Undead Labs Studio is One Of The Subdivisions That Has Been Added To Microsoft In Recent Years, Has Been Involved With A Lot Of Margins; we Have Been Looking Into These Stories.

State Of Decay 3, The gaming industry is not having a good day with its employees. Most regular gamblers are paid less than they should be, and the gamblers’ share is tiny compared to the vast profits that managers receive and the particular points from shareholders.

On the other hand, we see reports from behind the scenes in various studios every day. From small and independent companies to the largest studios, they are in a bad situation, and their employees have many complaints of abuse.

The need for a fundamental change in the mechanism of gaming companies is felt more and more, and many giants in the gaming industry agree with this. However, we still see the sad news of issues and problems in the studios, which show that without spending enough time and Of course, spending can not get rid of these problems, and even companies whose managers have repeatedly spoken about the importance of a healthy work environment are involved in these events.

A month ago, Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming (Microsoft’s top gaming organization), addressed the DICE Awards 2022 and said: “Our responsibility is evident and straightforward: we have to do everything we can.

“To make sure that every person in the gaming industry acts with dignity and respect.”

Spencer has made many efforts in this field for a long time and has repeatedly said the importance of working in a suitable work environment. Still, on the other hand, he has admitted that he and other game industry managers in the past should and perhaps did not stand up to these problems.

“Unless we can provide a safe and secure environment for every person in the gaming industry, we have failed in this mission,” he said at the DICE Awards 2022. If we tolerate even a small amount of abuse and do not think about eliminating it, we have failed in this case.

“Every time someone feels insecure in a studio and concludes that the gaming industry is not the right place for them to work, we fail.”

Many studios can consider Spencer’s talk. One of them is Undead Labs, the State of Decay game series creator with elements of fear and survival and the base’s construction, which Microsoft purchased about four years ago.

The studio is located inside an old brick building in downtown Seattle, about 20 minutes from the two-square-kilometer Microsoft facility in the city; A company that has undergone significant changes since its acquisition by Microsoft and is in the process of evolving from a small, stand-alone studio to a pre-party subsidiary with the potential to produce massive AAA games.

Undead Labs grew from a small, independent studio to a larger company in a short time but could not adapt well.

Undead Labs has doubled these days, but its charismatic founder has lost it. They are working on State of Decay 3, which is still pre-production after a few years. On the other hand, these days are witnessing allegations of mismanagement, overwork, harassment, and homosexuality. We are inside the studio.

A reporter for Kotaku recently spoke with 12 current and former members of the Undead Labs studio, all of whom have asked not to be named for fear of jeopardizing their job security. Despite the problems they have in the studio, some of these people are satisfied with working there and say that it is not too late to improve the situation and the studio atmosphere can improve by fixing the problems.

However, most of them say that they have faced various crises over the past few years since Microsoft acquired the studio and are concerned that its management has not learned the lessons during this time and will not fix the problems.

Of course, some studio members raised these concerns from the very beginning. They were concerned about what would happen to the atmosphere of this independent studio after Microsoft acquired Undead Labs.

They have now come to the conclusion that Microsoft’s management of the studio has damaged it, and while the studio’s appearance has changed and grown, too much freedom of action has been lost to its detriment; The vertical space that Microsoft executives have for their subsidiaries, in cases like Undead Labs, leads to mismanagement and reduced performance.

“We were afraid that Microsoft would make a big change in the studio’s culture, but instead, everything inside the studio broke down, and Microsoft could have helped us more,” said one former studio member.

When Kotaku’s reporter approached Microsoft officials to ask them about the Undead Labs incident, the company officials preferred to summarize everything in a statement instead of answering various questions; Explanations provided by Matt Butty, Head of Xbox Game Studios:

“All Xbox studios will have access to a variety of resources and assistance and management guidance as needed to understand better their capabilities and the culture that governs the studio.

Of course, how each studio is supported is different and depends on the specific circumstances of that studio. Still, all of them, besides having their human resources department, are also directly related to Microsoft Human Resources and can work with other company subsidiaries.

And form joint teams to achieve their goals. At the same time, all Microsoft employees, including members of Xbox Studios, must be trained in how to work in a business environment, including how to behave in the company and deal with harassment and the like.

Undead Labs Studios has moved forward with positive changes over the years, and we have tremendous confidence in their work on State of Decay 3; “It’s going to be one of Microsoft’s most ambitious games.”

Undead Labs Studios has been looking to hire more people with gender and racial diversity in recent times.

According to a Microsoft spokesman, the positive changes Undead Labs mentioned by Matt Butt include a whole new set of management teams, recruiting more gender-diverse employees in 2021, of which 42%.

The new staff consists of women and people (people who do not identify themselves exclusively as male or female), hiring people of racial and ethnic diversity who make up 29% of the studio’s new members, in addition to the March 2022 Health Questionnaire.

It gives to team members, and 84% said they would recommend Undead Labs to other game developers.

But some current and former members of the studio say that these figures do not show all the issues behind the recent years, and on the other hand, some time should spend on new hires, and these people should spend more time in the studio to get better. Comment on working conditions there.

“Until recently, the studio’s culture made it not easy for you to work there unless you were a white man,” said one current Undead Labs member. “Of course, the situation has improved over the past six months, and unlike in the past, we are seeing more people with gender and racial diversity being hired.”

But back to the days when Undead Labs was starting.

Jeff Stern founded the studio in 2009, having worked on Blizzard Entertainment on such works as Diablo, StarCraft, and World of Warcraft. He left Blizzard in 2000 and started working on his new MMO called Guild Wars with the founding of ArenaNet Studios.

In 2007, two of Strain’s colleagues, Brent Fitzgerald and Doug Williams, proposed to him a zombie-based MMO, and later, when Strain founded Undead Labs, he hired Fitzgerald and Williams to implement the idea.

Finally, the game was released with a change from the original idea, in the form of a zombie-based open-world role-playing game called the State of Decay. But a few years later, while Undead Labs is currently working on State of Decay 3, Strain is no longer in the studio and is working on his new company, Possibility Space.

Jeff Stern and the Possibility Space studio logo

A former Undead Labs member says of Jeff Stern: “I have never seen anyone in my gaming career which, like Jeff, could encourage his employees to work hard on video games.

“The amount of energy he put into this way attracted amazing people to Undead Labs and created a culture within the studio where everyone was excited about producing compelling work. There was a sense of power and trust within the studio.”

Microsoft released the State of Decay in 2013 as an Xbox Live Arcade, which, while not as ambitious as the initial ideas for a zombie MMO (known as the Class4 codename), overall.

It was an attractive game that was successful, received positive reviews, and experienced outstanding sales. The same thing led the studio to pursue its second project in the State of Decay world, this time producing the game for the Xbox One, while the dream of Class4 remained in the corner of the team members’ minds.

The number of team members gradually increased from a massive studio in the early years to a 60-member team in 2018 with the release of State of Decay 2; A more extensive work than before, which, of course, still suffers from a lack of good polishing and optimization, and this issue also had an impact on its critiques.

Most members of Undead Labs were not aware of Microsoft’s acquisition of the studio, and they found out at Microsoft E3.

A month after the game was released, team members were shocked to hear that the studio had sold to Microsoft; “I’m excited to welcome Undead Labs to join Microsoft Studios when Phil Spencer came of age during the Microsoft conference at E3 2018,” he said.

Undead Labs was thus one of the studios that added to the Microsoft gaming studio family at the time; This was something that no one but a few high-ranking members of the studio knew about, and most Undead Labs staff found out about it during the Microsoft conference, and that was just one of their surprises.

The main surprise for the team members was that Jeff Stern, as the founder and head of the studio, always behaved as if he wanted Undead Labs always to remain independent.

Even shortly before the announcement of the studio’s sale to Microsoft, Strain spoke in a passionate and emotional speech to team members about the need to remain independent; The rumors did not match the news of the studio’s sale, leading some team members to believe that Strain was speaking only because of the hot market and the studio’s rising price.

“The situation was extraordinary, and the situation had changed so quickly that some of the old members of the studio who were there from the beginning were shocked by it,” said one former team member.

Phil Spencer is talking about buying Undead Labs.

Kotaku’s reporter also asked Jeff Stern for an interview at the time of reporting to answer some questions, but he chose not to say anything to Kotaku. Instead, he wrote a statement on his page on the Medium platform.

He said in part that as the sole founder of Undead Labs, he and his wife only received money for the sale of the studio but preferred to give 20% of it to key members of the studio, including them. Participate.

He also said that he would never recall speaking about the studio remaining independent and that Undead Labs had been accepting purchase requests from other companies for years.

In another part of Jeff Stern’s statement, we read:

“Before Microsoft acquired Undead Labs in 2018, it was clear that the studio’s future focus was on the State of Decay series. Given the expectations of State of Decay 3, a budget Far higher than previous studio projects, we needed to produce it.

When you own an independent studio, you have to take full financial responsibility if you fail to produce a project and do not earn a decent income. Since State of Decay 3 was supposed to be a much more extensive work than previous projects. We were not able to finance it.

“That’s why we agreed to Microsoft’s offer to protect the team members’ job position and not destroy the studio culture developed over the past eight years.”

As director of Undead Labs Studios, Jeff Stern has long considered selling it to a large company.

On the other hand, the State of Decay series of games is essential for Microsoft, and the executives of this company need such works to enrich Netflix’s shared service, such as Game Pass.

For example, it did not matter that State of Decay 2 received poor reviews at its release. It was enough for Microsoft to put it on the gameplay and develop various updates and add-on packages to increase its popularity day by day. We learned in the past that the number of users of the game had reached more than 10 million.

Following the success of State of Decay 2, the question arose among team members as to whether they could finally move on to the zombie-centric MMO idea that was supposed to be made a decade ago. Or should they follow in the footsteps of previous versions of State of Decay and offer a more or less similar work, albeit with higher quality and fewer flaws that fans of the series can enjoy?

 According to current and former studio members, the views differed, and everyone had their own opinion.

Of course, this is not uncommon in game studios, and there is often a lot of controversy during the game development period.

But Undead Labs’s problem was that they had to think about supporting State of Decay 2 and planning for a new project. Because the game, which was well-received as a live service, needed more content, and things like the Heartland expansion pack in 2019 and the Juggernaut Edition in 2020, which were released in this direction, took a long time.

Team members took; An issue that shows that a game’s live service and its benefits and reasonable profits can be a spell for the studio to stop in that project and not move on to the next project.

As discussions continued on Andes Labs Studio’s third project, its directors divided the team members into different groups, each working on their ideas and exciting features for the next project.

But the bridge between these groups was not well-formed, and there was no complete oversight of their activities, and this led to overtime; For example, the first group was doing something that the second group was doing, but due to the lack of proper communication with each other, neither of them knew about it.

According to a former studio member:

“Every few months, when we got together to review the bands’ achievements, the bands would completely disintegrate, and the studio members would start working on new bands again.

“The same thing meant that there was no complete harmony between the members of each group, and they became teammates with other people every time, and no one could focus all their attention on a particular idea.”

The process resulted in various mechanisms finally introducing for the studio’s next project, none of which reached the right point and did not form a complete product.

Thus, the game’s core was incomplete despite spending a lot of time and energy and providing features such as quality parkour movements or the animals reaching based on the climate model. It could not put these ideas together well and other structural problems. There was in the project.

“The quality control team members worked hard and were constantly finding problems and bugs, but senior project officials ignored their efforts and told them, for example, ‘Do not bother with multiplayer mode bugs,'” said one former member of Andes Labs.

“Because they did not want the game production process to be slowed down to eliminate those bugs, they preferred to show that part of the game to the company executives, even though it had bugs and bugs, to prove that the project was progressing.”

In this way, the various problems and problems became more and more and more, and they piled up, making it harder for them to leave the pre-production stage and enter the primary production stage.

While the State of Decay 3 production team was made up of different groups, these groups did not coordinate and, in some cases, suffered from overtime.

Another former team member says: “Each project involves the primary stages of production (the so-called Milestone) in which they work on the part of the game is completed and we are ready to enter the next step. But this was not the case during the pre-production period of State of Decay 3, and each time we had several different and chaotic features that could not use to produce a fun and engaging game.

 “The senior members of the studio just wanted to prove to the managers that the project was going well with the help of these separate sections.”

 

The sensitivities and attitudes developed between the various groups, the distinction between men and women on the team, and gender discrimination exacerbated the situation.

“When I entered the Andes Labs for a job interview, I enjoyed that the studio prioritized issues such as gender and racial diversity, equal pay, and providing a conducive environment for minorities to work,” said one former studio member.

“But the truth was that the studio executives made such a gesture only ostensibly to appease Microsoft officials, and in fact, female employees were always being ignored and reprimanded.”

Another former employee of Andes Labs says:

“The comments of the female employees were rejected instantly, and the managers did not hear their conversations even in the primary causes such as the most straightforward game codes.

“Even women who were active in higher positions, such as directing, were ignored by studio men. Someone else interrupted them and was reprimanded on various occasions.”

Another former member of the studio says that the men of the studio, regardless of the position of the women, constantly asked them to take pictures during business meetings so that they would not forget anything.

They also used inappropriate sentences; for example, one said, “You are not as beautiful today as you always are.” “It’s extraordinary that a girl like you has such a job,” said another.

“We had to constantly remind them of social etiquette in business meetings because the men in the studio did not allow women to speak. They jumped in the middle of what they said and humiliated them,” said another former member.

“Of course, the etiquette did not work, and the situation was the same.”

Stern had not officially left the Andes Labs until the last months of 2019, but according to current and former studio members, he has been less and less since early 2018 and the days when State of Decay 2 was preparing to hit the market.

Heads to the studio. Philip Holt, director of the production at ArenaNet Studios, then joined Andes Labs, where he took over in a supporting position in early 2019, later replacing Strain as chairman.

Some studio staff talks about how men treat women inappropriately, and even high-ranking female members are not immune to male humiliation.

“In 2016, I started weekly trips to New Orleans to visit my wife and five children,” Stern wrote on his Medium page. “So compared to previous years, I spent less time in the studio, and after a while, I concluded that I could no longer handle the responsibilities of Ande Labs alone.”

Strain points out that he was an old member of ArenaNet who offered to hire Holt and that Holt was not initially intended to replace Strain completely.

Thus, in the days of Jeff Stern’s absence as Andrew Labs’s birth father, Holt took on the role of stepfather, according to a former studio member:

“He knew he could not fill Jeff’s vacancy, but he did his best to “Be friends and get closer to us.”

Of course, this was not in line with the tastes of some studio members, and they were not satisfied with this replacement. According to them, Holt was a party-goer and used his friends and acquaintances in the company, paying more attention to his plans than the team’s actual needs. He soon began hiring his friends from other studios and giving them senior management responsibilities for the activity.

Thus, while the new Andes Labs offices were to help the company become one of the most potent subsidiaries of the Xbox, Holt harnessed their potential and, with the help of a network of high-ranking members, he selected from his friends, played a growing role. He found more color in the studio.

However, a Microsoft official denied the allegations, saying in response to Kotaku:

“The Andean Labs recruitment process is legal, meets high standards for all positions, and is highly monitored.”

Another criticism of Holt by some current and former members of Andes Labs is that she forced two studio women, who also held senior management positions, to leave because they did not have adequate support to meet their administrative needs.

He participated and then replaced them with men:

“It had become an unwritten tradition for women to have many problems and men to be very supportive. “The studio management never wanted to upset anyone unless that person was a woman.”

Holt did not respond to a Kotaku reporter but instead preferred to have his statement officially released by Microsoft.

“Since the acquisition of Andes Labs by Microsoft in 2018, the studio has focused on improving the quality of the State of Decay and presenting ambitious ideas in it. On the other hand, it has tried to promote gender and racial diversity and respect for minorities within the studio.

Providing a healthy work environment for everyone is at the heart of our studio cultural activities. We constantly monitor that our teams work in the best way possible and prepare the best games.

Of course, I also understand that some current and former company members may not have an entirely positive work experience at Andes Labs Studio.

But it should note that the studio’s past is different from today, and we are still thinking of further improvement.

Over the years, we have undergone many changes and now have a completely new management team, including a new HR manager who will join the studio in 2021. We have hired about 75 new employees since the beginning of the Coronavirus epidemic, and in this way, we have succeeded in creating more gender diversity in the studio.

And we are already seeing the result of these cultural changes in creating a better work environment, which will also result in the production of better games for those interested.

“I am proud of what I have done in the studio so far, and at the same time, I know that we have great responsibilities for the future, and we must learn better every day by learning from our past experiences and working harder.”

Shortly after Holt joined Ande Labs Studios, he began helping Strain recruit new troops, one of whom was Anne Schleser; The studio’s first human and cultural director, who came to Andes Labs to help better manage teams and improve the situation by moving from an independent studio to a large studio.

As a human resource management professional, Schleser previously worked for companies such as Dell, Lowe’s, and Microsoft Software and could be of great help in improving the situation.

But current and former members of the studio say Schleser ultimately failed to do much to improve the studio’s relationship and eliminate discrimination, and in some cases, worsened the situation.

“There was a person on the State of Decay 3 production team who had very sexist views and a bad view of women,” said a former studio member. But Ann Schleser did nothing about him.

 “We also had a manager on the technical arts team who misbehaved and did something that almost all the team members left the studio because of him, and in the end, Schleser stood by him and did nothing with him.”

Current and former employees of Andes Labs do not have happy memories of those days and tell of people on the team who were constantly causing them problems and troubles, to the extent that they preferred not to be close to them: “All kinds of gender discrimination and The mistreatment of that time made us unhappy at all. “There were people in the studio who harassed us not once but repeatedly.”

Abuses of female studio staff continued during the Coronavirus epidemic and sometimes even through the Slack platform.

When they brought their complaints against these people to Schleser, they were faced with only a series of brief excuses or even blamed themselves. The situation had worsened in the days of the Coronavirus epidemic, and Philip Holt and Ann Schleser were even more likely to deny the problems and see no need to fix them.

However, the abuse continued during periods when face-to-face work was closed and team members communicated through Slack (a platform for business relationships and teamwork). Female employees did not feel comfortable with some of the studio bullies.

Whenever they talked about these issues with Holt and asked him for help, they did not reach a specific conclusion.

According to a former team member:

“Once, when a female employee confronted Philip’s disregard for her criticism, she addressed him publicly. Philip was forced to respond to the need to take advantage of gender and racial diversity. Providing a suitable work environment for minorities spoke.

Some of the studio staff, who had not been able to voice their protest to the authorities until that day, started shouting, and Philip expressed his displeasure but promised that he and he would do more to improve the quality of the studio in terms of

“They will pay attention to gender and racial diversity and provide a suitable work environment for minorities, but nothing special happened after that, and he forgot everything.”

“It got to the point where, almost every week, I saw video calls from studio staff who cried when they spoke to me because I was the only one listening to what they had to say and their heartache,” said one current studio member.

Of course, things seem to be getting better these days, with Microsoft claiming that 32% of Andes Labs’s members are now women or binaries, up from 15% a while ago. Non-white Andes Labs also rose from 12% when Microsoft acquired the studio to 20% in 2022.

Schleser also denied the allegations, saying in a statement to Kotaku:

“As a woman who has faced a toxic and sexist work environment in the past, and I do not have happy memories, I will never accept such behavior under any pretext.

One of the accomplishments I have had at Andes Labs Studios, and I am very proud of it, is the complete addressing of such issues, which is very common in American corporations, especially in technology-driven corporations.

Before I left Andes Labs, I developed a new mechanism for hiring employees, which has resulted in more than 30% of employees being women, sexual minorities, and non-whites, both in senior management and other occupations.

They are busy. Naturally, no two people have precisely the same views on different events, which is true of working in the studio. Still, all the decisions made at Andes Labs are based on the circumstances of the staff and when I was working there daily.

And even for an hour, I thought about these issues and communicated directly with team members;

 “Because I attach great importance to these issues and create an environment with healthy and equal conditions for all employees.”

Last summer, Schleser chaired a meeting entitled “Women of the Underwear,” which focused on the importance of women in the studio.

According to one of them, Schleser went to strange solutions instead of solving problems; for example, when this person complained to Schleser about the intolerance of some men, Schleser told him that he should get a man in the studio to defend him.

But it was not until August 2021 that the story culminated and the water collected behind the dam (referring to the studio women’s anger at the workplace) broke the barrier. Complaints reached a point where there was a lot of noise inside the studio. He got up.

It is not clear precisely what happened at the time. Still, some current and former members of the studio speculate that several employees have taken their complaints directly to Xbox officials.

A current member of the team says that Microsoft’s human resources department at the time asked Schleser for a report on the studio and talked to dozens of team members, and finally, Schleser one Friday in September, without saying goodbye to the members. Slow studio left.

Ann Schleser and Philip Holt

However, Schleser denied the allegations in a telephone interview with Kotaku, saying that his separation from Andes Labs was pre-planned and part of the studio’s mechanism for change but did not elaborate on the break. They are also not willing to talk about it.

Schleser’s departure from the studio made some employees think it would be the beginning of a more significant change, but that hope was soon dashed by Holt’s email; An email in which Holt praised Schleser:

“I have to tell you with regret that Anne Schleser has left the Andes Labs studio.

I always felt that we did more than expected by bringing him into the studio. As a very experienced person in the field of human resources, he helped Andes Labs become a better and more professional studio. “He left Andes Labs while the studio is in a much better position than before he arrived.”

Ann Schleser changed the studio environment, but some team members were unhappy with her work and eventually left the team.

Of course, along with those who criticized Schleser a lot, some employees saw his role as positive in raising salaries and benefits and meeting the gaming industry standards. Still, they were surprised by the way he left the studio.

In the months that followed, various changes took place within the studio, particularly regarding the training of managers. For the first time, meetings were held on how to combat sexual harassment (although Microsoft does not see this as something new and says that employees are always The new studios are receiving training in this area, and this has been common in the past).

But some studio employees disagree, saying that events such as Schleser’s sudden departure and subsequent plans to combat sexual harassment indicate a reversal of the studio.

Others, of course, did not make the change too seriously, believing that because of Holt’s inability to manage the studio properly, the problems remained and that employees with no hope for the future were leaving the studio.

“For example, five people left the studio in one week,” said one current studio member. “In general, the outputs had increased, and out of every ten people who left, only one left in favor of the studio, and I was very upset about the separation of the other people.”

Let’s go back to the production adventures of State of Decay 3. According to three different sources, Undead Labs did not intend to introduce State of Decay 3 in 2020, let alone show a full trailer.

But because of the imminent release of the Xbox X Series and Xbox S Series consoles, Microsoft went to many of their studios and asked them to prepare trailers for the show.

But despite the team members’ dissatisfaction with the introduction of State of Decay 3, Holt put a lot of pressure on them to announce the game ahead of time (although a Microsoft official told a Kotaku reporter that trailers were showing In that Xbox event, they were completely optional and did not put pressure on game makers like Fable, Forza Motorsport, and Everwild).

“We did not want to introduce the game because even we did not know what the game would look like in those days,” said one current team member.

For example, the climax of the State of Decay 3 trailer was when we came across a zombie deer, and this part of the trailer had attracted people’s attention. But even some of the game’s creators were surprised by this because, until that day, they were not sure if there would be features like animal zombies in the game or not.

In late 2020, an internal demo (a demo to show to studio officials, not the general public) prepare from the initial version of the game so that team members could offer part of the production process to company executives; A demo that was not of good quality at all, and after that, the studio executives were at least terrified in 2021 that they still could not show something ready and suitable for the game to the Microsoft officials; As one former member of the studio puts it:

“The management team of Andes Labs claimed that we were working well on the game’s prototype when in fact, we had not yet reached the point where we could even produce a playable demo of good quality and give it to the managers.

” Let’s put Microsoft. “The contradictions between the words of the officials of Andes Labs and the realities of game production were growing day by day.”

Another team member says: “They wanted to add more features to the game in a row for the following demos, but this made the situation more chaotic. Team members were also constantly leaving the studio, giving way to newcomers.

For example, a new producer came into the studio and said, “I’m not a professional coder, and I do not have much information, but you have to go through the prototype stage and get to the more basic stages of production.”

Even when professionals in the coding department told him that such a thing was impossible and that the game’s performance had not yet reached that stage, the developer did not care about their opinions and only said that he should add more features to the game.

Studio executives tried hard to show the appropriate demo of State of Decay 3 to Microsoft officials, but the game was still in pre-production and could not be well demoed.

According to several team members, two internal demos of State of Decay 3 were to be prepared in the fall of 2021. The first demo was scheduled for September and mainly consisted of several GIFs from various parts of the game, and the second was planned for December to show the gameplay.

But suddenly, Holt’s decision changed in the late summer, and he said he wanted both demos to be entirely dedicated to gameplay, which put a lot of work pressure on team members.

According to a former team member: “The story of the demos and the pressure he put on the staff was Philip’s fault and had nothing to do with Xbox officials. Philip wanted to present himself as a skilled manager in the Xbox game studios, so he put a lot of pressure on us.

“In this way, the game’s creators fell victim to Philip’s plans to show his managerial power.”

Eventually, however, the team members staged massive protests, and Holt backtracked. Thus, the demo, which was supposed to be ready for December, became shorter and more crowded and was moved to September, and canceled the second demo. Of course, the preparation of the December demo for September (i.e., three months before December) put a lot of pressure on the team members.

The same events and excessive work pressure caused more experienced studio members to leave by the end of 2021. “When we endured all this hardship and pressure just for the pre-production stage, I couldn’t stay there to continue the project and the main stages of production,” said one. “State of Decay 3 may still be in pre-production for a year or more, and a lot is still in its infancy,” said another.

Of course, the people who have stayed with the team are more optimistic about the future and think that the changes of 2022 can reach the end of Labs and State of Decay 3 and put the studio and the project in a better direction;

“The game has the potential to become an attractive work, and there are very good people working in the team,” said one team member. “I just hope we do not repeat the bad habits of previous years.”

State of Decay 3 may remain in pre-production for at least another year.

But others still do not have enough confidence in Holt or Microsoft officials. They believe that Holt is seeking to cover up past problems instead of resolving them completely; for example, he convened a meeting in mid-February and told staff that negative news of gender discrimination and similar issues would soon be published and it is better than no one talks about it on social media.

Holt’s words also upset team members for missing the opportunity to talk about work problems in a gender-biased environment.

On the other hand, along with Andes Labs, we have to wait and see what plans Microsoft has for its new acquisition; Activision Blizzard, who joined Microsoft in a $ 68.7 billion deal, is one of the gaming industry companies that does not hear good news about its work environment and has received numerous complaints of sexual harassment and gender discrimination.

If the Federal Trade Commission finally approves Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the company will have to make managerial and cultural changes to its new subsidiary of about 10,000 employees.

It is the most challenging test for Phil Spencer, who has played a vital role in both the drafting and management of Microsoft Gaming. It remains to be seen what he will do for Activision Blizzard as it strives to provide healthy, far-flung work environments.

Interestingly, let’s go back and look at last summer’s adventures in the margins of Activision Blizzard. We remember that Jeff Stern, the founder of Andes Labs, was one of those people who, at that time, had the importance of monitoring studio workplaces and equality.

“Over the past week, the gaming industry giants have shown that they can no longer be trusted to manage and distribute the money they receive from gamers and video game enthusiasts and to be able to use their power properly,” he wrote in an open letter to employees.

“They do not have themselves.”

Stern spoke of the need to form unions to take care of gaming studio staff and their efforts to get the excellent pay; and it’s just the first time we’ve seen such a thing happen within Activision Blizzard, and we need to see what Microsoft plans to do in the future.

It’s still too early to judge the future of Andes Labs, and we need to see where the recent changes are taking the studio; Changes that might have made things better, but I wish they had happened sooner so that some members of the studio would not leave;

“I attach great importance to my former colleagues at Andes Labs. I hope the situation improves, but the situation will not change until someone responds to the prob here completely and accurately,” said one.