Just so you know, hes on the no no list of posting content on this forum
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CDPR Bosses in 2019: "No mandatory crunch." 2020: "Never mind, mandatory crunch."
- Thread starter Jawbreaker
- Start date
I see, that makes sense.
No one cares what this libertarian cretin thinks.
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I'll never understand why he threw everything away. Just could've been a normal guy and done his job and watched his mouth like the rest of us. Instead, ironically, he made "much ado about nothing" and isolated himself from all his friends in the industry
They really want to meet that GOTY 2020 deadline, huh ?
Fuck 'em, just delay the game instead of overworking your employees, especially during a pandemic
Fuck 'em, just delay the game instead of overworking your employees, especially during a pandemic
LOL, is he even still relevant?
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I disagree with people who are saying it's not management's fault and delays don't help crunch. That makes no sense to me.
You delayed the game and now there is crunch because of greed and unreasonable additions to the game. You went over your buffer that you built in to handle unexpected problems... Tough shit.
Honestly that's the answer right there. Shareholders and managers be damned. You undermine your workers and piss everyone off. That's how this should be handled.
You delayed the game and now there is crunch because of greed and unreasonable additions to the game. You went over your buffer that you built in to handle unexpected problems... Tough shit.
Honestly that's the answer right there. Shareholders and managers be damned. You undermine your workers and piss everyone off. That's how this should be handled.
Thanks. I was not aware. I've only been here since December. Unless that ban was recent.
Any list that shows banned content / people?
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If they can mandate crunch they can mandate a normal working hours this is fully in their control. Gamers will rage when they feel slighted but not when CEOs want to work devs to death. Middle and upperclass dont care about us working class, they just want us to smile and deal with it to make them happy, its sickening.
It's absolutely management's fault and their workers always pray the price for it. Working crunch in the video games is tied to promotions, getting preferential treatment from higher-ups and this whole sick notion of paying your "dues" like everyone else because you are passionate about what you work on. It's completely asinine and almost always can be attributed back to a poorly planned project or poorly planned aspects of the project, or major scope creep.
Crunch is not and should not be normal. Crunch should never be accepted. Any overtime should be kept to strictly limited extra hours. Employee mental health has to always come first.
Some video game companies out there treat their employees as replaceable parts and this is the natural end of an industry that thinks that way.
The only way for workers to protect themselves long term is unionization and global unionization has to happen across the industry in order for it to be efective.
I work in this kind of situation and it can be just as demoralizing as crunch just in a different way.
We have no deadlines. We have no overtime. We have no crunch.
We also have no product. Management will never let us put a release out despite having 2 subsequent versions ready to go. It's like purgatory because we're doing the same work repeatedly, testing it repeatedly, and documenting it repeatedly, but we're now having to push everything through all three versions to ensure it's all being updated properly.
Yeah, I get to come home and I'm getting sleep, but I'm a husk on the job regardless of the hours. I'm wasting away with no real work to do and it's put me in a real dark place mentally as I feel useless and helpless.
It's by no means the same or even on the same magnitude as crunch culture, but just know there are ditches on both sides.
That's only because of this is CDPR.
You'd be getting a completely different reaction if this was about EA or Activision.
Probably. But it doesn't really solve the problem we're seeing with in this particular case.
The thing is (and bear with me as I'm about to play devil's advocate here), game development is very hard, and one of the hardest things within the field is the producer's job of scoping and leading to a game's release on time and budget. It's... probably almost entirely impossible for them to miss their release date now, because the discs are on their way to stores as we speak, promotional materials are in store... it'd probably be a multimillion dollar decision to delay the game even by a single week, because of the amount of moving parts in the process.
The fact is, this is an extra seven days of work for the entire studio, the equivalent of just over one work week. This completely sucks, but I genuinely don't know that it's fair for us to say there was a better solution to this. Personally, I think their big day one patch coming out a week later would be totally acceptable... but the thing is- it's quite possible the game on disc right now is in a very, very bad state. It's possible that to get through cert, they entered a deal with Sony and Microsoft to fix X and Y bugs before release. It's the kind of thing that can happen, and in fact happens for most video games. Sometimes you think you can absolutely make that happen. Sometimes you even plan for extra time "just in case", and you still fall short. Yet, despite that, the entire process of making and releasing games REQUIRES you to lock in some dates, and moving those dates is a hard proposition, and not just because it's expensive to move them back.
It's also especially hard to move dates this late in the year, and doubly so when new consoles are about to release, because everyone is sending out their games for certification at around the same time, and there's limited capacity there.
Eh, I wouldn't put your situation and crunch on opposite ends of the coin. Crunch a lot of the times can be just as horribly inefficient as what you are talking about due to workers not being able to see the end of the tunnel and because after so many hours per day you can only keep your concentration going for so long before mindlessly working.
The opposite side of both your coin and the crunch coin are happy, well-balanced work schedules that properly ebb and flow and account for a need in increased bandwidth properly. Management with direction is needed in both cases as well, since both cases often happen because management lost their way: on one end management forgot their core product principles and on the other management went so far into the reeds with the project that everyone has to push the car back on the road.
I think it's extremely dangerous to position the opposite side of crunch as potentially boring, aimless work, and I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to do that!
I escaped crunch a few years ago and the amount of stress it took off of me was incredible.
That's why I didn't use a coin as an analogy. I used a ditch because there is a point in the middle, as you say, where you can get the work done without the pressure or the wasted potential.
The 'well, that's the cost of being part of something great' that I've seen in response to this in some spots is pretty astonishing; some low-level wire-frame animator isn't getting their name up in lights just because they were worked to the bone on the most recent hotly anticipated thing.
The real solution to this problem for the entire industry is to use Nintendo's approach of... sitting on games.
You make your games, and release them on a delay. You don't even announce them until they're completely done.
The competitive landscape and rise of service games keeps that from happening on a wider scale, but Nintendo shows it can work.
It would solve so many problems. Mandatory crunch, budget allocations, sunk cost issues, some staffing issues, and a TON of marketing woes.
You make your games, and release them on a delay. You don't even announce them until they're completely done.
The competitive landscape and rise of service games keeps that from happening on a wider scale, but Nintendo shows it can work.
It would solve so many problems. Mandatory crunch, budget allocations, sunk cost issues, some staffing issues, and a TON of marketing woes.
Not to mention all the poor people that won't be in the credits. Having touched 30+ in development video games at various points along their dev life, I think I'm credited on two? Maybe three?
Not to mention industry NDA's are so strict that if you work for an external contractor and you worked on, lets say, an EA game - you can't even go to EA and say you worked on their game for 2 years due to your NDA.
Honestly, some of their stuff lately I feel they'd been sitting on AFTER it was done and waiting for the right time to drop it. If it was/is the case, they couldn't have picked a better time to have a backlog of titles ready to release already.
Right. It's just such a fanciful view of the world. I don't even know if naive is the right word, it just blows my mind that's a viewpoint people possess.
Yeah, Nintendo absolutely does do exactly that and has done it for years with some of their titles. It really is a smart and enviable position to be in. From what I understand, they also have some of the best working conditions in the industry AND are known for releasing some of the most polished, well-received games.
Nintendo's been around for a long time, there's a lot the industry could learn from them.
I don't think its that delays cause more crunch.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that.
If you aren't crunching in the first place, delaying a game doesn't change how much crunching there is.
If you are crunching in the first place, delaying a game just means you have more time to crunch or you fall further behind.
Net result in these two cases is crunch tends to increase with a delay.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that.
If you aren't crunching in the first place, delaying a game doesn't change how much crunching there is.
If you are crunching in the first place, delaying a game just means you have more time to crunch or you fall further behind.
Net result in these two cases is crunch tends to increase with a delay.
No joke. You're so painfully right it hurts lol. Might possibly see companies move to this model if they have enough prestige. Sony maybe?
It takes strong, quality leadership to have both good working conditions and a solid product and timeline. I've seen from experience that poor management does not work well without deadlines.
I respect them more and more from that perspective the longer I work under poor management.
The unfortunate thing is that even if the main studio on a game does not crunch (let's stick with your example and say Nintendo doesn't crunch) their outsourcing development partners and those companies additional partners outside of that likely did or do crunch.
It's kind of like the movie industry in a lot of ways: The production team may not crunch and they get all the glory, but you better believe most of those VFX teams did and they got paid like dirt too.
Same thing in the video game industry. It's why I always laugh when someone says "Well this company says they don't crunch!" - that may be true but somewhere someone likely crunched on that project, often a whole team.
I am not sure if there is anyone here with project management and development planning experience within the gaming industry but are there any concrete steps that companies can take to reduce crunch?
My assumption was that hiring more staff and increasing development time (not merely through delays but through practices such as not publicly dating games that are in development or starting major marketing activities prior to a game's development wrapping up); however, I am seeing more people say that adding more people and increased time does not necessarily reduce crunch. This is a major issue that is affecting developers across the industry and overcompensated executives within gaming companies have little interest in fixing it (hence why my belief is that developers across the game and software industry in general should unionize). But I am curious what can practically be done with specific regards to avoiding crunch.
My assumption was that hiring more staff and increasing development time (not merely through delays but through practices such as not publicly dating games that are in development or starting major marketing activities prior to a game's development wrapping up); however, I am seeing more people say that adding more people and increased time does not necessarily reduce crunch. This is a major issue that is affecting developers across the industry and overcompensated executives within gaming companies have little interest in fixing it (hence why my belief is that developers across the game and software industry in general should unionize). But I am curious what can practically be done with specific regards to avoiding crunch.
Parkinson's Law has to be coming into play with some of these AAA games. Give them a month and they'll find a way to get the game out in a month. Give them an extra year and things will still end up being tight near the end.
I guess crunch is ultimately a project management failure (aside from unavoidable externalities such as COVID).
I guess crunch is ultimately a project management failure (aside from unavoidable externalities such as COVID).
You're 1000% right, and I'm sure Nintendo does plenty of crunch as well, especially since not all their projects release on a delay. But having such a delay built-in at least fixes a lot of the situations where crunch becomes a necessity. Hell, I'd argue it solves every single one of them. The only reason that remains to crunch is for companies to stay on budget, and in a lot of places now, laws are such that crunching is actually more likely to make you go over budget than production delays would be. The only remaining reason for crunch would be poor management or producer delusions, which would hopefully be taken care of by other factors.
Contractors and outsource work are always at risk of getting abused though. In the same way customer service employees / departments gets abuse from consumers, outsourcers get abused by their customers who often prey on them. It's a sad reality that needs its own looking into, really.
Sadly, he has the second largest patreon behind easy allies, so yeah, pretty much.
I always avoided this type of topics but I want to ask something and tell something.
this developers that crunch at work, they are paid for the extra hours of work?
I am asking because I am from Brazil and I know that is a 3rd country world, so I really don't know the costumes from the richest countrys in Europe and North America.
But man, me and my wife work as accounters for many many years and crunch is so normal here in Brazil.
I don't understand game development but this games are not made in cycles? as soon the game is finished, this developers can't take days of vacation to compensate?
I don't agree with crunch at all but I don't think that's something so so serious in most of the cases ( of course there's some particular cases to be analyzed).
Specially if you are in a work that it seems that the huge majority of workers in this area do what they really love.
this developers that crunch at work, they are paid for the extra hours of work?
I am asking because I am from Brazil and I know that is a 3rd country world, so I really don't know the costumes from the richest countrys in Europe and North America.
But man, me and my wife work as accounters for many many years and crunch is so normal here in Brazil.
I don't understand game development but this games are not made in cycles? as soon the game is finished, this developers can't take days of vacation to compensate?
I don't agree with crunch at all but I don't think that's something so so serious in most of the cases ( of course there's some particular cases to be analyzed).
Specially if you are in a work that it seems that the huge majority of workers in this area do what they really love.
Hi!
A couple of things can be done to mitigate crunch but its hard to outright eliminate it on any given project due to the video game industry's rampant use of external partners for a lot of things. What can be done to reduce crunch from a project management side? I'll give you 5 off the top of my head that need to be considered as like..step 1. In truth, the actual list could be hundreds of items long.
1) Put major (and I mean major) buffers in your project plan from the very start. A game finished early is better than a game finished late.
2) Use past data points from your team to plan accordingly. A lot of project managers use their past team data stats such as attrition and the like and plan a razor-thin buffer - this is bad because anything like a slight breeze can derail your project.
3) Plan to fail things a few times. Plan for a certain % of bugs to be bounced back and need to be fixed 5+ times. Plan to fail cert a few times.
4) This is more of a company one: Stop rewarding OT/willingness to sacrifice physical and mental health as a positive during a performance review.
5) Plan realistic deadlines not just for yourself but also all the teams under your wing including external partners. If possible, have team member(s) go visit your external partners regularly and ensure that they are treating their employees fairly.
As I said, it isn't easy but what would go a long way to force companies' hands is unionization. In reality I could do a full multi-page analysis on how to fix stuff like this within the industry on both the micro level and the macro level. Unfortunately the video game industry is built off a twisted thought that you need to pay your "dues" in order to rise up - whether that's working your way up to a position at your dream company or working at an external company hoping for a chance at another company.
Having been one of the ones that did almost 80 hour weeks, I know that it gave me opportunities in this industry and other teams were made aware of me because of my willingness to sacrifice. We need to stop that.
Who is he and what did he do? Some shit take on race/gender/lgbt+?
These practices are always awful but companies like CDPR and Rockstar - companies with a shitload of money and the freedom to put games out whenever they want - have literally no excuse for this sort of thing.
Just stop announcing release dates if you have no idea whether or not you're gonna be able to hit them, for fuck's sake.
Just stop announcing release dates if you have no idea whether or not you're gonna be able to hit them, for fuck's sake.
Depends. Companies on hourly pay often get paid. Salaried employees are a little more dicey and subject to employment law in the area.
The larger problem isn't that people get paid for their crunch, of course they should be and (I think) most often are. The problem is that people get fired, demoted, passed over for promotion, put on call or a million other things for trying to get out of mandatory (or even non-mandatory) crunch and you WILL hurt your professional development by not participating. Even worse, you are often seen as "not a team player" if you say you have other things to attend to, such as kids or a partner.
The physical and mental health toll can be astronomical.
Sounds rough. That's why I never took that career.
God bless them.
yes!!
its pretty normal here.
theres times that I worked more than 15 hours a day/6 days a week.
It can be hard or bad at times, but I imagine, work in a fantastic project like cyberpunk.
Work hard and suddenly the game bomb in sales because of this type of news...
So, all the hard work you and your coworkers made go in vain.
I would have no problem waiting a few extra months to play this game if it meant no crunch for the devs but I know it's not that simple. I think if companies didn't announce games so far out there would be less pressure to get it out "sooner". There is no way they can delay this game again just based on optics but they shouldn't have announced this game so early.
Someone above spoke about now Nintendo handles announcements and releases and I couldn't agree more. Announce your game around 6 months from release or less. I really don't need to know about a game that is 2+ years out. Marketing does not need to start that early nowadays.
Someone above spoke about now Nintendo handles announcements and releases and I couldn't agree more. Announce your game around 6 months from release or less. I really don't need to know about a game that is 2+ years out. Marketing does not need to start that early nowadays.
I'd say they're not baffling nor surprising... people just care about what affects them directly
Yeah, but the spotlight shines on CDPR 'round these parts.