Former Sledgehammer Boss Clumsily Walks Back Pro-Crunch Comments

While it’s great to see the apology to his team, who are of course the people in such circumstances most likely to be affected by bosses who extol the virtues of working themselves far too hard, there are a lot of omissions in this follow-up. Given that Jason’s tweet including the original has seen over 25,000 likes, it’s perhaps naive to believe deleting the first tweet would do the trick and make the bad bits go away. So to gloss over the bit where he said how his staff were working those back-breaking hours through “exhaustion” and “Covid” is perhaps not a brilliant look.

The ol’ “Anyone who knows me,” gambit is never a great start, not least when it in no way suggests anything to the contrary of his previous remarks. But to summarise a tweet in which he proselytizes working through exhaustion, not stopping for meals, and doing it all with the expectation that anyone working for him would put up with it because of “luv,” as saying how “proud I was of the effort and hours” is just bonkers. Nope, that isn’t at all what he said.

Hopefully this will be a watershed moment for employees at Striking Distance, and such brutal hours will be made unacceptable. But it exemplifies an all-too-common issue in games development, where a boss’s attitude toward over-working employees creates a workplace where such efforts become tacitly expected. One where staff naturally assume that if they aren’t seen putting in as much work as the person next to them, then they will be deemed less “passionate,” and thus lose out on opportunities.

We’ve reached out to Striking Distance to ask if there will now be any new policies put in place to protect staff from such extreme work hours, and we will let you know if they get back to us.