For just a moment there, it felt like the bad old days all over again.
Striking Distance Studios CEO Glen Schofield's ill-judged tweet about the seemingly brutal crunch his employees are going through – boasting, rather than lamenting, about the 12-15 hour days and 6-7 day weeks they are doing, and insisting that it was being done out of passion rather than anyone forcing them to do so – could have fallen through a time warp from twenty years ago. It didn't, though; it was posted just last week, and that thankfully means that it met with a storm of criticism leading it to be swiftly deleted, retracted, and apologised for.
That, and I say this unironically, is progress. Masochistic attitudes to crunch, accompanied with sneering at the notion of work-life balance or a studio having any responsibility for its employees' physical and mental health, have not disappeared from the industry – far from it – but at least we've reached a place where they're unacceptable enough to get a negative backlash.