Gollum Developers Finally Break Their Silence

All right. Well, it looks like Lord of the Rings Gollum developer Didelic had a toxic work environment. At least that's what's being alleged. Uh we're going to talk all about this, read through this article from Justin Carter at gamedeveloper.com. And you know, it's not surprising when you see a terrible result of a game that seems completely aimless like Gollum was. It's not surprising that well, the development process and the culture was toxic. Let's read the article from Justin Carter. Lord of the Rings Gollum devs describe alleged hostile work culture. When I see this stuff, I'll admit I get kind of skeptical because well, a hostile work culture. It's definitely a subjective term, right? But reading this article and also watching the documentary about this, um, and by the way, you can check that out using the link below. I'm kind of realizing, yeah, it's kind of kind of toxic. So, let's go ahead and read this here. Current and exited staff claim Lord of the Rings Golem suffered from a lack of funding and a toxic work environment. So, the lack of funding actually kind of probably resulted in

the toxic work environment. We'll talk about why in just a second. Um, this is from upper management. Okay. German outlet Game 2 is reporting on allegations of toxic work culture at Didelic Entertainment, specifically surrounding Lord of the Rings Gollum. Nearly three dozen past and present employees claimed the project suffered from alleged environment and mismanagement at the studio. Three dozen is a lot. It's not just one person, right? It's not just two people. It's three dozen past and present employees claimed that there was um this sort of toxic work environment. It was buil as a AAA game. This is the problem. Uh the franchise's first since Monolith Middleear Shadow Duology. Um Game2's video game's video claims the project was budgeted at a considerably low price of 15.9 million US. To give you some context, a AAA game should be somewhere around like 50 to$80 million. So, it's built as a AAA game. What does that mean? It means it's marketed as a AAA game. So, this is what I mean. The problem and the reason

why people were suffering so much is probably at the the impetus was the marketing of this game as a AAA game because it's not a AAA game. And I've had publishers in the past tell me, "Hey, Thomas, let's say this about your game, and if you know, players don't agree, then we'll find out later. But let's say this at the start." Well, you might get away with this, but the problem is it creates a ton of pressure on a team. Okay, for example, if I claimed that my game Twisted Tower was a AAA title, my team would know that all these articles are coming out from, let's say, PC Gamer or Kotaku or Polygon, and they're claiming in the article that I said the game is AAA game. I would know that's a lie, and I would be stressed out every single day knowing that I would release a game to the public that thinks it's AAA game and it's not. And that's what happened with Gollum here. the team probably knew it was being built as a AAA game and they knew they didn't have a budget. They had $15.9 million um with I think it was 80 people

on staff, so they knew they couldn't do it, right? And so what this causes is this constant attempt to create a AAA game which creates feature creep and then people working overtime hours getting paid very little and then ultimately releasing a game that is immediately um declared as one of the worst games ever released. The Delic made attempts to get more funding, but those efforts were unsuccessful. The toxicity allegedly came from CEO and founder Karsten I can't say that last name. I'm sorry. Fitchelman and COO uh Stefan Harms or Ste Steven Harms, however you say that. Um, so really quick, I want to make sure that I clarify here. These are allegedly alleged accusations. Okay, so I I like to be kind of careful because I don't want to disparrage Karsten or the COO, Stephan or Steven, however you say it. Um that said, we've got dozens of people

uh claiming that these two leaders of the company um created an atmosphere of fear and it stemmed from the pair's presence. So imagine this, you're working on your game, whether you're working remote or working in a studio. And whenever these two individuals show up, your heart starts beating. You start feeling pressure. Okay, this is the opposite of what I want to create in my studio. And by the way, there's only three of us. There's three full-time employees working on Twisted Tower. um or three three full full-time contract workers working on Twisted Tower and I'm the leader of the team. When I show up in a Discord call, right, with my team, the last thing I want to do is cause their blood pressure to spike or their heart rate to increase. And here's why. Making games is a little bit different than a lot of other industries. Making games is stressful by default. You open up Unity and then suddenly you open up Photoshop and and then you open up Blender and then you open up Discord and then you open up Google to search for and then you open up Visual Studio, right? Then you open up Twitter for marketing and then you turn on your camera to do a YouTube vlog and then all of a sudden you realize you have 20

things open at once. You're juggling 20 different tasks. You're doing pretty much every art form you can think of, right? as opposed to making a film which is you know cameras and you've got a a camera operator but then you also have a sound guy and then you also have well you have somebody editing and then you have somebody who's just doing the screenplay and doing screenwriting whereas game development especially with a smaller team and I would say Dellic even has a small team they're juggling a million different things so for a leader to come in and put more pressure on you is is it's just not fair especially at what these people are being paid right even if somebody was making $200,000 a year. I don't think that pressure is fair. I really don't. Um I'm I'm being honest here. I I tell my team this all the time. Don't work over 40 hours. Do not work over 40 hours. It's just not worth it. And ultimately, it creates a a crappy project because if you're not having fun being creative, you're not going to be creative, right? Okay. Fishtoman would shout at staff. This is what they're saying. Um this is

allegedly. Fishermanmen would shout at staff and things were so hostile that some workers would whisper out of fear of being overheard. Oh geez, that is so frustrating. I hate seeing this because you cannot be creative with a a beautiful IP, a license to Lord of the Rings and you have to whisper that. That kind of stuff really bugs me because you have the perfect IP and you screwed it up because you created this atmosphere of fear. And I want to clarify, an atmosphere of fear is created for a variety of different reasons, but one of the main ones is when you have an overpromise in the marketing and you're underfunded. So you say you're going to make a AAA game, the team knows that, you know, you don't have enough money. And so what happens? Everybody's scared. Everybody's scared of the final product. Even the COO and the CEO are scared because because they know they're probably not going to deliver. And so it just creates this culture of fear.

And it all starts at the top, right? If the COO and the CEO are afraid of the final product, in this case, Gollum flopping, which it did, they're going to spew out their fear on everybody else, and everybody else is going to get afraid, too. That's just my assumption. I could be wrong. Maybe they're just mean dudes. The video further alleges staff had to crunch without pay. Again, this is not fair. Nobody should do this. And that junior staff and interns face the most pressure during development. This is brutal. This is brutal right here. Um the amount of workload and pressure should is this is inverted to what is just, right? What is just should be the the top guy, the owner, the founder, the CEO should face the most pressure. He should work the most. Um because frankly, he's getting paid the most. he stands the most to benefit from a successful project. So yeah, maybe he doesn't work 60 hours a week, right?

Maybe he works 40 hours a week. Well, it should trickle down. Meaning his employees should not be working harder than he is. And he should not they should not feel more pressure than he's feeling. He should feel the most pressure. He should bear the most burden because he's at the top and he stands the most benefit. The company, the game, it's his baby, not their baby. and he should not expect them to treat it like it's their baby. That makes zero sense because it's not their baby. And when you have junior staff and interns facing the most pressure, it's a completely backwards uh culture. Some employees noted that they were essentially cheap labor and they couldn't assess the level of stress as critical or unusual. So, they just had no idea that this was wrong. Okay, moving on down here. This is interesting. So, we've got 25 employees laid off out of reportedly 90 total. That's a big deal. What is that? A third is a third of the employees. And there was also a cancellation of the second

Lord of the Rings project, um, which was believed to be a Golem follow-up. If I were to if I were to recreate this Golem game and create like a sequel or maybe a reboot, I would market it as a double A game, I would use low poly. I would use tune shaders and I would focus super simple gameplay mechanics, which is sneaking. And then I would I was thinking it would be really fun if the if the community could create Lord of the Rings environments um and upload them to a server and then people could play hide-and-seek in this, you know, custom cave system. That's what I would do. um creativity and sneaking. That's those are the all wrapped in this beautiful Gollum IP. That's what I would do. But again, it would be build as a DA game. That's the important part. Um it's important to note here that the entire Lord of the Rings rights um have been sold to I think Embra Yeah, it says Embracer here. And by the way, uh 3D Realms is owned by Embracer. And so, um, the funding for Twisted Tower also comes

from Embracer, which isn't surprising because Embracer is massive. But that's just to say I I have pressure, too. Like, my team has pressure as well, um, from large companies. And so, I get that the the temptation to be an a-hole uh, when you have all this pressure, but again, it's not conducive to a creative project. You're going to see games like Gollum coming out when people are constantly afraid of higher ups. Okay, so Embracer has bought up the entire Lord of the Rings rights. Uh, notably Daidelic released a public statement apologizing for Gollum's release date. Um, and this this even got, you know, headlines because the the public statement even felt a little canned. Some people claimed it was created with chat GPT. All that said, all that said, guys, check out the the video below of it's it's I believe it's in German or is it French? I'm not sure. Um, but check out this video here. It's a it's a great video. just discussing the toxic work environment. In conclusion here, just because just because you feel pressure,

let's say if you're leading a game development studio, just because you feel pressure doesn't mean you have the right to let it spill out to other people. That's not fair to anybody. Um, if you're starting a game studio, I know a lot of you want to start a game studio who are watching my channel. as the leader, your job is almost to be kind of like a father or uh like a like like think about uh man I I'm thinking about someone who I really like Jesus Christ or like Harry Potter, right? They they hold the line or William Wallace. They hold the line and they they they bear the burden of the team and they do it quietly. Okay. Um maybe the two the CEO and the COO of Thidactic did that but reportedly they didn't. And so your job is when you're building this house of cards, this game, your job as the leader is to bear the burden quietly, put on a smile, don't freak everybody out, and don't lead out of fear. So that's my two cents.