In May, Team Bondi developed a game called L.A. Noire in which the player interacts in the 1950s as an upstanding detective named Cole Phelps. This is more than a period piece as gamers were forced to read the facial expressions of characters, through a breakthrough in motion capture technology, to evaluate whether a character was telling the truth or lying. The studio that funded this project was Rockstar Studios, the same studio that developed the Grand Theft Auto series and Red Dead Redemption. Many were unsure about how a game like L.A. Noire would sell but luckily it sold very well, moving 899,000 units in the United States alone.
However there was a sacrifice to this success. In June, there were unconfirmed reports of several leaked emails from Team Bondi that described Rockstar’s treatment of the employees at Team Bondi as unsatisfactory, at best. Twelve-hour work days and seven-day weeks and nearly 100 Team Bondi employees being left out of the game’s credits were only a few of these descriptions. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) made a statement about the allegations, “Certainly reports of 12-hour a day, lengthy crunch time, if true, are absolutely unacceptable and harmful to the individuals involved, the final product, and the industry as a whole."
When these reports were confirmed as being fact the IGDA released another statement about Team Bondi’s treatment and the development process, “in many cases it is not illegal and as such employees have little ability to effect change other than raising awareness of studio practices, and looking to work for studios that operate differently.” Gamespot.com released a report from a Team Bondi employee about being left off of L.A. Noire’s promotional material, “I'll never forget being treated like an absolute **** by these people.”
This corporate drama happened during the summer, so the question you’re probably asking yourself is what happened to Team Bondi? Well as you can probably tell from the title, nothing positive. On Sept.1, joystiq.com reported that Team Bondi was entering administration. What this means is that an external independent source takes over the running of the company, i.e. paying off debts and claiming from creditors. This independent company was Kennedy Miller Mitchell (KMM), which is the Australian production company that released the Mad Max movies, Happy Feet and it’s sequel coming this year. “Staff at Team Bondi were reportedly offered jobs at KMM if they did not take severance pay,” as Joystiq confirmed this in the article.
My point in writing this report is to; as the IGDA commented on in the second statement, raise awareness for these kinds of things that happen in the video game industry. I think, just as the movie industry did decades ago, there needs to be a unionization between video game developing companies so to avoid these kinds of business practices from happening again.
Leave your comments below about what you think about these events that happened between Team Bondi and Rockstar.
