There has been a lot of fuss going around lately regarding L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi. There has been everything from poor working conditions to ridiculously long hours under punishing conditions from the management. Now L.A. Noire lead programmer Dave Heironymus has come out to say that all this controversy is for nothing, staying on the side of his employers.
He wrote a letter to Gamasutra about the controversy, saying:
“What is the motivation behind these attacks on Team Bondi? If the motivation were to see improvement in the working conditions at Team Bondi, then I’m all for it. All of the management and staff at Team Bondi want to improve our processes so we can make even better games in a decent timeframe, without burning people out along the way.
However, some of these comments in recent stories seem to go beyond that. Some ex-employees who left the company years ago want to see Team Bondi destroyed. They want to see 35 game developers out of a job. That seems to me to be a less laudable motivation.”
He says that the most hours he ever had to work was 65 hours on average and that was only for the final build of the game. He did say that there were a number of things that Bondi should have done different and says that the company will “learn” to not make the same mistakes again.
