The founders behind Moon Studios, the developer for the highly-rated Ori games on the Xbox platform, have been lambasted by its employees. Multiple employees have anonymously stated that both Thomas Mahler and Gennadiy Korol have created an indie studio that’s meant to be anti-corporate and transparent on the surface, but was allegedly a place that enabled sexism, bullying, and casual racism.
The toxic workplace allegedly behind the scenes at Moon Studios
The lengthy exposé at VentureBeat levels allegations that Moon Studios is an extremely toxic workplace and reads like a summary of awful reviews on GlassDoor. In fact, Moon Studios currently has a rating of 2.7/5 on Glassdoor, and many of the complaints there echo the sentiments in the piece. The piece claims that the main reasons any developer stayed – despite the burn-out, the mental health issues, the crunch culture, and the exceedingly high turnover rate – was because it was difficult finding remote jobs in the industry and because Ori is beloved by so many fans.
One of the employees’ chief complaints are the unprofessional and offensive comments that Mahler and Korol would allegedly engage in, flooding public workplace chats with anti-semitic snipes, sexist comments, and jokes about their penis size. Both founders were so busy trying to be “anti-woke” and “not politically correct” that any criticism of their “man children” behavior was seen as being overly sensitive. For the new game from Moon Studios, several developers said they even had to talk Mahler down from a rape scene that was going to be the impetus for a revenge plot.
Many times, the two founders would allegedly argue with one another for an hour during a meeting, with one developer saying that the team “wasted hours hearing Gennadiy and Thomas screaming like teens.” In front of cameras, though, the developers say that they put on a smile and acted nice.
The founders have also been accused of being overly aggressive in their critiques, publicly shaming and micro-managing the work of their employees. This was particularly evident when it came to the art team, where workers described the founder’s feedback as “pixel f**king.”
This led to many developers leaving. Even after the success of the first Ori title, hardly anyone from that team stayed for the second. A few developers say they were severely burned out, experiencing PTSD, with one worker saying that leaving Moon Studios was “the best decision I’ve made in a long time.”
Both founders have made a full statement to the criticisms laid before them:
“We don’t believe the experiences suggested by your questions are representative of the more than 80 Moon Studios team members who are thriving and doing great work every day — nor do we believe they are representative of the experiences of former members of our team…
[W]e appreciate the irony that we — an Austrian and an Israeli Jew — started this multicultural enterprise… We have made jokes at our own expense about the differences in our backgrounds — and there may have been times that our teasing of each other has come off as insensitive and may have made others feel uncomfortable.”
In other news, Hogwarts Legacy State of Play has revealed a Holiday 2022 release window, and Gran Turismo 7 is getting review-bombed on Metacritic.
