One of the biggest stories in recent gaming industry news is the one surrounding L.A. Noire’s developer, Team Bondi. The company was accused of housing poor working conditions and exerting excessive force in the workplace by a handful of ex-employees not too long ago. Not to mention, some anonymous current employees spoke out against the company as well, adding to the issue. According to these allegations, the company’s workplace conditions were comparable to a sweatshop in the gaming world, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.
Just recently a Lead Gameplay Programmer sent an open letter to the industry news hounds, explaining the management’s side of this story:
“I never (and in my experience, neither did any of the other managers) expected anything from my team that I didn’t expect of myself,” Heironymus writes. “Brendan [McNamara, Team Bondi founder] himself worked very long hours and few of us here in the studio are aware of how grueling the DA and motion capture shoot in LA was. During the early years of L.A. Noire, we generally worked 9 to 6. Occasionally we’d do some late nights towards the end of a milestone, but by and large it was pretty smooth sailing. Unfortunately as time went on we failed to make as much progress as we’d have liked and there was growing pressure to work longer hours. It was not any one person’s fault that we weren’t making progress, responsibility for that has to rest with the entire team. There were times when it seemed too hard to keep on going. Work kept piling up, potential release dates slipped by, and frustration grew. At these times we lost people, who legitimately decided that they weren’t willing to keep on pushing. No-one at Team Bondi is under the illusion that crunching is a good way to work and we’re actively working to learn from our mistakes for our next project. The people at Team Bondi are great to work with and I’m confident that we can make Team Bondi a leading game studio on the international stage.”
These are some pretty confident words coming from the programmer. Of course, what Heironymus is saying completely contradicts the accounts of numerous current and previous Team Bondi employees, so there may need to be some investigating to set the story straight. We’re awaiting more word from the programmer to see if we can get a bit more detail, and as soon as it comes in we will update. Until then, what is your take on this whole fiasco?