Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga developers say crunch was a 'soft-spoken blackmail'

pcgamer.com:

The biggest Lego Star Wars game to date, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, took its developer nearly five years to make, a process that included extensive crunch, mismanagement, and high staff turnover, according to a report by Polygon.

The game, which got an April 5 release date today, has been through a tumultuous development since 2017. Several current and former developers from TT Games—at both the Knutsford, UK-based studio and the Wilmslow, UK-based TT Fusion—described a culture where working overtime was effectively mandatory and concerns about the company's ongoing issues went largely unfixed.

One employee said that overtime hours were «a very soft-spoken blackmail,» and were told things like "'If people don’t start doing overtime, there’s going to be problems.'"

When the company started in 2005, TT Games presented overtime as voluntary and paid, but that changed in 2010. Department leads at the studios decided whether extra work hours were classified as overtime or «flexitime.» Overtime would result in extra pay or days off, but «flexitime,» which was capped at 40 hours, could be exchanged for late starts and additional holidays. Developers were warned about consequences for not putting in extra work time and that they would be letting down the team, and said this led to many regularly working 80 to 100 hours, six days a week, during crunch periods.

In addition to the long hours, both TT studios were hostile to women, according to Polygon's sources. Women were subjected to bullying, comments about their appearances, and were paid less than most male employees. In an April 5, 2020 gender pay gap report, women at the company only made up 2.4% of the highest paid jobs and only 8.7% of the employees in the upper