Head of Xbox Games Studios: Confident that Bethesda doesn't have a culture of overtime right now

Matt Booty, head of Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios, said at a recent all-hands meeting that Bethesda Game Studios, the developer of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, and other game studios owned by its parent company ZeniMax Media, now have no mandatory overtime. , and said it was "unfair" to accuse Bethesda.

Kotaku published a story earlier this month about the prevalence of overtime at Bethesda and its parent company ZeniMax. The focus is on Bethesda's serious overtime situation during the development of "Fallout 76". For example, if there are no QA employees who "voluntarily work overtime", all employees must work overtime together, and QA employees will be monitored when they enter the lounge. In addition, in order to develop "Fallout 76", Bethesda also recruited a lot of people from other studios. However, not many people are optimistic about this project. In addition to the serious overtime, many developers and even senior employees have chosen to leave Bethesda.

In a question-and-answer session at the conference, Matt Booty responded to the report and said he was "confident" that Bethesda was not working overtime.

"The overtime culture is... if it was 10 years ago, it would be unfair to blame a studio alone. It was part of the industry before. I'm not taking that to say that overtime is correct, it's just the industry culture. Part of it. I tried sleeping under my desk when I first started, and we were all proud of it.”

Matt Booty said the reports were all about past overtime:

"I know from Bethesda management that now we are not putting our employees on overtime, and I'm pretty confident about that."

At the same time, he also said that there may still be people who are forced to work overtime without his knowledge. Matt Booty believes that employees need to trust Xbox's internal processes, and said that Xbox's HR department is willing to listen to employees' concerns, and there will be support groups within each studio.

“They can report these to us anonymously through HR, and we need to rely on these independent systems for checks and balances.”

However, for Xbox's response this time, some Xbox insiders told Kotaku that it was useless:

"As an employee, I only know what he said is to go through the HR channel, and we all know that this trick is useless, just look at Blizzard."