A few days back a news bomb dropped about Warhammer 40K: Inquisitor Martyr being delayed. The game’s devs NeocoreGames published an apology that seems somewhat disconcerting, to some.

“We promise we’ll push this extra three weeks in 90+ hours per week.” Is the statement that has a whole lot of people riled up. This statement refers of course to the Crunch, an unfortunately unavoidable thing in games’ development, a period when everybody has to work double-time to meet a deadline. This is not unusual for everyone who has to work with arbitrary deadlines (which is everyone except your boss, obviously) and most of the time we all just accept that this is something that is going to happen.

This time however, there was a massive reaction on Twitters and Reddits, lambasting Neocore for “inappropriate treatment” of their staff. I mean maybe it has something to do with the fact that Neocore issued very similar statements in the past. It’s hard to consider something told repeatedly to be a joke, at some point you have to admit there might be something to it.

Nevertheless, the studio’s staff took to social media themselves to dispel the notion that they are being treated anything but fairly. Which some were convinced by and some weren’t. The full text (now redacted) can be read here. If you do read between the lines, maybe some kind of malice could be implied here? But then again if you read between the lines, you could imply anything.