WTF?! Revelations about a game developer’s unsettling request that employees have naked sauna sessions are gaining attention on social media. Spectrum Studios is making a game about a “saunamaster,” so getting your clothes off and experiencing the real thing is “not negotiable” as the “entire team needs to understand the product.”
The bizarre request, highlighted on LinkedIn by Patryk Suchy, Lead Recruiter at 8bit (via Dexerto), was made by Spectrum Studios creative director Jacek Piorkowski. “This dude, a creative director, requires NAKED SAUNA SESSIONS as a part of work in his studio,” Suchy writes.
Screenshots showed Piorkowski responding to a developer on LinkedIn about a job. Narrative designer and writer Aleksandra Wolna told Piorkowski, “From what you said, you consider naked sauna sessions part of the work responsibilities in your studio. I told you that was a dealbreaker for me.”
Piorkowski’s response, which he has since edited, was “You had a lot of time to prove me wrong. To write scene in sauna without being in sauna… Instead, we are wasting time on social media.”
“My narrative girls had to go to sauna with me to came up [sic] with amazing script for proof of concept,” he added. “I absolutely adore the fact that they could use their sauna experience to write awesome scenes”
The unusual mandate is apparently so those working on Spectrum Studio’s new game, in which the main character is a “saunamaster,” can understand the product. An ad for the game claims it is a mix of Life is Strange, Final Fantasy, Heart of Darkness, The Turyst, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, oddly. The ad itself states that attending sauna sessions is not negotiable – being able to use the sauna free of charge is highlighted as a benefit.
Found an article in Polish media with the actual ad: pic.twitter.com/IGBJXgLN7e
– Simon Christiansen (@SimonChris1729) June 18, 2024
Piorkowski wrote in another post that they are able to organize female-only events, which they already did. As for why people have to be naked and can’t just wear a towel, he says towels get extremely wet after a few seconds in a sauna and may result in fungal infection. He tried to justify the demand by saying you wouldn’t hire a cloud engineer that doesn’t understand the idea behind cloud, or an engineer to build a plane that doesn’t understand the physics about why plane actually fly.
A game company immersing development teams in scenarios that help them understand the characters or story doesn’t sound unusual, but there should be limits. One assumes, for example, that the developers of Dead by Deadlight didn’t go around killing people to make a better game, or the makers of Hatoful Boyfriend didn’t date any birds.
