Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has led to extensive crunch at TT Games

polygon.com:

In late 2017, development studio TT Games began work on Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga at a time when dozens inside the company were at odds with management. Citing frustration over tight development schedules, the company’s crunch culture, and outdated development tools, more than 20current andformer TT Games employees tell Polygon that calls for change over the years had largely been ignored.

Multiple people who worked at the studio remember breaking down outside of work hours because of the workload and some of the stresses they were under.

“It was a very soft-spoken blackmail,” one former employee says. “‘If people don’t start doing overtime, there’s going to be problems,’” although the problems were never specified.

Some former staff even came up with a term to describe their experiences at the studio, referring to them as “PTTSD.”

With The Skywalker Saga — an adaptation of all nine main films in the Star Wars series — management promised employees a longer development timeline and a new engine. Unfortunately, this did little to improve the situation, according to employees. Multiple staffers say that management ignored warnings about switching to NTT, a new engine being developed internally, and say that the longer time frame was unsuccessful in alleviating crunch.

Over the past few months, Polygon has spoken to more than 30 current and former TT Games employees, all of whom spoke anonymously due to nondisclosure agreements and a desire to avoid negative repercussions. They opened up about the studio’s challenging work culture over the last decade and a half and The Skywalker Saga’s difficult development cycle. Two years have passed since TT Games and publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced