Other Mortal Kombat Studio's Hellish Working Hours

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Read about Nether Realm Studio' s hellish working hours and wage stuff from pcgamer and twitter:

A former full-time employee and multiple former contractors paint an unpleasant picture of long periods of crunch throughout the development of Mortal Kombat 9, X, and the Injustice fighting games. PC Gamer also spoke with four former members of NetherRealm's contractor QA team, who corroborated the reports of months-long crunch and poor pay for contract workers during their time at the company.

"On [Mortal Kombat 9] crunch officially began after New Year's day 2011. Of course, we did a bit of pre-crunch before that, just to make sure we were in a good spot for crunch. This was on schedule documents. this was not a wink-wink-nudge-nudge 'passionate hardworking' thing, this was mandate," James Longstreet, a software engineer at NetherRealm for two years, wrote in a Twitter thread.

"Nothing improved from MKX to Injustice 2. Everything was down to the wire. Everything was worse " said Rebecca Rothschild, former QA analyst.

Jiminy Snackmouth on Twitter

"it's been 8 years, and they've made it clear to me that I'm persona non grata there anyway so, fuck it: working at NetherRealm on MK9 nearly killed me. I didn't sleep more than 4 hours for months. from january to april 2011 i was at work more than half of the time"

Beck Hallstedt claimed that the studio relies heavily on temporary workers "on a 9 month on, 3 month off cycle with zero benefits near minimum wage, strung along with lukewarm messaging that maybe you'll be hired 'after the next contract'."

"Some folks have been doing this for 4+ years. Some folks have gone into huge credit card debt b/c of it," Hallstedt wrote. "Because of this NRS's contractors NEED overtime to survive. They NEED the time-and-a-half pay to make rent."

"I managed to get by for a while, but it got to a point where I had to put my student loans on hold. If it wasn't for the money made during crunch, I'd likely have had to settle for a different job and industry, which was something I didn't want to do because this is what I had just finished school for and had a passion for. I didn't want to throw that all away even though I probably should have thought differently."
 
I feel forming a worker's union can improve their working conditions since a work union may help make a better deal for the workers.
 
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