Respawn Hopes To Keep Quality Of Life High For Apex Legends Developers

On the same day that news of Epic Games' overworking of its employees in the wake of Fortnite: Battle Royale's success broke, Respawn Entertainment CEO Vince Zampella was at the GamesBeat Summit in Los Angeles, discussing how his team has handled the rapid ascent of Apex Legends. Gamasutra has an account of that talk, in which Zampella said that his company hasn't changed how it does business, keeping a close eye on the quality of life for his employees and not working them to the point of exhaustion.

Apex Legends' content updates were always intended to be seasonal, Zampella said, despite how the game was "blowing up" and how the temptation was there to "start trying to drop more content." Zampella still isn't sure about the exact rate of content production, and admits that the first season was a little light on content, but he doesn't want to burn out his team in trying to figure out how to do it:

"But I think you look at quality of life for the team. We don’t want to overwork the team, and drop the quality of the assets we’re putting out. We want to try and raise that."

I had a mini-Tweetstorm earlier this week when the Epic news broke, in which I said that while unionization and better communities would be nice, the only way that crunch might ever really stop occurring in the video game industry is for the people at the top to say, "You know what? Maybe we'll just have to make less money than we could if we worked our people for 100 hours a week." For the moment, at least, it seems like Zampella is on board with that idea.