I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad take, but it’s worth pointing out that lots of games miss internal deadlines and waste time ‘spinning their wheels’ but still turn out good or even great. The difference is that you don’t usually hear about it, whereas here some of the team are obviously pissed enough about the crunch that they went to the press.
Crunch is always bad and is an indication of poor project management and/or unrealistic expectations, but issues with scope or major reworks aren’t always a death knell either. I’ve seen plenty of games go through that and come out the other side better than before.
Demo in this context isn’t a consumer-playable ‘demo’ in the sense that most people understand; it means a playable internal build with specific targets for what must be included. Internal demo milestones are often linked to project funding and approval to move forwards, so there is a tangible risk if they fail to deliver.
Presumably the current state of the game is behind where it needed to be to deliver that demo, so they’re now crunching to finish it on time.
Whenever they add new symbols to Unicode, for a start.
Probably other reasons too, on occasion. For non-Latin languages with thousands of characters, I’d imagine certain unusual combinations occasionally get discovered that need rendering tweaks? Things like that.
I wouldn’t say it’s suitable for kids - there’s a lot of innuendo and crude visual gags. Mid/late teens probably fine, but it’ll depend on your tolerance.
Official internal chat will be either Slack or MS Teams. Using any unauthorised app to discuss matters relating to the business would be a contract violation.
Realistically, game devs do this all the time in private chats with colleagues that happen outside work, both online and in person. But of course R* either never knows about those or chooses to overlook it.
In this case, I suspect the fact they were unionising was the reason they actually took action on it. It’s not about consistency, it’s about having an excuse to fire these people.