The worst kind of Booty call | This Week in Business

gamesindustry.biz:

Brendan Sinclair

Managing Editor

Friday 1st July 2022

This week saw Kotaku follow-up its reporting on Fallout 76 crunch at Bethesda with an account of an all-hands meeting in which Microsoft's head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty addressed the contents of the report with an assortment of flimsy and clichéd excuses.

For the sake of readability, we will go over some of the things Booty said using the Good Call, Bad Call format from our 10 Years Ago This Month columns. Well, half of the format, anyway.

BAD BOOTY CALL | "The challenge with a lot of these articles is that they look backwards, sometimes pretty far back in time."

This line bothers me for a couple reasons. First, Booty is downplaying the significance of not just the Kotaku report, but the flood of investigative reporting into abusive game companies in recent years, as if they don't paint a collective picture detailing the various ways employers exploit developers through both design and neglect, one that is as relevant now as it was when the games industry first started.

Crunch. Crunch never changes...

And while some such reports rely exclusively on former employees, the participation of current employees -- as Kotaku had for its original report, as well as for the report of the all-hands meeting -- is clear evidence that these problems have not been addressed to everyone's satisfaction.

Second, Booty's statement echoes numerous other statements from the subjects of such reports, suggesting that if something happened sufficiently long ago, it is no longer reasonable to hold anyone accountable for it.

STAT | 4 years - How long ago Fallout 76 came out.

STAT | Unknown - How long it takes for an individual to recover from burnout, to repair a broken marriage or home life, to