The Fridge

Days after launching their first indie game, everyone responsible for publishing it was laid off: ‘We had a Slack channel with everyone in it, and then you see them leaving one by one’

Chris Stair, one of the creators of action platformer Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, was in Kyoto celebrating the game’s launch at indie festival BitSummit when he got the news: The publisher he’d trusted with all of the launch logistics was effectively gone. All 36 employees had been laid off. “We had a Slack…

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Naughty Dog developers reportedly hit with mandatory overtime to finish an internal demo for its upcoming sci-fi game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet

After years of being accepted as just how things are done, crunch—working horrifically long hours for weeks or months at a stretch in order to meet an arbitrary deadline set by an executive who’s probably still going home on time every night—is now widely frowned upon in the videogame industry. But it also seems to…

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