This year's The Game Awards saw Naughty Dog walk away with seven awards for The Last of Us Part 2, but Kotaku's report that followed didn't sit well with veteran dev George Broussard.
Just to clue you in on the context of Broussard's rant, Kotaku's report immediately followed the ceremony, arguing that games made under crunch conditions don't deserve "The Best Direction" awards. They compared them to Hades, an indie games that saw no crunch.
"You have no idea what it takes to ship world beating AAA games and you take the word of disgruntled ex-employees vs the 100's that are happy there. Also comparing a 20-man indie to a 300 person studio is stupid", he said.
Broussard eventually had to clarify that his tweet was not in support of crunch but rather criticism of Kotaku's poor timing. More precisely, he insisted that the timing was purely in the service of "clicks and outrage", and not because of actual concern.
"Don't know a single studio that doesn't try their best to limit & mitigate crunch hours or eliminate it. Fact is making large AAA game with 100s of people is a very hard problem & things happen & timelines slip. It's not all "bad management". Studios do their best. Stop vilifying them", he said.
It didn't take long for Broussard's Twitter to be absolutely swarmed with all sorts of opinions, although to be fair - many of them were not coming for discussion. There is something quite telling in the fact that openly mean and malicious actors act as if their malice is highly moral, just and in service of humanity.
Broussard eventually gave up fighting the masses, and it goes without saying that not a single developer or studio head was responsible - it was mostly people who play games as a hobby.
In one of such replies, he said, "Yeah well I'm not wrong and I have the industry experience and knowledge to back it up, vs say, Kotaku who's just triggered and shitting on a studio for social points. ND is an amazing studio and you can bet they are also continually tweaking process trying to get better."
The Last Of Us Part 2
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