Staff allege Ori developers Moon Studios is an "oppressive workplace"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Current and former developers of Moon Studios have alleged that the company is an "oppressive workplace", citing offensive jokes, harsh feedback and inconsistent direction by its founders. Several developers also alleged that the founders encouraged crunch. Moon Studios are the creators of Ori And The Blind Forest and Ori And The Will Of The Wisps, both critically lauded and commercially successful platformers published by Microsoft.

CW: The report includes mention of anti-semitimism, rape, use of the r-slur.

"It’s an oppressive workplace, for sure. But it’s hard to pinpoint one thing because, in isolation, all of these incidents, if they happen once, you would think they are small things," one game developer told VentureBeat. "When you’re dealing with that for [multiple] years, you’re going to see the decline of people’s mental health."

Moon Studios is a fully remote studio with 80 employees. Face to face meetings and video calls were said to be rare, with almost all company communication conducted via text chat.

Most of the criticisms from employees, speaking anonymously, are directed at Thomas Mahler and Gennadiy Korol, Moon Studios' two founders. For example, in a transcript from an internal chat channel shown to VentureBeat, Mahler "joked" about "devious plans to kill the Jews by making them work to death through game development." Mahler's co-founder Korol is Jewish.

"Were the founders both belligerent? Yes. In my opinion. Was it limited to those two? Yes. Unprofessional on an hourly basis? Yes. Harassing? Yes," one game developer told VentureBeat.

Much of the criticism concerns the way feedback is delivered within the studio, with Mahler reportedly rejecting work by saying it is "shit" without explaining