Redundancies and restructuring have become sad themes of the industry of late. Just this week, BioWare was closed by EA, amid Xbox laying off 3,200 jobs across the entire division. One place that seems safer is Rockstar, which is gearing up to release the mammoth GTA 6, and at least one ex-dev there believes it's in better shape than most.
"I never heard the question of, we need to see if we need to downsize, or if we can afford it. Rockstar can afford it," Jérémy Hartvick, an open-world designer on Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 6 who left Rockstar in 2020, tells the Kiwi Talkz podcast.
"The question is whether you can meet the expectations, and if you don't, then you might not last," he explains. "But otherwise it's not a question of money."
I should hope so, considering the kind of money-spinners Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have proven to be. Both have shifted copies non-stop since launch, the former literally charted in the top five digital games for the PS5 in Europe in September of this year.
That's without getting into GTA Online and Red Dead Online, each with large, dedicated communities who provide yet more revenue through glorious microtransactions. There's no shortage of money flowing through Rockstar. For his own exit, Hartvick points towards a personal situation that required him to be closer to home, since he's from continental Europe and was living in Scotland to work at Rockstar North's Edinburgh office, and the intense amount of labour.
"The quantity of work made it more difficult to be present there," he says about his family. While he helped launch Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 6 was still years away at that point - eight years, in hindsight - creating a situation where he wondered if he fancied that marathon, or something else.
It bears repeating, despite the job security through funding, Rockstar's currently in the middle of an employment tribunal after suddenly letting a number of staff go last year for allegedly spurious reasons. At the end of the day, it's still a corporation, just like EA, Activision, and any other major publisher.
