But even his brother is not top leadership at the organization. Any direct orders from their superiors at Take-two still take precedence over what Sam Houser says. In fact it's currently suspected that the order to fire came from Take-Two.

They're rich beyond the average person's imagination, but not "early Google employee" rich, let alone "started multi-billion dollar company" rich. They started as regular employees that, after making the first few golden geese, got given stock options so they wouldn't leave.

Turns out the big 100 hour crunch for RDR2 was just Dan Houser, Lazlow and 2 other senior writers and for about 3 weeks. Apparently the crunch used to be a bigger issue earlier on, but got improved after GTA V.

Senior Code Content Developer Phil Beveridge concurred that “work practices have definitely improved. Crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2 has definitely been a lot better than it was on GTA V, where I was pulling a month of 70+ hour weeks (while being told by my boss at the time to go home…).”

As I understand, the issue at R* wasn't ever really anyone's boss saying "you gotta work 70 hour weeks", it was more "the senior staff works 100 hour weeks and maybe if I only do 40, I'll not be seen as a team player". Which is still toxic, but if they've taken steps to reduce it, perhaps things aren't as bad as they seem.

The games industry is so bad because of the deadlines. The whole public announcement of "we'll release game on date X" is a huge problem, as is the fact that games make most of the money just after release, so you gotta have a new game out every few years if you want to keep the lights on - a problem R* no longer has since they've brought in billions, so I'm sure Take-Two has loosened the leash a bit on that front at least.

Hell, I'm a regular software engineer and I've worked 60-70 hour weeks. Not because I was forced to, but because the deadline was near if not passed already, the customer was getting unhappy and I knew it'd look great for my next salary review. I suspect if I was working on a public project, essentially a work of art, that millions of people will get to see and I saw my boss work 100 hours a week, I'd also be motivated to work 60 or 70 for a while. So I can kinda understand how some R* employees say there was no forced crunch time and others say they felt like they were expected to crunch.

Honestly, the Houser brothers have just always struck me as creatives who are super passionate about their work. That's the type of person that can work ridiculous hours without even realizing it and it could bend one's expectations of what others should do, but it doesn't seem to me like they've ever expected everyone else to work as much as they do, nor has either of them (or even the brothers combined) become a billionaire off over 20 years in senior leadership at a company that literally prints money for its parent company.