Cloud Imperium Games, the developer of Star Citizen, has mandated its developers to work seven days a week to meet deadlines for Citizencon on October 19th.

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[–] PunchingWood 54 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

An internal email sent to staff yesterday states that the company needs to “double down over the next 18 days to make sure that once again we create an amazing experience for our community.” This includes finalizing patch 3.24.2 for Star Citizen and having a Squadron 42 demo showcase for Chapter 1.

I'd probably be so inclined to just call in sick every weekend or something. Unless the employees have really been slacking and have no right, I'd not bother with doubling down.

Sounds a lot like my previous jobs where the boss would sometimes tell us to "make a career" for ourselves by working overtime, and ask us to give our absolute 200%, stating how much the clients pay "us" for some big project and how we should really give our absolute best (despite management often briefing us waayyy too late on projects and deadlines), telling us to never have a 9 to 5 mentality, yadda yadda. But never actually bothered to reflect this in our salaries whenever we did put the extra effort in. (And the occasional company pizza slice doesn't count as a reward)

It never mattered how much effort we put into something, it just meant that the next day the next thing would just pop-up and expectation became we kept putting that 200% into every project. Morale often just dropped to absolute zero around the place. Especially when after all that the boss shows up in his brand spanking new car, while telling us we should be happy to have a job, and even telling everyone they're replaceable.

Star Citizen feels like it's exactly this kind of work ethics. Now they gotta put in the extra work to be ready for their next big presentation. But after that it's probably the same song until the next one all over again.