Located 20 minutes from Microsoft headquarters, the Seattle studio founded in November 2009 does not seem to have digested its transformation from an independent studio to that of an official member of Xbox studios, which is now expected to deliver a State of Decay. 3 with AAA ambitions. In four years, Undead Labs has doubled in size while losing its founder Jeff Strain, who announced his new venture last fall.
The investigation by Ethan Gach first brings bad news for players: although State of Decay 2 was released in May 2018, State of Decay 3 would still be stuck in the pre-production stage. The symbol of a studio that is the subject here of allegations of mismanagement, burnout and sexism, quite far from the inclusive image that Phil Spencer and his teams strive to paint every day. Most of the 12 employees who participated in the article believe that Undead Labs has been going through a period of unresolved crisis since its acquisition by Microsoft.
Ironically, the first reaction of Undead Labs members to the announcement of the takeover by Microsoft in 2018 was to fear that the conglomerate would exert too strong a hold on the former independent studio. In the end, it is on the contrary the excessive freedom granted by Microsoft to its studios which shows its limits when a team needs help, a refrain already heard recently during the investigation into the behavior of the founders of Moon Studios. “We were afraid that they would come to change our culture, but our collapse came from within, and we could have needed their help.“, summarizes a developer.
“Over the past few years Undead Labs has seen a number of positive changes and we are confident in the direction the team is taking for State of Decay 3, one of our most ambitious open-world games in development.“, believes for its part Microsoft in a response to Kotaku, while unpacking some statistics such as the recruitment of women or non-binary people (42% of recruits in 2021) and people from ethnic minorities (29% of recruits in 2021 Figures which, surprise, do not reflect much of the health of a studio.
The testimonies point to a lack of direction and cohesion that was felt from the start of the design of State of Decay 3. We are talking about a studio divided into teams responsible for prototyping their own functionalities but which do not communicate properly with each other, for lack of competent leadership to ensure consistency between the different systems. Concerns compounded by too frequent staff turnover but also by a culture of discrimination against women, non-binary people and other marginalized employees. Ignored, rejected or victimized by sexist remarks, women are at the forefront of employees with complaints about Undead Labs.
Appreciated founder Jeff Strain officially left Undead Labs at the end of 2019 but had already taken a step back from managing the studio at the start of 2018. His successor, Philip Holt, is much less prominent among his collaborators. Accused of nepotism, he would also have contributed to the withdrawal of the few women occupying important roles in the studio. As is often the case, it is a woman who is found in the position of human resources director, but despite her experience at Dell and Microsoft, Anne Schlosser did not meet the expectations placed on her to resolve the conflicts between members of staff or to combat discrimination. Worse, she often made the situation worse by siding with the wrong people. And while she left the studio in March, thanks to what appears to be Microsoft’s only direct intervention, so have many employees. “If pre-production looked like this, there was no way I was staying for the real production“, summarizes one of the starters.
The investigation tells us that Undead Labs had no intention of announcing State of Decay 3 in 2020 let alone show it off, but the request came from Microsoft, which needed to compile announcements for its summer Showcase, a few months before the launch of the Xbox Series. Other games far from being baked, such as Fable, Everwild and the upcoming Forza Motorsport, were also featured in this conference. “We didn’t want to advertise the game because we didn’t even know what it was at the time“, admits an employee. The announcement video was therefore limited to a short cinematic showing a zombified deer. ‘She still didn’t have a cohesive slice of the game to present to Microsoft.
Anxious to appear as an effective leader in front of the pundits, Philip Holt then exerted unwelcome pressure on his teams by summoning them to produce a gameplay demo for the summer of 2021, when it was initially scheduled for December of the same year. “The weirdness of the situation boiled down to Philip putting pressure on the team, not Xbox. Philip was pressuring us because he was obsessed with proving himself to be a leader within Xbox Game Studios. He used this as leverage to advance his own career and image, to the detriment of developers“, accuses a developer.
The team was finally able to make their manager listen to reason and find a compromise. A less ambitious version of the demo scheduled for December was finally brought forward to September. And since ? In the last news, State of Decay 3 still hadn’t come out of the pre-production stage, but some of the employees who haven’t left the studio are optimistic about Undead Labs’ prospects, which look healthier as of 2022.”It could be such a cool game and we have a lot of great people working on it. I just hope we don’t repeat the terrible habits of the past few years“, summarizes a worker.
Note that none of the people interviewed by Kotaku heard of any Microsoft audit to help the studio get out of its internal problems. “There was no visible intervention or support from Microsoft. Nothing ever got better from my point of view, things just got worse“, comments a developer. A philosophy “hands free“which leaves you wondering at a time when Microsoft is supposed to clean up the many problems reported at Activision Blizzard, a company of nearly 10,000 people that cost it nearly $70 billion.
- Also Read | Moon Studios: An article exposes the oppressive and toxic culture of Ori’s studio