nothing to do. Everybody then panics and things have to be done for yesterday. Terrible environment, everybody is frustrated. We made the most successful game in the world and everybody was miserable! Get ready to work long hours/weekends for months or years. You will get aggressive emails demanding you to work 6 days a week as a minimum. You will be threatened to be fired if you don't work every weekend and 12 hours a day. Everything is kept in secret so you don't know when the game is supposed to be done and stay late. Then deadlines are pushed and the crunch is extended for another 6 months. This can go on for years. Extremely passive aggressive managers that treat you like a new guy working at McDonalds even if you are very skilled or senior. All managers have this "you should feel grateful that you work here" attitude. People hate them with passion. Everybody is afraid of Sam. Everybody is walking on eggshells waiting for him to explode. Managers hide from him what is really going on in the project so he doesn't explode again. Culture of fear. You will get fired if you don't come on the weekend. You will get sued if you talk badly about us. You will get sued or fired for everything! Constant feeling of "something really bad is about to happen". My health suffered from it. Managers treat you badly and are extremely moody. Sam screams at them and they scream at the people below them until it reaches you. Horrible, horrible atmosphere. Some managers are abusive to the point of illegality but are protected by management. Managers treat people who leave Rockstar as traitors or losers. HR is on Rockstar's side. You feel trapped. You hear horrible stories happening at other Rockstar studios all the time but nothing changes. Really bad technology. RAGE engine is terrible. Crappy tools that are very limiting. Feeling of having to work handcuffed. Things are not automated enough and are done by hand by people that have to stay late. Brute force is the norm. Wouldn't work here again and i don't recommend it to anyone. Forget the prestige. It's not worth it.

Where to start. Let's start with the obvious, you are not valued working at Rockstar. Unless you've been there for several years, and have kissed all the places needing kissed, you are a number without a face. This is the general feeling you're given even when you have excelled. I joined as a relative old hand in the industry, and yet still felt as though I was of no value to the company. Upon working there for I'd say nearing a year, the contracts expired. For about 3 days we all continued to work, essentially unpaid (albeit the new contracts did include those days). Legality aside, what followed made me and many others consider leaving the industry. After these few days with no contracts or feedback, our section manager received a call, approached a staff member, and asked them to go to HR. The guy left, we all looked around confused, he came back. Those were his shipping orders. He was then told to pack up, and leave the building. What happened next was the exact same thing, culling about half the department. Each time, the manager was given a call, and wandered over past everyone to get to the next person. I can say with some certainty that I only plan to meet the grim reaper once in my lifetime, but this was essentially a trial run for us all. I and a few others were thankfully secure, mainly due to our prior experience. But several others, this was their first job, and to be cut in that manner was so absymally unprofessional. After passing that trial, I knew I had to get out of dodge as soon as possible. There was literally a second QA department made up of people they dragged off the street, and they were given MORE remit to test than the actual professional department. Worse still, we had to babysit their issues, fix their mistakes and generally do their job for them fairly often. And oh, there's the times when we had to do a playtest with one of the head producers! That was a treat. A man who would sit in a playtest and blurt out half baked, often invective riddled ideas as he played, and the poor designer had to sit by and basically promise to try them out. Solid ideas like "No friendly fire, but allow friendly melee attacks", essentially allowing any trolls to kill their entire team in the spawn area. And "If you get hit by a bullet add a few miliseconds of input delay". Great idea, if you're hit once, you're now LESS able to defend yourself! Of course, none of these ideas made it into the game, because they were clearly ridiculous. But it didn't stop each and every one getting implemented on the whim of but one man. Put simply, I'm staggered that the company churns out top quality games with the processes it employs. It speaks more to the quality of tools and support than to the actual higher development itself. The designers are all hamstrung by the higher ups to change design on a nonsense whim, the lower downs are hamstrung to just kiss whatever they're told to in order to proceed. I was very thankful to find a way out of the company about a month after the big cull. But the kicker was this, the manager of the department attempted to chastise me for leaving after the cull, because "someone else would have had my spot". Like that was MY fault!? Stunning. And as a final kicker, on my exit interview, I was both promised that I would be credited on the project I'd worked nearly a year on, as well as given a free copy (which I didn't expect). But, as all you readers can likely guess by now, neither promise came to fruition. Even if I left of my own volition and was removed from the credits for that (which is a shockingly unprofessional approach anyway) all of the people who were culled were also removed from the credits... their first ever game worked on, mind you. It's such a low and pointless move by the company, but they do, and will continue to do so. I can say with happiness that I'll never return to another Rockstar studio as long as my career continues, and every person I've worked with who is an ex-Rockstar has said the same. Just avoid the whole brand, folks.