Some GTA 6 developers are passionately rejecting Rockstar's guidance that the push for workers to return to office will ultimately help make a better sequel.
In late February, Rockstar senior leadership asked previously remote-working GTA 6 developers to return to the office five days a week in the sequel's final stretch of development for "productivity" and "security" reasons.
Now, speaking to Aftermath under condition of anonymity, two employees are pushing back against the notion that in-office work will have the "tangible benefits" Rockstar cited when pushing for a return to office.
Speaking to the security aspect of the situation, which refers to the prevalence of leaks, which has been particularly bad for GTA 6, there were varying degrees of understanding.
"Security is definitely the argument that's easier to take in good faith because we have had leaks, and they're a serious problem," said one Rockstar employee. "We need to do as much as we can to make it harder for attackers to get into our systems."
Another employee, however, argued that leaks can happen with in-office work just as much as remote work. "We've historically had leaks regardless of what setup we had. Back with [Red Dead Redemption 2] we had leaks around the launch of that game. It's never going to be 100 percent fully secure. People will be motivated to leak our content because there's a great deal of interest in the products that we make."
There's little disagreement among the employees interviewed, however, that it's possible for most employees to be just as productive from home as in the office.
"If you're a programmer, it's quite a bit easier for you to work remotely than it is for other roles involved in acting and mocap and things like that," said one Rockstar employee. "But the reality is, for probably the majority of people in the development staff, you don't need to be in the office every single day to do your job."
"If we look at our previous project, [Red Dead Redemption 2], where we were working five days in the office, we're still working remotely with all of these other studios," said another Rockstar staffer. "So whether you were in the office or not, you were still doing remote work. ... You work with so many people on so many different teams. A good majority of them will not be at the place where you work."
Furthermore, an employee pointed to Rockstar's current remote sick policy in which "slightly ill" workers can continue working from home as a boon for productivity, and something that "will be completely lost ... That's going to result in a loss of productivity for the company."
"We're quite worried that we're gonna lose personnel over this or it will have a large negative impact on people's health," said another Rockstar employee. "It's a very anti-parent move. For people with disabilities, it's a massive problem."
Perhaps even more crucially, some Rockstar employees are worried the return to office will set a harrowing precedent for re-introducing the studio's infamous crunch culture that made headlines back in 2018.
"We're concerned about going back to that," said one Rockstar employee. "I've been through a couple of projects, both of which had crunch. The first one was extremely difficult. I had way less gray hair back then. ... We want to continue the strides we've made as a company to remove that toxic culture."
Some Rockstar employees speaking to Aftermath expressed concern that Rockstar's in-office mandate is simply a means of "quietly laying people off" without severance pay by making work "unbearable" or inaccessible. The employees are concerned that some of their colleagues will choose to simply step away from GTA 6 and Rockstar altogether when faced with the decision to prioritize their health over work.
"Having people who've been through [the end game of a project before], who know what to do in that situation and know what's the best decision to make to solve a problem, is better than having people who haven't had that experience – who might make mistakes they otherwise wouldn't if there wasn't this pressure," said one Rockstar employee. "Losing key people in teams would be very, very bad."
GTA 6 is set to launch sometime in 2025.
