[2021] This is great, he is in a fine spot right now anyways.

I have no idea how you could possibly 100% guarantee that when we have data that is not privy to most people, and I don't think you do. :)

The truth, as often, lies somewhere between the extremes of "Respawn doesn't crunch, and will never crunch", and "Respawn doesn't care about their workers". We've crunched before, sure. I crunched for like pretty much 9 months straight on the first Titanfall! I know people who basically lived in their office for half a year on Titanfall 2. I don't want to speak on behalf on the Jedi and MoH teams since I don't know their situations as well but I've definitely heard of people putting in late hours to push the game across the finish line. It is thus patently untrue to say we never ever crunch and we never ever will.

It is also patently untrue to say we don't care about people's health. I had a break down about 3 years back; was clinically depressed and feeling suicidal. I put in my 2 week's notice but multiple people reached out and asked "Hey, we know things are rough for you now, but let us know how we can help. Don't quit, take a sabbatical instead, and if after that you feel like you might want to come back here to work, we'll find a way to make things better". Things like that don't happen at a studio that treats people as disposable and replaceable. Multiple people have left the studio and then come back later, which doesn't happen at a studio that treats their employees very poorly.

I'm not going to say the story of the dev who developed anxiety working here is untrue. I'm not going to say we couldn't have done better, to have prevented things turning out like that. What I will say is that we don't build crunch into the schedule as an expected part of shipping. We cut as much as we can - see the single player portion of the game being cut entirely from Titanfall 1. Even still we don't get things correct and we go "Oh sh*te we messed up, ok we might need to crunch a bit to meet our deadlines but once that is done let's reflect and see where we went wrong and how we can prevent that next time". We delayed and cut things from Seasons in Apex as we adjusted into the difficulties of working from home. We are expanding as quickly as we can, see Respawn Vancouver as proof of that. We took a vacation at the end of the year to try and recharge at the end of a challenging year. I personally post a lot less here and on Twitter than I did before because the relentless negativity and personal attacks definitely take their toll. But at the end of the day, we're still here, just a bunch of folks trying to make as many people as happy as possible playing some shootybangs :)

WE NOT BAD. MAYBE WE NOT SUPER GOOD EITHER BUT WE NOT BAD.