Rockstar, Red Dead Redemption in trouble?

Rumours hit the internet over the weekend about industry giant Rockstar, with a bunch of mutinous spouses-of-employees over at the company's San Diego office penning a furious, grammatically questionable missive to "Whomever it may concern". Basically, employment conditions are allegedly pretty bad, there's loads of mismanagement and time wasting, and guys are sitting twelve hour days while leather-clad supervisors prowl the cubicles with cattle prods.

Following the subsequent copy-pasted publication of this letter all over the web, a source at Rockstar San Diego contacted Joystiq, adding that, "Anyone from the New York office is feared, because people in the San Diego office know that they are unstable and needy ... in other words, if a comment comes from a person from New York, it's a mandate that needs to be immediately addressed regardless of previous priorities."

Another anonymous source, a former employee at Rockstar NYC, confirmed this, saying "I can support what those accounts are saying, where you're working long hours with last minute demands and no direction."

But that stuff is for the unions. What about the highly anticipated, upcoming cowboy adventure, Red Dead Redemption? With Rockstar in possible trouble, development on the project could be stalled. Back over at Joystiq, anonymous sources are claiming that, the game "was a complete disaster for most of 2009 and previous ... it has since turned around a little bit, but there are huge problems with it still," and "it will never get the money back in sales it cost to create for those six years".

However, a subsequent response from another Rockstar source has it that, "It will take 5 million sales at full price to recoup the development costs of Red Dead. The good news is they [Rockstar] are not expecting to make money with Red Dead Redemption. At this point, that project is just supposed to prove that the San Diego studio can make a great quality AAA title."

The drama is ongoing. Of course, with Red Dead Redemption scheduled to release at the end of April, it seems a bit unlikely that it would be cancelled this late in its development cycle, though, a delay is not out of the question.