this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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He left rockstar after red dead redemption II, partly because he was tired of dealing with those execs.
Tired of dealing with greed-flated, not fully rounded humans? I can relate.
He left with a shit ton of money.
So he’s going to rehire the visa dependent labourers RG fired?
The ones that were fired 5 years after he left R*? I mean, it'd be nice if he did, but is he really at fault here?
If some of these 35 visa dependent worked for more than 9 years, I am pretty sure he was there when they were exploited to work there. There’s no indication that these workers have less than a 5 year tenure.
fyigm, amirite?
How's this a fyigm situation? He left 5 years before this particular thing happened, he had no say in it.
Now if he has actual need for these employees in his new company, I could see him hiring them there, but his new studio is in California and those employees were sacked in the UK, meaning they need a new job in the UK to keep living there. He also currently has fewer employees than the amount that R* fired. That's how small that shop is.
His brother, however, is still an exec at Rockstar. He, along with the rest of R* and Take-Two leadership has a lot to answer for.
In my eyes it's simple. His brother is not just an exec at rockstar, he's the company president. They're worth hundreds of millions of dollars and both have been in positions to shape company policy especially around labor conditions within their subsidiary.
I can all but promise that a union busting culture is not new. The influence they've had as upper executives cannot be minimal, as these guys have been the ones making the golden goose.
Odds are both houser brothers are sitting on loads of take two stock. Their performance bonuses have probably been more money than anyone on here will ever make in their lives, their kids' lives, or their grandkids' lives collectively with few if any exceptions. The crunch time issues of the past are absolutely a symptom of the disease: fyigm. Why pay anybody or treat anybody fairly when you can just keep your money?
I'm not saying others are not also to blame, but anyone who is in a top leadership post at an organization usually has a massive amount of discretion especially for those under them.
But even his brother is not top leadership at the organization. Any direct orders from their superiors at Take-two still take precedence over what Sam Houser says. In fact it's currently suspected that the order to fire came from Take-Two.
They're rich beyond the average person's imagination, but not "early Google employee" rich, let alone "started multi-billion dollar company" rich. They started as regular employees that, after making the first few golden geese, got given stock options so they wouldn't leave.
Turns out the big 100 hour crunch for RDR2 was just Dan Houser, Lazlow and 2 other senior writers and for about 3 weeks. Apparently the crunch used to be a bigger issue earlier on, but got improved after GTA V.
As I understand, the issue at R* wasn't ever really anyone's boss saying "you gotta work 70 hour weeks", it was more "the senior staff works 100 hour weeks and maybe if I only do 40, I'll not be seen as a team player". Which is still toxic, but if they've taken steps to reduce it, perhaps things aren't as bad as they seem.
The games industry is so bad because of the deadlines. The whole public announcement of "we'll release game on date X" is a huge problem, as is the fact that games make most of the money just after release, so you gotta have a new game out every few years if you want to keep the lights on - a problem R* no longer has since they've brought in billions, so I'm sure Take-Two has loosened the leash a bit on that front at least.
Hell, I'm a regular software engineer and I've worked 60-70 hour weeks. Not because I was forced to, but because the deadline was near if not passed already, the customer was getting unhappy and I knew it'd look great for my next salary review. I suspect if I was working on a public project, essentially a work of art, that millions of people will get to see and I saw my boss work 100 hours a week, I'd also be motivated to work 60 or 70 for a while. So I can kinda understand how some R* employees say there was no forced crunch time and others say they felt like they were expected to crunch.
Honestly, the Houser brothers have just always struck me as creatives who are super passionate about their work. That's the type of person that can work ridiculous hours without even realizing it and it could bend one's expectations of what others should do, but it doesn't seem to me like they've ever expected everyone else to work as much as they do, nor has either of them (or even the brothers combined) become a billionaire off over 20 years in senior leadership at a company that literally prints money for its parent company.
Check out the state of Civilization 7 at launch for what Take-Two can force. The game badly needed a delay, but didn't get one. I'm assuming the GTA delay factored into that decision. Although Civilization isn't nearly the cash cow that GTA is, this is the latest entry from a 30+ year old series and the biggest name in the 4X strategy genre.
For what it's worth, Civ 7 is a much better game now, after additional content (some free as an apology) and big monthly patches.