Rockstar Games, the New York-based subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive responsible for the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises, has occupied a contentious position in industry-wide debates about developer wellbeing. Following Jason Schreier's October 2018 Kotaku exposé on "death march" crunch periods during Red Dead Redemption 2 development, and co-founder Dan Houser's now-infamous remark that the team "were working 100-hour weeks" (Schreier 2018), Rockstar publicly committed to a series of cultural reforms. This report examines the company's stated wellness initiatives, its anti-crunch measures, and employee feedback as documented by reporters at Kotaku, Bloomberg, The Guardian, Vulture and Wikipedia aggregations of primary sources. The picture that emerges is mixed: management has introduced flexible scheduling, mental-health resources and a "no-mandatory-crunch" policy, while simultaneously facing serious allegations of union-busting in 2025 and ongoing pressure tied to the unprecedented scope of Grand Theft Auto VI.
Rockstar's wellbeing discourse cannot be understood without the 2018 Schreier investigation, which interviewed 77 current and former employees and documented systemic overtime across studios in Edinburgh, New England, San Diego and Lincoln. While Rockstar disputed the characterisation of average hours as "self-selecting for the most extreme ends of the scale" (Schreier 2018), the company acknowledged that evening and weekend work had occurred. The Wikipedia summary of the affair notes that "most current and former Rockstar employees said they had been asked or felt compelled to work nights and weekends, with many reporting working an average of 55 to 60 hours a week" (Wikipedia 2025a). This followed the 2010 "Rockstar Spouse" open letter from Rockstar San Diego partners, which the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) judged "exploitative and harmful" (Wikipedia 2025b).
In direct response to the 2018 reporting, Sam Houser and Rockstar's head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe authorised an internal communication programme that included:
Harold Goldberg's Vulture feature on Red Dead Redemption 2 development quoted multiple Rockstar leads describing post-2018 efforts to "build a sustainable studio" rather than burn through staff per release cycle (Goldberg 2018).
Rockstar's anti-crunch stance, articulated through 2020-2023 internal communications and external statements, comprises several pillars. First, the company stated that overtime would be voluntary rather than mandated, with no negative performance review consequences for declining additional hours. Second, project planning was restructured to extend development timelines: the multi-year delay of Grand Theft Auto VI (now targeted for late 2026) has been explicitly framed by Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick as preferable to "bad things happen[ing]" when games ship too early (Valentine 2025). Third, Rockstar dispersed motion-capture, QA and engineering workloads across its global studio network—Dundee, India, Toronto, New England and the newly acquired Australia studio—to reduce single-site bottlenecks that historically produced "death march" conditions (Wikipedia 2025c).
The shift is consistent with broader industry movement documented in the Crunch (video games) Wikipedia entry, which records that "since the early 2010s, some companies in the industry have taken steps to eliminate crunch" while noting "little progress had been made in the decade after the EA Spouse controversy" (Wikipedia 2025b, citing Williams 2015 in The Guardian).
Employee sentiment, as captured by trade press, has been ambivalent. Anonymous developers told Kotaku in 2019-2020 that Edinburgh and New York offices had become "noticeably calmer" and that managers were "actively pushing people to go home" (Schreier 2020). However, the October 2025 firings of 30 to 40 employees in Canada and the United Kingdom—who Rockstar said were dismissed "for gross misconduct" related to confidential information sharing—were characterised by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as "the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry" (Wikipedia 2025a, citing Bloomberg). IWGB president Alex Marshall stated the workers had been attempting to unionise via Discord. UK Labour MP Chris Murray subsequently raised the matter at Prime Minister's Questions, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling the firings "deeply concerning" (Wikipedia 2025a). A Glasgow Employment Tribunal declined interim relief in January 2026, finding it unlikely that trade-union membership was the principal reason for dismissal—though a full hearing remains pending.
This dual narrative—publicly-stated wellbeing investment alongside contested labour-relations incidents—mirrors patterns identified in the academic literature on EA Spouse and the "crisis of video game labour" (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2006).
Rockstar's wellbeing programmes represent a substantive, if incomplete, departure from pre-2018 norms. The combination of extended development timelines, flexible scheduling and mental-health benefits constitutes meaningful structural change. The 2025 union-busting allegations, however, indicate that the company's tolerance for collective worker voice remains limited, and that "wellbeing" as practiced by Rockstar is management-mediated rather than worker-led. For Grand Theft Auto VI specifically, the test will be whether the final pre-launch months replicate the Red Dead Redemption 2 "death march" or vindicate the post-2018 reforms.
Dyer-Witheford, N. and de Peuter, G. (2006) '"EA Spouse" and the crisis of video game labour: enjoyment, exclusion, exploitation, exodus', Canadian Journal of Communication, 31(3), pp. 599-617. doi:10.22230/cjc.2006v31n3a1771.
Goldberg, H. (2018) 'How the West was digitized: the making of Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2', Vulture, 14 October. Available at: http://www.vulture.com/2018/10/the-making-of-rockstar-games-red-dead-redemption-2.html (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
McPhillips, A. (2022) 'Rockstar Games improves its gender pay gap issues', Game Rant, 6 April. Available at: https://gamerant.com/rockstar-games-gender-pay-gap-improvements/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Schreier, J. (2018) 'Inside Rockstar Games' culture of crunch', Kotaku, 23 October. Available at: https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1829936466 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Schreier, J. (2020) Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made. New York: Harper Paperbacks.
Valentine, R. (2025) 'Take-Two CEO is "highly confident" on new GTA 6 release date', IGN, 6 November. Available at: https://www.ign.com/articles/take-two-ceo-is-highly-confident-on-new-gta-6-release-date (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025a) Rockstar Games. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_Games (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Crunch (video games). Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025c) Rockstar North. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_North (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Williams, I. (2015) 'Crunched: has the games industry really stopped exploiting its workforce?', The Guardian, 18 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/18/crunched-games-industry-exploiting-workforce-ea-spouse-software (Accessed: 14 May 2026).