* Rockstar Games announced on 28th February 2024, that workers will have to be
in the office 5 days a week from 15th April 2024 as remote working provisions
are withdrawn for the majority of staff.
* The news comes one year after 170 Rockstar Games workers in the UK signed a
petition opposing mandatory 3-day office work, in one of the UK games
industry’s biggest ever trade union actions.
* Workers belonging to the IWGB Game Workers Union accuse Rockstar of “broken
promises”, an
Tbh, game studios often require special equipment such as dev kits and high-end PCs for development. It makes sense that they might not want to send this equipment home, especially if it is an unreleased console"s dev kit. Game studios honestly seem more justified in not having WFH
Dev kits are accessed remotely. High-end PC 's are accessed remotely. Everything is done remotely. Hardware stays on-site. Source? Am game dev who works remotely full-time, using 4K streaming.
Maybe the tools have changed since last I worked in the industry (or maybe we weren’t good at using all the features), but I never saw that anyone had remote access to the devkits. I could remote into my workstation, but it surely was not the best way to work.
Yeah, Microsoft Remote Desktop is relatively slow but works for most workflows. For more demanding/responsive stuff with higher framerates (games), try Parsec (https://parsec.app/), it’s great. It has controller pass-through as well, at least for sony. I’m not sure about other brands.
Not every dev is compiling code to run on a devkit tho? Also, not gamedev, but surely they’re not running a new build every day
Depends on the studio. There will be a lead platform, and if that platform is a console, then a majority will run on a devkit.
In the studio I worked in, we ran new builds almost twice a day. That doesn’t include the iterative changes you make if you are a programmer. If you don’t run new builds contantly, that means you aren’t doing any actual work if you are on the engineering side. If you are in art you might not really screw around with too many builds. If you are a director or producer, you might not either if you’re bad at your job.