Glassdoor Review Suggests Respawn Entertainment Failed at COVID-19 Response

Respawn Entertainment has earned itself a reputation, almost by accident, of being one of the few good studios left in the industry. This is largely in part because they put out pretty high-quality games and have a reputation for being one of the more human studios, famously saying that they wouldn’t be forcing anyone to crunch for their current flagship title, Apex Legends.

Since then, while the rest of the games industry has crumbled under allegations of crunch and sexual abuse, Respawn has appeared to be an oasis of purity in a wasteland of corruption. Which is why it’s all the more upsetting to learn that a new review of Respawn Entertainment on Glassdoor suggests that things might not be that great in our little “oasis”, at least as far as their response to the COVID-19 pandemic is concerned.

According to a screenshot of the post:

"Mostly every other game company (Epic, Activision, Bungie etc.) have extended project deadlines and feature/content road maps to accommodate for lower efficiencies and general stresses/anxiety during COVID 19, but not on the Apex project. I feel extremely stressed and burnt out trying to keep our seasonal releases on the same aggressive timeline as pre-shelter in place productivity.”

He also said that Respawn gives no attention to employee health, 13-hour work days, and poor planning that suggests they don’t know how to run a live-service game.

Now, that’s bad. Really bad. But here’s the interesting part: when the news of this new Glassdoor review came out, a number of other Respawn developers leapt to their employer's defense on Reddit. A number of them claimed he was outright mistaken, while others expressed concerns that someone felt this way and encouraged the dev in question to reach out for help.

In any case, I really hope these accusations turn out to be false. We can’t lose the one good studio the games industry has on hand.