The North American giant, responsible for GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2, is known to be aware of the severity of COVID-19 in society.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) is already a global pandemic. Despite the fact that the impact of the outbreak is not as pronounced yet in the United States as in Europe, Rockstar Games have publicly declared that they apply telework in all their headquarters and offices to combat the possible health consequences of their employees. They will all work from home.
Those responsible for GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 do not want health problems in their workforce and intend to minimize the possible impact of COVID-19 on their business plans, where they are – at least – future updates, patches and content in the related video games.
Objective: to reduce the impact of the coronavirus as much as possible
"Rockstar Games has implemented work-from-home policies in all of our offices and studios internationally," they begin by saying. “After a careful consultation and investigation with all our teams around the world, we have started to apply the work remotely since last week; We are confident that we have a robust system in place so that our teams can continue their work with minimal disruption. ”
GTA Online, one of the games with the highest global turnover on consoles in 2019
Furthermore, they make it clear that their games will continue to function normally and support teams will be available to the gaming community. Not surprisingly, "the health and safety of our employees and their families remains our top priority," they expand. In the absence of knowing what they are working on now, after these two commercial successes, the hitherto producer of both intellectual properties, Dan Houser, has left Rockstar.
The coronavirus is having direct consequences in the video game industry. The cancellation of E3 2020 is just one of them: lack of supply on consoles such as Nintendo Switch in Japan, cancellation of fairs, possible delays in video games and, who knows, perhaps also the delay in the departure of PS5 and Xbox Series X, such as some analyst groups already venture to say.
