Focus Home Interactive Responds To Aeon Must Die! Allegations

The one thing I’ve found most obnoxious about America is a parallel with gaming. Breakfast cereals are disgusting, filled with more sugar than my morning coffee. One of the many offenders is old Cap’n Crunch, a dirty old man that also hangs over video games like a disease. That was a rather roundabout way to point out that “crunch” in video games is disgusting, an abhorrent scourge of the industry promoted and ignored by its most successful leaders. One such game that is happy to promote such a toxic work environment was The Last of Us Part II. Another was Red Dead Redemption 2. That’s not even getting into about Ubisoft’s despicable practices.

As we noted just last week, during the cavalcade of creatively boring people to death with PlayStation’s State of Play, there was a story breaking behind one of the games. Aeon Must Die! is a very stylistic fighting game set in a far-flung sci-fi world. However, that’s as much as could be said about the game itself. The team previously behind the game had (during the reveal) also uploaded the trailer with a description detailing their alleged work conditions. There was immediate cause for concern as to the horrific accuracy and precision of the detail found in the linked Dropbox files that, in the team’s own words, stressed “endless crunch, harassment, abuse, corruption, and manipulation.”

Each file and folder features descriptions of work conditions that not only raise eyebrows, but make you gasp in cartoonish horror at the lengths the team would put up with problems. Several members of the team, though now fired and/or resigned, give anonymous reports of the harmful or complete absence of management over several months. Some of these accounts recall asking for contacts, organizing Visas under false pretenses, and never getting an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) to work on something for several months. This is coupled with backdated contracts being handed over to sign that, allegedly, misrepresent the amount of work done and/or the compensation equal to the results the company received.

In the leaked public documents to the press, the team comprising of several creatives and one of the developer’s founders, detail why they have moved forward with resignations, and the leaks of redacted documents and substantial evidence. One of the team’s many claims is that on June 22nd, 2020, twelve members of staff including those still with the developer sent a document with fewer redacts to the publisher, Focus Home Interactive. As the documents released to the press allege, the publisher ignored and brushed off these with a quick email blast doing very little to the situation.

According to the team, with the help of an attorney, they built their evidence and provided further detail of the accounts on which the team makes their claims. They put together audio recordings, detailed logs, bank statements, and more to provide to the legal team of Focus Home Interactive. Once again, alleged by the team, days before the trailer was set to be revealed at Sony’s PlayStation State of Play, the legal department for Focus Home Interactive “sees no problem with what has happened,” as the files claim.

Over the weekend, following the State of Play, we attempted to get in contact with Focus Home Interactive. We asked for any possible comment or refute to the claims made by the team, to which we got no reply by Monday evening. On Friday morning, Focus Home Interactive released a brief statement claiming they will be looking into this matter.

“Focus Home Interactive was informed of serious allegations raised by some of the developers at Limestone [games] Who have worked on the creation of the video game Aeon Must Die!” the statement reads. Going on to say, “These grievances are directed at Limestone [games], their direct employer,” shirking any responsible action as the publisher. “As the publisher of the video game, Focus [Home Interactive] is carefully looking into these allegations and will draw the necessary conclusions if they are proved to be well-founded, and then take all appropriate measures,” it ends after stating no more comments will be made.

If this was true, the question must be asked, why wasn’t this the action the publisher took in the first place? It should also be asked, why doesn’t Focus Home Interactive acknowledge their previous attempts to find substantial evidence within the files? Files that include alleged evidence of cracked pirated copies of programs to develop the game. Files that show detailed descriptions of being paid not by the developer, but instead out of one of the managerial team’s own pockets.

That doesn’t even mention the overtime, crunch, and extra projects that are not part of the game, but are meant to provide the studio with financial support. Meanwhile during development the studio couldn’t pay for a mouse or other simple equipment to make the game. Pouring over the reduced and redacted files intermittently for the last few days on their own shows at least a problematic environment, to say the least.