How do you learn from failures that succeed? | This Week in Business
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Friday 21st January 2022
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.
Yesterday, Polygon published a report on crunch culture at Lego Star Wars developer TT Games. It's lengthy and well-researched, with plenty of details about how unpleasant working there could be.
It should also be sadly familiar to anyone who has read previous studio tell-alls, from the bullying bosses to the ways employees were pressured to work unreasonable hours to the studio's pledges to improve on crunch and subsequent backsliding into old patterns.
But there was one part of the story that really stood out for me.
QUOTE | "They say management told employees early on that The Skywalker Saga was supposed to mark changes in the company's working conditions, but it eventually grew into what many now refer to as TT Games' biggest project yet, with management coining the phrase 'strive for 85' to refer to the game's potential Metacritic score -- the company's highest Metacritic score at present is 83 for Lego Marvel Superheroes on PS4. This, they say, required staff to be in and out of overtime for years to achieve the company's ambitions." - An excerpt from Polygon's feature on TT Games.
Lego Star Wars has been delayed three times and in development for five years
This is perhaps the biggest failure of management detailed in the piece. Having recognized a problem with the studio's penchant for crunch, TT Games pledged to cut down on that and improve working conditions for its developers. At the same time, it set a higher
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