The topic of crunch has been an active one in the last few years, since reports on studios like Rockstar, Epic Games, and Telltale have highlighted accounts of crunch culture during development, and now Variety reports on a similar culture at Netherrealm Studios, who has just released Mortal Kombat 11.
A Twitter thread from April talked about this culture of crunch, but Variety's sources are allegedly a mixture of current and former employees and contractors, talking about multiple Mortal Kombat games other than 11.
These sources talk of the pressure to work long hours, or face the threat of being fired or denied a promotion to a better position. This includes 60 to 70 hour weeks, seven days a week since January - according to one employee - caused by mismanagement like a January marketing event that allegedly put the studio behind.
"Everybody said from the get-go, 'No, this isn't going to impact any development time at all; we should be fine. We'll use the content we have now,'" the employee said. "Little did our creative director, our publishing team and marketing know that we were already about three months behind on the entire game.'"
"So they had to pull everybody off, set everybody back another month and a half so we could we could make ourselves look good for MK Day," he continued. "So that set back design, that set back QA [quality assurance], programming, animation — mostly every department had to start playing catch-up."
The report claims other full-time staff members resorted to living at the studio during intense periods, and that for temporary positions Netherrealm used contractors like students from DePaul University, willing to work on triple-A titles.
Those aren't the only issues identified in the studio though, as there are claims of gender discrimination as well as "loud, obnoxious, super toxic" employees. Former QA analyst Rebecca Rothschild said the following in a statement:
"At the same time, I have never been more aware of my gender and insignificance at a workplace. I left with scars and fear of an industry I am deeply passionate about. I don't like being a news story. I have nothing to gain from this professionally. I just want management to at least consider the other side and try to be better."
"As far as being aware of my gender, it was a lot of things," she continued. "The small amount of women working there, the even smaller amount of women who were full time or had any kind of real influence. Being given a disgusting nickname I won't repeat by a set of co-workers I never spoke to."
"Sexist, transphobic and generally toxic behavior was rampant, likely due to the fact that people were working 80-plus hours a week for months on end and there was no accountability for such behavior," another former female employee added. "I heard from multiple people that a cabal of male [developers] had nicknames for all of the women in the office, including 'Silver Fox', 'DB'/'Dyke B****' and 'Morph,' in reference to a trans employee. A co-worker once jokingly called an 'Injustice Mobile' character who did bleeding damage over time 'Time-of-the-Month Wonder Woman' in the presence of two leads, and referring to women as 'bitches' was commonplace."
Even with these complaints, the report alleges that women were discouraged from taking concerns to HR.
"The entire studio had a bro-centric culture where complaints about women, in general, were a daily occurrence," one source explained. "'Sometimes you just want to slap a b***' is a thing I got to read in a chat. Calling someone out for bad behavior was met with over-exaggerated pleas to not take it to HR. When I did talk about the culture problems to full-timers, I usually got the line of 'at least it's not as bad as Midway."
"I knew of multiple women who went to HR with various complaints of harassment, only to be dismissed with comments along the line of, 'Well, not everyone has to get along,'" a source added. "So I avoided going to HR, with the exception of one particularly egregious rape joke that was emailed out. There was no follow-up from HR aside from, 'I'll look into it.'"
Another employee filed a report with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission due to incidents at the studio, but Warner Bros. Entertainment lawyers have denied wrongdoing, citing some complaints as "work-a-day gripes". The EEOC eventually dismissed the complaints, and the employee was advised to pursue a lawsuit.
There are various other examples given in Variety's report, and Netherrealm has responded to the claims with an official statement:
"At NetherRealm Studios, we greatly appreciate and respect all of our employees and prioritize creating a positive work experience. As an equal opportunity employer, we encourage diversity and constantly take steps to reduce crunch time for our employees. We are actively looking into all allegations, as we take these matters very seriously and are always working to improve our company environment. There are confidential ways for employees to raise any concerns or issues."
We will keep you updated as this story develops.
