Jason was using it as an example that 'plans change' is a shitty argument.
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CDPR Bosses in 2019: "No mandatory crunch." 2020: "Never mind, mandatory crunch."
- Thread starter Jawbreaker
- Start date
Jason was using it as an example that 'plans change' is a shitty argument.
Crunch fucking sucks. Feel sorry for all the people who have to compromise on e.g. mental health and their personal life in order to secure a job in their favourite field.
I mean, why would they stop crunching? Most folks aren't gonna stop buying it. Hell, it's not even like any critics are gonna dock anything in the review for it, if they even mention it at all. Further still, if the likes of Naughty Dog and Rockstar are anything to go by, folks'll go to bat for them and twist themselves like pretzels into reasoning that crunch is why these games are the way they are.
That's great for single-player, however for multiplayer as long as its all cosmetic. Pay to win has to be gone in multiplayer.
Going gold isn't a real marker anymore with game patches. They'll finalize a candidate to go on the discs, and then keep working on a patch. I wouldn't even use the release day as a good marker for when this crunch ends.
Definitely depends on the contract and where you work as well. I'm not sure, but I've heard google/amazon folks get paid well, but they also expected to work some long hours if need be.
In my experience, it's usually the integration part of our systems that delay in deliveries. Sometimes it's us, sometimes it's even the customer with unreasonable, hardline dates.
As far as I know, "mandatory" crunch might not be as black and white. I'm not a game developer, so I'm speculating. Management can mandate what they want in order to get a project through, but I've never been glued to my workstation and told that I will work 80 hours a week. I can work work until I feel like I'm crazy and call it quits for a bit before I reengage, but I've (and no one else I know at LM) has ever been told we will work such and such hours. The only thing you have to be cognizant of is managers thinking you're not holding your own weight can most definitely use that against you in the future.
This game is a couple weeks from hitting gold if they are gonna make their launch date. The Game is still not in a shippable state?
I am not pretending I care. And you twisted/understood my word from that thread wrong, but whatever. Right now, I dont care about that, I wanna know more about managing side of crunches (I might word this poorly as well).
So every AAA company and also a lot of... every kind of game companies have poor management?
The few games I worked on, crunch usually ended/reduced the moment game went gold. But true, we would continue our work till the release date for the day 1 patch. Then it was comp time after that patch.
Most games come together towards the end. It's the optimization and cleanup stage. Basically on what bugs are acceptable and how to make the game as it stands presentable.
I'm genuinely curious. Where you ever forced to feel as though if you didn't crunch that there would be retribution as a game dev from managers?
Always has been a trash company, always will be.
For such a complex, huge, complicated game like this, there's never enough polish. Even months after the release, they'll keep releasing patches. If they delay the game, they'll just keep crunching so that the game can be as polished as possible when it release.
I am going to preface this by saying, yes, I want better work environments. I want them for myself. I want them for my teammates. I won't disagree with anyone here about compensating teams for the extra work they put in in real, tangible ways. I've been in the game industry 15 years, and I've inevitably crunched on every project I've been on. Some were forced. Some were suggested. Some were me just being naïve and working more than I needed to. I've run the gamut of working weekends to sustained periods of 12-hour days to even some full days. I've worked on projects both small and large-scale. And as I mentioned, crunch was an inevitability on each of them. I missed my youngest taking his first steps. I missed my middle child's first words. I've been there for numerous life events for all three of my children and my wife, but I've also missed some.
To lay it at the feet of management is short-sighted. A fantasy land where there is buffer built into schedules to account for issues that arise can't exist, because, and this may be shocking, that buffer is already built in. At least, it has been on the projects I've been on. To quote someone I loathe, with what some took as a gaffe from him, Donald Rumsfeld once said, "There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. There are unknown unknowns." and while he was talking about a senseless war, that quote succinctly captures the realities of game development. From every discipline, design to engineering to art to audio to vfx to animation to narrative to QA, we are constantly meeting and ultimately working through all the questions posed when making a game. And there are tons of them. Even simple answers can require complex solutions. Time estimates on tasks are best guesses based on prior experience, but sometimes those take more. That impacts the schedule. What gets pushed? Who can pick up what? Is it actually important? Day after day. Sometimes it can't get pushed, nobody else can pick it up, and it is important.
What's worth understanding is that the closer to the end, the harsher crunch normally gets. At least, in my experience. Why? The more of the game that is done, the more there is to test, the more bugs that get found to fix. Those fixes can uncover other problems or break other things. Games also start getting playtested the close to done they are. What's resonating? What isn't? Why isn't it? How do we course correct? Yes, you want to get to these answers as soon as possible, so I always push for playtesting earlier, but that can get stonewalled all the way up to the publisher level (which sucks.) ANYWAY... there are just so many factors, especially in the final few months, with everything coming together, that it is very difficult to not end up in a situation where extra work is going to be required. Yes, this is with building polish and bugfixing time into the schedule, too. I've been on a project that had 6 months of "polish time" built in that was quickly consumed by lots of unforeseen bugs and changes that had to occur. So believe me, I've seen it attempted, but 15 years of experience at multiple studios has just shown that, even with good scheduling practices, the reality is that some level of crunch is going to exist.
Again, I'm not advocating for crunch existing. I'd love for it to be unavoidable. I have literally made herculean efforts to ensure that my own teams have been affected as little as possible, too, generally to my own detriment. I'll gladly talk about my experiences or expand upon what I'm saying here as much as I'm able to if anyone has any questions.
To lay it at the feet of management is short-sighted. A fantasy land where there is buffer built into schedules to account for issues that arise can't exist, because, and this may be shocking, that buffer is already built in. At least, it has been on the projects I've been on. To quote someone I loathe, with what some took as a gaffe from him, Donald Rumsfeld once said, "There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. There are unknown unknowns." and while he was talking about a senseless war, that quote succinctly captures the realities of game development. From every discipline, design to engineering to art to audio to vfx to animation to narrative to QA, we are constantly meeting and ultimately working through all the questions posed when making a game. And there are tons of them. Even simple answers can require complex solutions. Time estimates on tasks are best guesses based on prior experience, but sometimes those take more. That impacts the schedule. What gets pushed? Who can pick up what? Is it actually important? Day after day. Sometimes it can't get pushed, nobody else can pick it up, and it is important.
What's worth understanding is that the closer to the end, the harsher crunch normally gets. At least, in my experience. Why? The more of the game that is done, the more there is to test, the more bugs that get found to fix. Those fixes can uncover other problems or break other things. Games also start getting playtested the close to done they are. What's resonating? What isn't? Why isn't it? How do we course correct? Yes, you want to get to these answers as soon as possible, so I always push for playtesting earlier, but that can get stonewalled all the way up to the publisher level (which sucks.) ANYWAY... there are just so many factors, especially in the final few months, with everything coming together, that it is very difficult to not end up in a situation where extra work is going to be required. Yes, this is with building polish and bugfixing time into the schedule, too. I've been on a project that had 6 months of "polish time" built in that was quickly consumed by lots of unforeseen bugs and changes that had to occur. So believe me, I've seen it attempted, but 15 years of experience at multiple studios has just shown that, even with good scheduling practices, the reality is that some level of crunch is going to exist.
Again, I'm not advocating for crunch existing. I'd love for it to be unavoidable. I have literally made herculean efforts to ensure that my own teams have been affected as little as possible, too, generally to my own detriment. I'll gladly talk about my experiences or expand upon what I'm saying here as much as I'm able to if anyone has any questions.
Great post and great insight. I was hoping to hear someone from a lead position weigh in.
Standing ovation for him. The lack of empathy, the selfishness, the childishness, the sense of entitlement, really I could go on , so often shown by "gamers" in regards to this subject is so, so gross. Heck there are people in this thread, on this site that couldn't care less about the well-being of the developers so long as they get their game "day one".
I wish more Jason's existed
Hmmm... that's a difficult question to answer. I had a great manager and was really in the "prove my worth" stage of my career and didn't really think twice about the overtime. We had a good rapport among the team and we would work together, while joking about the overtime. But in the process, I did hear about how we were in a much better crunch culture than it previously used to be.
Really interesting post, great to get a different perspective. Thank you.
Yes.
Only having 1 day off is mentally detrimental. I used to to do it and on my days off I'd be so tired and constantly thinking about going to work the next day. When you're living like that you may as well be working 24/7, your brain thinks it is.
Now, have standards improved over crunch in the old days? Sort of. Developers used to get longer breaks after completing a project, periods of down time. Now as soon as you ship a gane you're working on dlc and dayb1 patches. Then more patches once the public get a hold of your game.
If it's a continously supported game as a service then you could work 6 days a week crunching forever. It's bad for you, bad for your project and bad for your studio.
Looks like a bunch of angry clowns got angry at Jason for reporting the truth of Cyberpunk 2077's development.
I'd recommend reading Schreier's book, Blood, Sweat & Pixels, if this sort of stuff interests you because it goes into just how much of a last-minute finish it is to get any game out at all, including the development of CDPR's last major title, The crunch-filled Witcher 3.
Do you work in a tech startup? Because 6 days a week and constant overtime is par for the course with startups. Because in many ways a AAA game project is very similar to a tech startup. Both require the invention of new tech, new creative, with often hazy product and design goals and leadership that is not really prepared to handle things in an empathetic way. And a limited runway of funding to get the thing out the door.
This is 100% true. In my experience when execs/producers tell you the deadline was pushed back, all of a sudden theres more work than was in the original sprint :\ And it never lead to people working normal hours. Not once.
Thanks for elaborating what I have been trying to say in the thread. With so many moving pieces and personnel, it becomes very challenging to estimate accurately. A game is a bunch of parts which all comes together towards the lag end of the project. Everyone should read this.
This would cause more crunch because games are never perfect or wholly finished when they go out the door and there's always the next thing to fix.
The only way to avoid crunch is by expert project management at the beginning of the project - and even then it can be difficult except for highly skilled project managers.
The only true way to avoid crunch in the video game industry is by having the video game industry unionize.
Of course it's not unique to games. But as someone who's worked in software dev for 12 years, it's not inevitable either and is entirely avoidable.
Man I don't think I've seen a single piece of coverage about this game that increased my desire to buy it in, like, 2 years.
Every single piece of news makes me less interested.
Every single piece of news makes me less interested.
Do you?
I've been anywhere from the only developer to the fourth in 4 startups, none of which were even series A funded when I joined. None of them routinely worked 6 day weeks. I'm not saying overtime never happened right before a big demo or investor pitch, but it's nowhere near game industry crunch. Maybe at it's height we pushed 50 hours a week for 2 or 3 weeks. I've known game industry people who worked double that for months and months on end.
Whoa. Someone that actually knows what they're talking about. Get him!
That's kind of how it feels with the team I'm in right now. Like, we've been through the suck, but we know that getting through it will sustain our business contracts. Especially when we go from the development part of a contract to the sustainment part, which opens the door for other customers. I feel with less than 10 years at my current job, I'll always in the the prove my worth mentality.
Oof that sucks. Idk how to approach this. Buy used to not support this practice or buy new to show devs I am glad for their sacrifices? Super bad move by mgmt, they probably don't want to delay it again
Damn, crunch sucks. One release valve they should use is a 100% drop of unnecessary SKUs to worry about. If a delay would not help, and if they're really beholden to shipping the content they want and wont drop that, then they can release a bit of pressure by cutting current gen Xbox One / PS4 and ship those later or through a 3rd party if necessary. It's not much, but those platforms aren't free to support either.
I don't think anyone is making a huge deal about the occasional Saturday in the office, as much as it sucks, but one day off a week, week after week, for weeks or months can be absolutely crushing. And that's not counting already working over mon-fri.
With all due respect, I really wonder what everybody else does for a living. This is not exclusive to gaming.
In my line of work, absolutely no one works a 9 to 5 stress free job if you want to remain in business and be competitive. Especially when facing deadlines and on big projects.
Just my opinion.
In my line of work, absolutely no one works a 9 to 5 stress free job if you want to remain in business and be competitive. Especially when facing deadlines and on big projects.
Just my opinion.
Is there anything out of this dude's mouth that isn't awful in some way
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