“Was the feedback given in constructive ways? No. Was the feedback ultimately constructive? Yes,” said one developer, who felt the behavior of the leaders was atrocious but felt mixed in his opinion of the founders because they got results.

from this article on the studio behind the Ori games.

This is the most ass backwards way of looking at what happens when bosses and toxic workplaces damage the people that work there.

I’m not willing to concede that traumatising, upsetting and otherwise abusing workers is worth it if you get a decent videogame at the end of the process because there hasn’t been a videogame yet worth all that. There will never be a videogame worth all that, sorry.

Aside from that…

It is unnecessary. Nobody needs to treat people badly – nobody needs to be cruel – to make a videogame happen. Nobody needs to be broken to make something wonderful. If something wonderful is made, it is made in spite of the cruelty not because of it.

The repercussions, the results, go beyond the one game.

Every time we burn one person out, that’s one person less able to contribute their best to games. Every talented person who leaves games is a loss to videogames future, every person we break or traumatise we leave them less able to bring their “results” to future videogames. We take from videogames more than we gain when we burn through people. For the sake of one game, we jeopardise an unfathomable amount more.

The results are stolen from the future. They’re stolen from somebody’s future. The results are stolen from someone’s health, physical and/or mental. They’re stolen from the relationships, the families, the friends of the people we burn out.

“On balance”, the cruelty just breaks people. That’s never worth it.

Never.