BioWare issued a follow-up statement addressing the crunch practices and defended members of company leadership that were identified in the Kotaku report. The company said that overwork wasn't a major area of feedback in internal surveys after "Anthem's" release, but avoiding crunch is still a priority.
"We hear the criticisms that were raised by the people in the piece today, and we’re looking at that alongside feedback that we receive in our internal team surveys. We put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid 'crunch time,' and it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems," BioWare's statement read. "Making games, especially new IP, will always be one of the hardest entertainment challenges. We do everything we can to try and make it healthy and stress-free, but we also know there is always room to improve."
In an internal statement sent to BioWare employees, General Manager Casey Hudson expressed concern about individual members of leadership being singled out for public criticism. He said the company will implement changes to offer a better vision of the company's direction and individual employee roles.
Part of what interested me about returning to BioWare was the challenge of building a new leadership team around solving precisely these problems. We have more to do, but creating a happy and rewarding work environment remains our top priority.
— Casey Hudson (@CaseyDHudson)
April 4, 2019