9 ms·

Crunch Makes Games Worse

96 points by larsiusprime 12y ago

serve_yay 12y ago
> "Crunch sucks, but if it is seen by the team members as a fair cost of participating in an otherwise fantastic employment experience..." Oh, I see: workers should repay employers for a "fantastic employment experience". Boy oh boy. I say if your industry is such that you must have this sort of in-depth investigation in order to simply work normal work-weeks, your goose is already cooked.
- astrodust 12y ago
  When you die of a heart-attack brought on by too much Red Bull and sleep deprivation, they can put on your tombstone: "Died coding, but at least the trees in GTA V looked really nice."
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    Thats more than what most people can expect on their epitaph, though.
    - tdees40 12y ago
      It's really not. Most people would put "Great (father|mother)", "Wonderful Friend", but I suppose that's a value judgment and each has his or her own opinion.
      - ekianjo 12y ago
        "Great","Wonderful" is all relative. You don't usually benchmark your parents/friends with others, and in the case of parents there's a significant bias, because you know, you share half of your genes with them and stuff like that. And what I meant is, rather, few people can claim to have touch millions of people through their work, but someone who worked on GTA V can, even if it's just a tiny part of it.
        jerf 12y ago
        Here Lies Jerf Probably in at least the 60th Percentile of Parents (Based on a Biased Self-Reporting Survey of his Children) THIS EPITAPH APPROVED BY EKIANJO (No offense intended. The idea tickled me.)
        ekianjo 12y ago
        haha :) I found that funny.
        coldtea 12y ago
        >"Great","Wonderful" is all relative Whereas the impact you've made to "millions of people" because of the quality of graphics in a game where pimps shoot people in the streets and beat women up is a subjective accomplishment?
        ekianjo 12y ago
        Well everything is part of the experience. If something stands out in the game some people are bound to notice it, and no matter the subject of the game (GTA V was brought to light here but it could be any other popular game) you will probably feel responsible for some of the good reviews the game got (and how successful it was market wise). Beyond what you did as a person you were part of a team working on something that many people enjoyed.
        ncza 12y ago
        GTA is a sandbox game. If violence against virtual women is all you do in it and that concerns you, I would highly recommend seeing a psychologist to find help.
        coldtea 12y ago
        >If violence against virtual women is all you do in it and that concerns you, I would highly recommend seeing a psychologist to find help. Do people really think it's tactful and/or polite to suggest psychiatic treatment to others in a discussion? Especially after mis-reading their whole point? I don't do anything in GTA, have never played the game. The parent comment presented it as a something to be proud about as compared to being a parent/friend/etc. I just wanted to point out it's not some great achievement humanity wise.
  - atomicfiredoll 12y ago
    To be fair, this is why I have no issue when GTA V for PC gets pushed back for the one-hundredth time. Maybe they didn't estimate it well, but hopefully they aren't buying in to the pro-crunch philosophy either. It seems like they're really trying to do it right and the end product will will probably reflect that.
    - shortsleeves 12y ago
      http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RockstarSpouse/20100107/86315/Wives_of_Rockstar_San_Diego_employees_have_collected_themselves.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RockstarSpouse/20100107/86315...
      - Svip 12y ago
        I don't know, but I don't think Rockstar North and Rockstar San Diego usually operates under the same principles.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  If people continue to work in the games industry despite the workload and pay they must be getting something out of it.
  - serve_yay 12y ago
    Indeed, and bless their hearts.
  - pixl97 12y ago
    People commonly work against their own self interests. People commonly vote against their own self interests. People commonly do stupid things.
    - jiggy2011 12y ago
      What if you really enjoy working on games that much?
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    People continue to join the games industry - attrition rates are sky high and the vast majority do not last. Perhaps the argument should be reframed as - why is it that despite high-profile and commonly known, and completely batshit insane working conditions, do people still sign up (and then quit the industry entirely)? Are we doing a poor job publicizing these conditions, or are the stories just so horrifying that they become almost outlandishly unbelievable?
    - jiggy2011 12y ago
      Everyone I knew who went into games knew what the conditions were before they joined. It's only bad if you don't have a backup plan.
    - andrewfong 12y ago
      I'm armchair psychoanalyzing, but I think it's largely because the people entering the games industry are young and it's exceptionally difficult to grasp how terrible something like 80 hour work weeks are until you've been through a few. I mean, it's fairly common for university students to forgo sleep crunching for finals or spend ungodly amounts of time playing their favorite game. Add in "it's not work if you love what you do" and "I'm a special and unique," and you can see how someone might be persuaded to join the games industry in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is a terrible idea. For what it's worth, this also seems to be true of the legal and medical professions as well. And, more relevantly, startup founders.
ekianjo 12y ago
The guy who wrote this is making linear correlations on likert scales? SERIOUSLY? Looks like some pretty poor understanding of stats.
- cecilpl 12y ago
  Why is this bad?
  - _delirium 12y ago
    A number of people argue that Likert scale responses are properly treated as ordinal data, meaning that 1<2<3<4<5, but not necessarily that |1-2| = |2-3| or avg(1,5)=3. Treating them as numerical data often (depending on what you're doing) implicitly makes some assumptions about calibration of the ordinal scale that might not be warranted (e.g. the distance between a "1" and "2" response might be very different than the distance between a "2" and "3" response).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
walru 12y ago
Crunch is typically the result of poor planning or design on the fly or by focus-group. So, to that end, it's not the crunch's fault, even though it sucks, it's the fault of design and production not getting their ducks in a row.
- jtheory 12y ago
  The OP gets into that -- the main secondary point of the article is that when these things go wrong (as they sometimes do), a "crunch" approach actually decreases the likelihood that the project will succeed. It just makes things worse. In other words, the medicine has awful side-effects, and it doesn't even treat the illness.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Maybe, but that's not quite what their survey showed: The four strongest correlations with our crunch-related questions were: +0.51: “There was a lot of turnover on this project.” +0.50: “Team members would often work for weeks at a time without receiving feedback from project leads or managers.” +0.49: “The team’s leads and managers did not have a respectful relationship with the team’s developers.” -0.49: “The development plan for the game was clear and well-communicated to the team.” (+ = this response was positively correlated with crunch)
  - walru 12y ago
    I'm just going off my experiences over the last seventeen years.
rhino369 12y ago
Welcome to white collar america programmers. It sorta sucks but at least you can afford a boat you never use and a house for your ex-wife to raise your kids. Signed Doctors, Bankers and Lawyers.
- sbov 12y ago
  If you take out the boat and house, sure. Most game developers I know working in the bay area don't make six figures.
  - iopq 12y ago
    No, they make like $95,000 which is only five figures.
- marincounty 12y ago
  I see that trend in a lot of occupations. My father was a union Electrician and never turned down overtime. Well he got everything he wanted, but he didn't value his family or friends. It was all about the job.(He took it very seriously). He took an early retirement because he could, but soon afterwards learning that no one was waiting for his company--he wished he didn't put so much energy into his job. He died a few years into retirement--very bitter. Yes--I tried to be a good son, but I really didn't like the person he became; I tried to bring him into my life, but nothing ever worked out between us. He changed when he got sick, and wished he didn't live for future, and treated his kids with honest love(at least I want to think he made a effort?)
- morgante 12y ago
  > Welcome to white collar america programmers. Nope. At least in white collar America professionals demand fair compensation for intense work. Gamers, on the other hand, are not behaving rationally and demanding appropriate compensation or the right work environment. Instead, they're unprofessionally stuck in a teenager's mentality that working in gaming is somehow amazing and fun.
umanwizard 12y ago
I work at a huge company for 6 figures total annual compensation, right out of college. I come in and go home whenever I want to, and I probably clock an average work-week in the high 30s. If I'm particularly interested in something I'm working on, that number might go up a bit temporarily, completely of my own volition. I have never heard of someone being asked to work more hours, and I imagine a manager even bringing it up would be very taboo. This all applies only to my team, as I'm sure there are some at my company under more pressure. But the point is the same: why would anyone do this to themselves? We may be in a bubble, but at least for the moment, software developer is a cushy job with lots of great opportunities available. Why anyone would work 100 hour weeks in a sweatshop baffles me. Who cares whether it makes games better or worse? I'm sure I could put out a better product if I worked 80 hours instead of 40. But I'd rather go home, sleep with my girlfriend, read a book, or (heh) play a video game. Our CEO is doing fine and doesn't need my charity.
- Swizec 12y ago
  > Why anyone would work 100 hour weeks in a sweatshop baffles me. Because idealistic 20-somethings are easily riled up into a frenzy. Promise them a chance at glory and they will do anything no matter their personal cost. And they're full of piss and vinegar to boot.
- ploxiln 12y ago
  The games industry is like the fashion industry. Young boys, girls respectively are super motivated to get a job in the industry, they think they're not interested in doing any other job. That desperation enables the industry to take great advantage of them at the lower levels: if they're not willing to work under those terms, there are a number of eager replacements. I'm not morally judging the situation, I think of it as a natural effect of market forces. A rational person would just go to another industry. I'm a software developer who was never anywhere near the game industry, fwiw, though I have had an appreciation for computer games since childhood. But In these industries, there are enough enthusiastic, perhaps not quite rational people, to keep that workforce unusually pressurized, metaphorically speaking.
  - 12y ago
ineedtosleep 12y ago
From the article referenced (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-23-game-devs-when-does-crunch-cross-the-line http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-23-game-devs-w...) > As we get deeper into the process we discover that things that sounded good on paper don't work in practice. Things that worked in prototype don't work in a fully textured and lit level. And then the folks providing money or distribution randomize and disrupt by demanding demos or screenshots at the most inconvenient times!" That quote was listed as one of positive quotes for crunch, but it solidifies even more that the process is broken and/or better project management has to be done.
- jblow 12y ago
  You can't schedule something unknown.
j_baker 12y ago
Who'd have thought that the business-types (Rubin and Spector) are supportive of crunch, while the developer (Paxton) doesn't like crunch? Apparently, the business types like turning their organizations into meat grinders while the developers like not being overworked and exploited.
- anon4 12y ago
  At this point I'm half-expecting they do it for the feeling of power, rather than for the goal of making a better game.
forrestthewoods 12y ago
Naughty Dog makes best in class games. They also have some of the worst crunch in the industry. I therefore conclude the title somewhere between incomplete and wrong. There's no blockbuster game on the market that wasn't crunched on. That's not excuse, just a simple fact. Can we have "crunch makes your startup worse" next? Then we an see a raise of hands for how many now successful startups were born in crunch.
- 21echoes 12y ago
  did you read the article? the article addresses this in the second paragraph. it then goes on to compare levels of crunch with metacritic scores and ROI data, and finds that crunch statistically significantly hurts projects.
- anon4 12y ago
  Five guys furiously getting an MVP off the ground in minimal amount of time is different from a studio of hundreds slogging through months of unpaid overtime.
egypturnash 12y ago
I used to work in the Hollywood animation industry. I had friends who worked in the LA video game industry around then. Crunch was, quite simply, an expected part of life in both industries. I think it may be something that emerges from the way human brains work, when dealing with projects that take more than a year to finish. People slack off near the beginning because, wow, they have YEARS to get it done. (Or obsessively try to polish a small part, because, again, wow, YEARS.) As the release date approaches, it starts to feel more like an actual thing, and people start panicking because there is a colossal amount of money involved in a big-budget game or feature cartoon. You can't take longer because you're running out of money, and you have a ton of sunk costs in the advertising that says a specific date, there are merchandising tie-ins waiting for the release, all kinds of things pushing towards "the team works crazy hours and burns out". Me? I draw a graphic novel now. The only deadline I have to make is the self-imposed one, and I'm lucky enough that my finances have enough slack that my schedule can have some slack, too.
- Animats 12y ago
  I used to work in the Hollywood animation industry. I had friends who worked in the LA video game industry around then. Crunch was, quite simply, an expected part of life in both industries. Much of Hollywood animation is unionized. (animationguild.org, IATSE Local 839). Crunches mean paid overtime. From the Animation Guild standard contract: "All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification." This discourages unnecessary "crunches". If you would like The Animation Guild to represent you and your fellow employees at a game company, print up some of these cards and get your fellow employees to sign them: http://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/RepresentationCard.pdf http://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Represe... You can force your employer to have a union election.
DigitalSea 12y ago
I wholeheartedly agree, crunch is damaging to any industry over extended periods of time. It doesn't matter if you're a game developer, web developer or architect, crunch affects everyone. It is an outdated way of thinking that the game industry has failed to let go of that the more people and effort you throw at a problem, the quicker it gets solved. The more hours you throw at a problem in my experience as a developer, you end up with more problems than you started off trying to solve. You lose focus, when you lose focus things that were once obvious are not in your peripheral vision and you make mistakes. It is akin to driving a vehicle tired, you are more likely to be in an accident. Sadly the gaming industry is notorious for this kind of behaviour of expected crunch. Yeah, you push yourself to get out a game, but then what? You start working on another new game or DLC for the current game and you find yourself working 80 hour weeks again, what was the benefit of those long hours other than keeping your job? It is a repeating cycle. People have been decrying the crunch in the gaming industry especially since the 90's and yet, nothing ever changes or improves. Someone writes a blog post or article, people unanimously agree things need to change and then it all blows over until the next article comes along. What's it going to take: a spate of sleep-deprived, stressed game developers taking their own lives? I accept the fact that avoiding crunch altogether is unavoidable in any industry, but we need to better manage it. We need to have a framework in place that prevents people from being expected to work 80+ hour weeks for years on end. Sometimes you need to put in some extra hours to finish a project, that's cool, just don't factor it in every time, expect it for months or years on end and above all: don't forgo compensation for the sacrifice your employees are making under the guise of "we need to do this" Look at mostly every single AAA game released in the last few years, more issues than you can poke a stick at. Look at GTA V, when it launched people couldn't even play the multiplayer component, same thing happened to the highly anticipated and hyped Destiny and pretty much every insert game name here - is it the fault of the developers who were enslaved to complete the game? No. It is the lack of resources, lack of care for sane work hours, lack of compassion or concern for employees that causes large games with budgets that rival Hollywood movies to fail spectacularly on launch. When is the last time a large company like Rockstar Games or Electronic Arts released a game that wasn't broken or buggy to some extent on launch? Besides having an extremely generous budget to hire the best and produce something spectacular? I can't recall a time that happened in the last few years. Perfection is not a priority, churn and burn is the name of the game. Get it out now as long as it is complete and we'll sort out the bugs with a patch shortly after launch. Oh, and hurry, the investors want to see a quick profit on this one. Some of you might recall the famous post from an anonymous blogger by the name of EA Spouse. A wife of a video game developer working at Electronic Arts pouring her heart out over the toll his long hours take on him and his family, the excessive work hours he puts in: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/ http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/ - large publications lapped the story up, people were outraged and yet here we are in 2015 reading another article about long hours. Things will not change until something bad happens (and probably not until it starts happening frequently). We've been talking about things needing to change for far too long, but nothing ever seems to get better.
Pinatubo 12y ago
Could these results be driven by sequels? I would expect that a sequel would need less crunch time (many big problems have already been solved) and have a higher ROI (they're likely making a sequel because the franchise is popular, and less effort is needed).
vehementi 12y ago
Sony's H1Z1 launched its early access (i.e. alpha) late last week and their president was saying the dev team was doing 18 hour days, and they worked 2 of the 3 days of the MLK weekend. Again, early access, not release, etc.
morgante 12y ago
What do people expect of an industry where supply and demand is completely out of whack? Supply of programmers in the games industry is almost completely inelastic. No matter how little they get paid (relative to tech standards) and how poor conditions become, young programmers will continue to flock to the games industry because it's perceived as "cool." Why people make employment decisions based on what they play in their free time I will never understand. I also love reading books, watching movies, and eating food—but I have no delusions that those would be good career options. More generally, I think the best way to improve working conditions across the tech industry is to kill the meme that working on "sexy" tech is important. So long as companies are able to attract talent through silly stories or sexy projects, rather than a good work environment and competitive salaries, programmers are going to continue to be abused and perceived as unprofessional. Lawyers don't choose which firm to join based on who has the coolest name. It's time that programmers stopped chasing cool and started acting professional.
famousactress 12y ago
The priceless quote here for me is: “Schedule 40 hours a week and you get 38. Schedule 50 and you get 39 and everyone hates work, life, and you. Schedule 60 and you get 32 and wives start demanding you send out resumes." That's a pretty great approximation of my experience with the concept.
pandaman 12y ago
In my experience crunch is often caused by poor direction, political games, understaffing, under-budgeting other such factors that are crippling to the game quality. So, naturally, a project that is in crunch is likely to fail in sales and in reviews. The article authors address this, but only at the angle of "Does it help to salvage a failing project?" and I agree with their negative conclusion. Crunching is not going to salvage anything. Why would it? Your publisher changes the requirements every quarter and the game's genre every year, your producers (managers) are busy trying to get each other fired, people are leaving because they think the game is going to suck and they have not seen a bonus in 5 years, you cannot hire anyone because they think the game is going to suck and you don't have money anyway so you could as well crunch trying to ship whatever with whomever is left but crunching is not going to fix these issues. Crunching can only improve a project that does not have any crippling problems. And it usually does (again, from my experience). It works because nobody can schedule 2+ years creative work for 200+ people with such a precision that on the last day of the schedule you check in the last line of code, export the last asset, pack a build and send an 80+ (hell, even 60+) metacritic game to the manufacturing. Game production is an iterative process. The more iterations you make - the better the game becomes in your eyes if not in the reviews. This is why people crunch voluntarily. They want to ship better games.

96 points by larsiusprime 12y ago

> "Crunch sucks, but if it is seen by the team members as a fair cost of participating in an otherwise fantastic employment experience..." Oh, I see: workers should repay employers for a "fantastic employment experience". Boy oh boy. I say if your industry is such that you must have this sort of in-depth investigation in order to simply work normal work-weeks, your goose is already cooked.

astrodust 12y ago
When you die of a heart-attack brought on by too much Red Bull and sleep deprivation, they can put on your tombstone: "Died coding, but at least the trees in GTA V looked really nice."
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Thats more than what most people can expect on their epitaph, though.
  - tdees40 12y ago
    It's really not. Most people would put "Great (father|mother)", "Wonderful Friend", but I suppose that's a value judgment and each has his or her own opinion.
    - ekianjo 12y ago
      "Great","Wonderful" is all relative. You don't usually benchmark your parents/friends with others, and in the case of parents there's a significant bias, because you know, you share half of your genes with them and stuff like that. And what I meant is, rather, few people can claim to have touch millions of people through their work, but someone who worked on GTA V can, even if it's just a tiny part of it.
      - jerf 12y ago
        Here Lies Jerf Probably in at least the 60th Percentile of Parents (Based on a Biased Self-Reporting Survey of his Children) THIS EPITAPH APPROVED BY EKIANJO (No offense intended. The idea tickled me.)
        ekianjo 12y ago
        haha :) I found that funny.
      - coldtea 12y ago
        >"Great","Wonderful" is all relative Whereas the impact you've made to "millions of people" because of the quality of graphics in a game where pimps shoot people in the streets and beat women up is a subjective accomplishment?
        ekianjo 12y ago
        Well everything is part of the experience. If something stands out in the game some people are bound to notice it, and no matter the subject of the game (GTA V was brought to light here but it could be any other popular game) you will probably feel responsible for some of the good reviews the game got (and how successful it was market wise). Beyond what you did as a person you were part of a team working on something that many people enjoyed.
        ncza 12y ago
        GTA is a sandbox game. If violence against virtual women is all you do in it and that concerns you, I would highly recommend seeing a psychologist to find help.
        coldtea 12y ago
        >If violence against virtual women is all you do in it and that concerns you, I would highly recommend seeing a psychologist to find help. Do people really think it's tactful and/or polite to suggest psychiatic treatment to others in a discussion? Especially after mis-reading their whole point? I don't do anything in GTA, have never played the game. The parent comment presented it as a something to be proud about as compared to being a parent/friend/etc. I just wanted to point out it's not some great achievement humanity wise.
- atomicfiredoll 12y ago
  To be fair, this is why I have no issue when GTA V for PC gets pushed back for the one-hundredth time. Maybe they didn't estimate it well, but hopefully they aren't buying in to the pro-crunch philosophy either. It seems like they're really trying to do it right and the end product will will probably reflect that.
  - shortsleeves 12y ago
    http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RockstarSpouse/20100107/86315/Wives_of_Rockstar_San_Diego_employees_have_collected_themselves.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RockstarSpouse/20100107/86315...
    - Svip 12y ago
      I don't know, but I don't think Rockstar North and Rockstar San Diego usually operates under the same principles.
jiggy2011 12y ago
If people continue to work in the games industry despite the workload and pay they must be getting something out of it.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  Indeed, and bless their hearts.
- pixl97 12y ago
  People commonly work against their own self interests. People commonly vote against their own self interests. People commonly do stupid things.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    What if you really enjoy working on games that much?
- potatolicious 12y ago
  People continue to join the games industry - attrition rates are sky high and the vast majority do not last. Perhaps the argument should be reframed as - why is it that despite high-profile and commonly known, and completely batshit insane working conditions, do people still sign up (and then quit the industry entirely)? Are we doing a poor job publicizing these conditions, or are the stories just so horrifying that they become almost outlandishly unbelievable?
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    Everyone I knew who went into games knew what the conditions were before they joined. It's only bad if you don't have a backup plan.
  - andrewfong 12y ago
    I'm armchair psychoanalyzing, but I think it's largely because the people entering the games industry are young and it's exceptionally difficult to grasp how terrible something like 80 hour work weeks are until you've been through a few. I mean, it's fairly common for university students to forgo sleep crunching for finals or spend ungodly amounts of time playing their favorite game. Add in "it's not work if you love what you do" and "I'm a special and unique," and you can see how someone might be persuaded to join the games industry in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is a terrible idea. For what it's worth, this also seems to be true of the legal and medical professions as well. And, more relevantly, startup founders.

ekianjo 12y ago

The guy who wrote this is making linear correlations on likert scales? SERIOUSLY? Looks like some pretty poor understanding of stats.

cecilpl 12y ago
Why is this bad?
- _delirium 12y ago
  A number of people argue that Likert scale responses are properly treated as ordinal data, meaning that 1<2<3<4<5, but not necessarily that |1-2| = |2-3| or avg(1,5)=3. Treating them as numerical data often (depending on what you're doing) implicitly makes some assumptions about calibration of the ordinal scale that might not be warranted (e.g. the distance between a "1" and "2" response might be very different than the distance between a "2" and "3" response).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

walru 12y ago

Crunch is typically the result of poor planning or design on the fly or by focus-group. So, to that end, it's not the crunch's fault, even though it sucks, it's the fault of design and production not getting their ducks in a row.

jtheory 12y ago
The OP gets into that -- the main secondary point of the article is that when these things go wrong (as they sometimes do), a "crunch" approach actually decreases the likelihood that the project will succeed. It just makes things worse. In other words, the medicine has awful side-effects, and it doesn't even treat the illness.
jjoonathan 12y ago
Maybe, but that's not quite what their survey showed: The four strongest correlations with our crunch-related questions were: +0.51: “There was a lot of turnover on this project.” +0.50: “Team members would often work for weeks at a time without receiving feedback from project leads or managers.” +0.49: “The team’s leads and managers did not have a respectful relationship with the team’s developers.” -0.49: “The development plan for the game was clear and well-communicated to the team.” (+ = this response was positively correlated with crunch)
- walru 12y ago
  I'm just going off my experiences over the last seventeen years.

rhino369 12y ago

Welcome to white collar america programmers. It sorta sucks but at least you can afford a boat you never use and a house for your ex-wife to raise your kids. Signed Doctors, Bankers and Lawyers.

sbov 12y ago
If you take out the boat and house, sure. Most game developers I know working in the bay area don't make six figures.
- iopq 12y ago
  No, they make like $95,000 which is only five figures.
marincounty 12y ago
I see that trend in a lot of occupations. My father was a union Electrician and never turned down overtime. Well he got everything he wanted, but he didn't value his family or friends. It was all about the job.(He took it very seriously). He took an early retirement because he could, but soon afterwards learning that no one was waiting for his company--he wished he didn't put so much energy into his job. He died a few years into retirement--very bitter. Yes--I tried to be a good son, but I really didn't like the person he became; I tried to bring him into my life, but nothing ever worked out between us. He changed when he got sick, and wished he didn't live for future, and treated his kids with honest love(at least I want to think he made a effort?)
morgante 12y ago
> Welcome to white collar america programmers. Nope. At least in white collar America professionals demand fair compensation for intense work. Gamers, on the other hand, are not behaving rationally and demanding appropriate compensation or the right work environment. Instead, they're unprofessionally stuck in a teenager's mentality that working in gaming is somehow amazing and fun.

umanwizard 12y ago

I work at a huge company for 6 figures total annual compensation, right out of college. I come in and go home whenever I want to, and I probably clock an average work-week in the high 30s. If I'm particularly interested in something I'm working on, that number might go up a bit temporarily, completely of my own volition. I have never heard of someone being asked to work more hours, and I imagine a manager even bringing it up would be very taboo. This all applies only to my team, as I'm sure there are some at my company under more pressure. But the point is the same: why would anyone do this to themselves? We may be in a bubble, but at least for the moment, software developer is a cushy job with lots of great opportunities available. Why anyone would work 100 hour weeks in a sweatshop baffles me. Who cares whether it makes games better or worse? I'm sure I could put out a better product if I worked 80 hours instead of 40. But I'd rather go home, sleep with my girlfriend, read a book, or (heh) play a video game. Our CEO is doing fine and doesn't need my charity.

Swizec 12y ago
> Why anyone would work 100 hour weeks in a sweatshop baffles me. Because idealistic 20-somethings are easily riled up into a frenzy. Promise them a chance at glory and they will do anything no matter their personal cost. And they're full of piss and vinegar to boot.
ploxiln 12y ago
The games industry is like the fashion industry. Young boys, girls respectively are super motivated to get a job in the industry, they think they're not interested in doing any other job. That desperation enables the industry to take great advantage of them at the lower levels: if they're not willing to work under those terms, there are a number of eager replacements. I'm not morally judging the situation, I think of it as a natural effect of market forces. A rational person would just go to another industry. I'm a software developer who was never anywhere near the game industry, fwiw, though I have had an appreciation for computer games since childhood. But In these industries, there are enough enthusiastic, perhaps not quite rational people, to keep that workforce unusually pressurized, metaphorically speaking.
- 12y ago

ineedtosleep 12y ago

From the article referenced (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-23-game-devs-when-does-crunch-cross-the-line http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-23-game-devs-w...) > As we get deeper into the process we discover that things that sounded good on paper don't work in practice. Things that worked in prototype don't work in a fully textured and lit level. And then the folks providing money or distribution randomize and disrupt by demanding demos or screenshots at the most inconvenient times!" That quote was listed as one of positive quotes for crunch, but it solidifies even more that the process is broken and/or better project management has to be done.

jblow 12y ago
You can't schedule something unknown.

j_baker 12y ago

Who'd have thought that the business-types (Rubin and Spector) are supportive of crunch, while the developer (Paxton) doesn't like crunch? Apparently, the business types like turning their organizations into meat grinders while the developers like not being overworked and exploited.

anon4 12y ago
At this point I'm half-expecting they do it for the feeling of power, rather than for the goal of making a better game.

forrestthewoods 12y ago

Naughty Dog makes best in class games. They also have some of the worst crunch in the industry. I therefore conclude the title somewhere between incomplete and wrong. There's no blockbuster game on the market that wasn't crunched on. That's not excuse, just a simple fact. Can we have "crunch makes your startup worse" next? Then we an see a raise of hands for how many now successful startups were born in crunch.

21echoes 12y ago
did you read the article? the article addresses this in the second paragraph. it then goes on to compare levels of crunch with metacritic scores and ROI data, and finds that crunch statistically significantly hurts projects.
anon4 12y ago
Five guys furiously getting an MVP off the ground in minimal amount of time is different from a studio of hundreds slogging through months of unpaid overtime.

egypturnash 12y ago

I used to work in the Hollywood animation industry. I had friends who worked in the LA video game industry around then. Crunch was, quite simply, an expected part of life in both industries. I think it may be something that emerges from the way human brains work, when dealing with projects that take more than a year to finish. People slack off near the beginning because, wow, they have YEARS to get it done. (Or obsessively try to polish a small part, because, again, wow, YEARS.) As the release date approaches, it starts to feel more like an actual thing, and people start panicking because there is a colossal amount of money involved in a big-budget game or feature cartoon. You can't take longer because you're running out of money, and you have a ton of sunk costs in the advertising that says a specific date, there are merchandising tie-ins waiting for the release, all kinds of things pushing towards "the team works crazy hours and burns out". Me? I draw a graphic novel now. The only deadline I have to make is the self-imposed one, and I'm lucky enough that my finances have enough slack that my schedule can have some slack, too.

Animats 12y ago
I used to work in the Hollywood animation industry. I had friends who worked in the LA video game industry around then. Crunch was, quite simply, an expected part of life in both industries. Much of Hollywood animation is unionized. (animationguild.org, IATSE Local 839). Crunches mean paid overtime. From the Animation Guild standard contract: "All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification." This discourages unnecessary "crunches". If you would like The Animation Guild to represent you and your fellow employees at a game company, print up some of these cards and get your fellow employees to sign them: http://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/RepresentationCard.pdf http://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Represe... You can force your employer to have a union election.

DigitalSea 12y ago

I wholeheartedly agree, crunch is damaging to any industry over extended periods of time. It doesn't matter if you're a game developer, web developer or architect, crunch affects everyone. It is an outdated way of thinking that the game industry has failed to let go of that the more people and effort you throw at a problem, the quicker it gets solved. The more hours you throw at a problem in my experience as a developer, you end up with more problems than you started off trying to solve. You lose focus, when you lose focus things that were once obvious are not in your peripheral vision and you make mistakes. It is akin to driving a vehicle tired, you are more likely to be in an accident. Sadly the gaming industry is notorious for this kind of behaviour of expected crunch. Yeah, you push yourself to get out a game, but then what? You start working on another new game or DLC for the current game and you find yourself working 80 hour weeks again, what was the benefit of those long hours other than keeping your job? It is a repeating cycle. People have been decrying the crunch in the gaming industry especially since the 90's and yet, nothing ever changes or improves. Someone writes a blog post or article, people unanimously agree things need to change and then it all blows over until the next article comes along. What's it going to take: a spate of sleep-deprived, stressed game developers taking their own lives? I accept the fact that avoiding crunch altogether is unavoidable in any industry, but we need to better manage it. We need to have a framework in place that prevents people from being expected to work 80+ hour weeks for years on end. Sometimes you need to put in some extra hours to finish a project, that's cool, just don't factor it in every time, expect it for months or years on end and above all: don't forgo compensation for the sacrifice your employees are making under the guise of "we need to do this" Look at mostly every single AAA game released in the last few years, more issues than you can poke a stick at. Look at GTA V, when it launched people couldn't even play the multiplayer component, same thing happened to the highly anticipated and hyped Destiny and pretty much every insert game name here - is it the fault of the developers who were enslaved to complete the game? No. It is the lack of resources, lack of care for sane work hours, lack of compassion or concern for employees that causes large games with budgets that rival Hollywood movies to fail spectacularly on launch. When is the last time a large company like Rockstar Games or Electronic Arts released a game that wasn't broken or buggy to some extent on launch? Besides having an extremely generous budget to hire the best and produce something spectacular? I can't recall a time that happened in the last few years. Perfection is not a priority, churn and burn is the name of the game. Get it out now as long as it is complete and we'll sort out the bugs with a patch shortly after launch. Oh, and hurry, the investors want to see a quick profit on this one. Some of you might recall the famous post from an anonymous blogger by the name of EA Spouse. A wife of a video game developer working at Electronic Arts pouring her heart out over the toll his long hours take on him and his family, the excessive work hours he puts in: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/ http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/ - large publications lapped the story up, people were outraged and yet here we are in 2015 reading another article about long hours. Things will not change until something bad happens (and probably not until it starts happening frequently). We've been talking about things needing to change for far too long, but nothing ever seems to get better.

Pinatubo 12y ago

Could these results be driven by sequels? I would expect that a sequel would need less crunch time (many big problems have already been solved) and have a higher ROI (they're likely making a sequel because the franchise is popular, and less effort is needed).

vehementi 12y ago

Sony's H1Z1 launched its early access (i.e. alpha) late last week and their president was saying the dev team was doing 18 hour days, and they worked 2 of the 3 days of the MLK weekend. Again, early access, not release, etc.

morgante 12y ago

What do people expect of an industry where supply and demand is completely out of whack? Supply of programmers in the games industry is almost completely inelastic. No matter how little they get paid (relative to tech standards) and how poor conditions become, young programmers will continue to flock to the games industry because it's perceived as "cool." Why people make employment decisions based on what they play in their free time I will never understand. I also love reading books, watching movies, and eating food—but I have no delusions that those would be good career options. More generally, I think the best way to improve working conditions across the tech industry is to kill the meme that working on "sexy" tech is important. So long as companies are able to attract talent through silly stories or sexy projects, rather than a good work environment and competitive salaries, programmers are going to continue to be abused and perceived as unprofessional. Lawyers don't choose which firm to join based on who has the coolest name. It's time that programmers stopped chasing cool and started acting professional.

famousactress 12y ago

The priceless quote here for me is: “Schedule 40 hours a week and you get 38. Schedule 50 and you get 39 and everyone hates work, life, and you. Schedule 60 and you get 32 and wives start demanding you send out resumes." That's a pretty great approximation of my experience with the concept.

pandaman 12y ago

In my experience crunch is often caused by poor direction, political games, understaffing, under-budgeting other such factors that are crippling to the game quality. So, naturally, a project that is in crunch is likely to fail in sales and in reviews. The article authors address this, but only at the angle of "Does it help to salvage a failing project?" and I agree with their negative conclusion. Crunching is not going to salvage anything. Why would it? Your publisher changes the requirements every quarter and the game's genre every year, your producers (managers) are busy trying to get each other fired, people are leaving because they think the game is going to suck and they have not seen a bonus in 5 years, you cannot hire anyone because they think the game is going to suck and you don't have money anyway so you could as well crunch trying to ship whatever with whomever is left but crunching is not going to fix these issues. Crunching can only improve a project that does not have any crippling problems. And it usually does (again, from my experience). It works because nobody can schedule 2+ years creative work for 200+ people with such a precision that on the last day of the schedule you check in the last line of code, export the last asset, pack a build and send an 80+ (hell, even 60+) metacritic game to the manufacturing. Game production is an iterative process. The more iterations you make - the better the game becomes in your eyes if not in the reviews. This is why people crunch voluntarily. They want to ship better games.