LEGO Developers Say ‘Crunch Was Blackmail’

As we’ve just covered, the biggest LEGO Star Wars game ever to exist is set to be making its way onto our consoles come April 5th. However, according to recent reports, the development process wasn’t the sunshine and rainbows you’d of expected it to be. Let us explain why.

Since 2017, the game has been through devastating development problems that included extensive crunch, mismanagement and high staff turnover. Unfortunately, several current and former developers from TT Games have described a culture where working overtime was effectively mandatory, with concerns about employee welfare going largely unnoticed.

Speaking about overtime hours, one employee said they were “a very soft-spoken blackmail,” and were told things like “‘If people don’t start doing overtime, there’s going to be problems.'”

TT Games Must Change Their Workplace Antics For Future LEGO Games

Whilst back in 2005, TT Games presented overtime as voluntary and paid, since 2010 that has changed. They transformed their overtime into supposed ‘fleixtime’, another fancy way of saying extra hours essentially. Overtime would result in extra pay or days off, but “flexitime,” which was capped at 40 hours, could be exchanged for late starts and additional holidays. Subsequently, developers would be warned about not meeting deadlines, causing stress and anxiety in the workplace.

Not only this, but there have also been reports that women were subjected to bullying, comments about their appearances, and were paid less than most male employees. In an April 5, 2020 gender pay gap report, women at the company only made up 2.4% of the highest paid jobs and only 8.7% of the employees in the upper middle hourly pay quarter. This isn’t good enough TT.

Managing director Tom Stone held a meeting back in 2017 for feedback and, according to employees, didn’t do much to alleviate these problems. Stone told Polygon he had “no reports of bullying,” at the time, and that “to give it balance we had plenty of people, even the same people, say, ‘I absolutely love being here and I love working on Lego games.'”

Hopefully, these problems will be addressed more promptly in the future. We want to enjoy our LEGO games whilst also knowing the developers enjoy making them too.