Two weeks ago at the time of writing, we reported on accusations from the Spanish union CSVI-CGT against MercurySteam, and their subsequent response. Now, a new report from 3DJuegos expands upon those accusations. They spoke with ten current and former employees, who allege that working conditions deteriorated beginning in January 2025.
According to the employees, MercurySteam implemented the Irregular Workday Distribution (IDD) model for some departments at the start of 2025. This model allows for a single hour of overtime per day, or nine hour workdays and 45 hour workweeks, due to “production needs”.
On May 5, MercurySteam announced that, along with temporary layoffs, some departments would have employees now working 10 hours per day, 50 hours per week, with a temporary ban on remote working and vacations. The employees claim that this change was communicated verbally and not in writing, and when they brought their concerns to management in a later meeting, they admitted these overtime hours were in fact voluntary. Nevertheless, the employees who spoke to 3DJuegos said that MercurySteam put measures in place to intimidate workers into working overtime, and some departments were unaffected.
In a shocking example, one probationary employee claimed that he was fired after declining to work overtime so he could take paternity leave to support his wife during her high-risk pregnancy. Another employee who was vocal in their opposition to these new working conditions was fired, and a third claimed that she was fired upon returning from sick leave. This employee claimed that her department head persistently texted her personal phone during said leave. On her return, she was denied access to critical systems, not assigned tasks, and then fired a month later for underperformance. She told 3DJuegos that MercurySteam threatened her with legal action for speaking about this on social media.
From August 20-22, 2025, 18 workers were laid off with the stated reason being lack of work and poor sales for Blades of Fire. In September, MercurySteam’s management implemented restrictions and random inspections of employee communications, and installed partitions in the office to limit staff interaction. The employees quoted in the 3DJuegos report dispute that there was a lack of work given the culture of overtime at MercurySteam.
They affirmed everything in the statement from CSVI as true, and refuted the response that came from MercurySteam, suggesting they would know if their former colleagues had spoken in the company’s defense. They additionally pointed out that despite the crunch they allegedly experienced at MercurySteam, job postings for the studio claim that there is no culture of crunch.
MercurySteam claimed that since the controversy around uncredited developers in Metroid Dread, they had changed their policy for Blades of Fire. However, the ten developers interviewed by 3DJuegos said this was a request from the workers’ committee that took eight months to approve, rather than a voluntary change from studio management. Further, they reported that some developers are currently crunching on MercurySteam’s next, unannounced game.
MercurySteam has yet to comment on these expanded allegations. If true, they are damning and very disappointing. We hope that for the sake of MercurySteam’s staff, these issues will be resolved, because every developer deserves fair compensation, a positive work environment, and time off in order to complete their games.
Source: 3DJuegos
