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Ex-Naughty Dog animator: "ND's games success is due in large part to Sony's deep pocket funding delays rather than skill alone"
- Thread starter Lant_War
- Start date
Addressed what? That he worked for the company that he admired, but doesn't anymore because issues there clearly came to be too much?
What there is to address?
Well damn. Also I'm curious what the compliance issue was and why would anyone assume they're above the line?
He left because of one issue, and I don't blame him at all on that one.
Apparently nothing. I very frequently criticize my employer/s especially while working for them. Apparently some folks don't see it that way. So I'm wondering what event brought him to speak out now? A cry for help from an ex colleague?
He can both be an asshole and have the correct message. That's why I don't get what his latest tweets discredit what he said in the first place. They are mutually exclusive in my opinion.
There is nothing to address. People are looking at this like an investigation or something. Jonathan is an extremely skilled animator that wants to work on the frontiers and doesn't want crunch to be a part of it. It's that simple. Furthermore, it's totally ok and normal for current ND employees to feel immense pride for their incredible work. For the employees, this is not a simple binary of "all good" or "all bad".
That all being said, crunch is brutal (been through it a couple times and it was nuts) and I do hope the Naughty Dogs can figure out a more sustainable workflow on the next project. Or unionize.
Yeah, I think it's one thing to be happy with your job, but I always take people with a grain of salt when they celebrate their employer because good employers are extremely rare. They exist, but generally, things can be better in your job.
On a related note, my trade can have crunch periods, but they're voluntary and compensated appropriately. When Wrigley Field is doing remodeling in the off-season, guys at another company work 7 12 hour days in two crews (so work going on 24 hours a day). With our union contract, they're making something like 3-4x pay per week and they can stop whenever they want. I've heard of guys making down payments on houses with just this work and we don't live in a cheap area.
Salaried employees (especially game devs) usually don't get that kind of overtime pay.
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Can you really tell him how to feel about Cooper's tweets though? Pretty sure he said that crunch sucks in his twitter thread. Trying to frame this dude as an asshole with no evidence for it is also not a good look.
Word that's where I stay the line myself. My company has been in crunch since the beginning of the year I have worked 6 day weeks anywhere from 10-14 hours each day. I work in manufacturing, we had a recent price hike so that's why we're crunching. But it reflects in my pay which I complain about until I see that bag.
That's what's unacceptable to me here they're not getting the bag for killing themselves.
Unfortunately it seems Naughty Dogs is not intending to change anything, and even if they want, it will have to be a very big change, as the culture is pretty deep rooted.
Yeah, I don't think we should be calling/insinuating that current ND employees are assholes, or invalidating their feelings, for trying to boost each other up after, I guess, getting kind of slighted by Cooper (which I'm sure wasn't entirely intentional and meant to hurt anyone other than ND's upper management - but just worded rather callously in an attempt to double down on the studio's alleged difficulty in locking down senior talent).
While none of the employees have directly addressed the crunch culture, it's worth noting that none of then have said anything to refute it either. The closest thing we got was Boon Cotter agreeing that crunch sucks to one of the replies to his tweets and Alexandria Neonakis going off on Cooper for dragging his former coworkers into his crusade and subsequently making it difficult for any of them to know what they can and can't say about the issue as current employees.
And, tbf, twitter isn't really the most appropriate place for currently employed individuals to air workplace grievances. This is an issue that will probably be addressed internally; but we may end up having to wait for the sequel to Jason's investigative article to see whether or not ND have taken effective steps to work on their unhealthy crunch practices.
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I imagine they're already in pre production of their next game to prove what PS5 hardware can do visually too whether it's a new IP, a new Uncharted or they're even moving straight on to TLOU III if they expect to spend six years on their next AAAA game.
Things will stay the same or get even worse with much stronger hardware. They will be moving from a 1.8tflop GPU base on PS4 to a 9-12tflop GPU base on PS5 in terms of raw visual fidelity. Crazy realism and development times ahead for them as well as most current AAA developers.
It's poor man, wish we'd just protect the actual workers here.
Brand loyalty might be great and all, but it can be toxic to a point as well
I said "in the past". But again, seems like some people would rather stick on this part of the post rather than acknowledging he's focusing on defending his coworkers that weren't attacked at all.
Saying "crunch is bad" while saying "we're doing the best stop attacking ND" is pretty useless.
Every studio in the industry has crunch time, you don't get to release games at the level ND does by working 9 to 5 M to F, do i like it? Of course not, but it is the trend in the industry and i see it very difficult for it to stop.
We often speak about Naughty Dog, Rockstar or CDProjekt for crunch but some more obscure game have crunch too.
Or here a game never released with 120 hours week of work:
After crunch seems unavoidable but it is possible to mitigate it:
Just calling someone asshole and pretending that its coz something happened sometime before which u cant recall, how convenient. Nothing much to make fuss over the guy's tweets. He said crunch is bad he said he loves his work. You got a problem? His dam choice. The only asshole im seeing here isn't him but someone else who tried to frame the developer as something negative and went on ranting about tweets that dont have much to fuss over. Acknowledge your own mistake.
I understand that the game has to work and crunch might be necessary if there are significant bugs to fix, but I wonder how much people have to crunch for all that ludicrous amount of frankly unnecessary detail ND puts in their games. Like having photorealistic wrinkles on Ellie's hand while she plays guitar or something. I hope these people aren't sacrificing their time for such minutia, although they probably are.
As you can see for yourself on the Jason thread, i wasn't talking about you.
I won't acknowledge a "mistake" that I haven't made if you actually bother reading my posts, sorry.
its safe to say Naughty Dogs' crunch isnt your ordinary last minute crunch, considering the many underlining cultural issues. Any other studio wouldnt withhold game development decisions in an attempt to create work sabotage, to manipulate other people to crunch.
So what if he's defending his co-workers? What Jonathan said came off as condescending to him and what looks like a good amount of the team.
Dice doesn't crunch and they make some of the best games in the industry. Granted the games they put are different from what ND puts out but they do not crunch from what I understand.
I wonder what the ratio is .
Not talking about AAA only but whole industry from indie all the way up .
DICE doesn't officially crunch and appears to be far better than most about it, but there are a few employee reviews on Glassdoor that specifically bring up or complain about crunch nonetheless.
"There is a lot of shadow crunching going on. Typically, you are not "forced" to work but no one else is going to do your work for you so if you are not on deadline that will reflect bad on you, even if the deadline is completely unrealistic. Most of the time the tools are broken and they are a hassle to debug. A lot of times something breaks and it can take several hours to get fixed. "
"Over reliance on a few people - while most people don't need to crunch it invariably falls on a few to burn the midnight oil and pull things together and those are the ones who suffer the most"
"Crunch and crunch. Studio claimed to have stopped crunching when I joined, but the crunch was inevitable from the start. No paid overtime of course."
"Crunch is fairly low. Some intense periods during a project happen, almost guaranteed but not that much usually."
DICE (Sweden) Reviews: What Is It Like to Work At DICE (Sweden)?
55 DICE (Sweden) reviews. A free inside look at company reviews and salaries posted anonymously by employees.
That and the quality of their games is far from Naughty Dogs. So while they may "shadow crunch" it tells they dont crunch like other studios.DICE doesn't officially crunch and appears to be far better than most about it, but there are a few employee reviews on Glassdoor that specifically bring up or complain about crunch nonetheless.
"There is a lot of shadow crunching going on. Typically, you are not "forced" to work but no one else is going to do your work for you so if you are not on deadline that will reflect bad on you, even if the deadline is completely unrealistic. Most of the time the tools are broken and they are a hassle to debug. A lot of times something breaks and it can take several hours to get fixed. "
"Over reliance on a few people - while most people don't need to crunch it invariably falls on a few to burn the midnight oil and pull things together and those are the ones who suffer the most"
"Crunch and crunch. Studio claimed to have stopped crunching when I joined, but the crunch was inevitable from the start. No paid overtime of course."
"Crunch is fairly low. Some intense periods during a project happen, almost guaranteed but not that much usually."
DICE (Sweden) Reviews: What Is It Like to Work At DICE (Sweden)?
55 DICE (Sweden) reviews. A free inside look at company reviews and salaries posted anonymously by employees.www.glassdoor.co.uk
All things considered, I don't think there's any point in comparing subjective quality when they're making completely different games.
DICE's focus is on multiplayer while Naugty Dog's on singleplayer, and they have wildly different standards in their respective genre.
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DICE doesn't officially crunch and appears to be far better than most about it, but there are a few employee reviews on Glassdoor that specifically bring up or complain about crunch nonetheless.
"There is a lot of shadow crunching going on. Typically, you are not "forced" to work but no one else is going to do your work for you so if you are not on deadline that will reflect bad on you, even if the deadline is completely unrealistic. Most of the time the tools are broken and they are a hassle to debug. A lot of times something breaks and it can take several hours to get fixed. "
"Over reliance on a few people - while most people don't need to crunch it invariably falls on a few to burn the midnight oil and pull things together and those are the ones who suffer the most"
"Crunch and crunch. Studio claimed to have stopped crunching when I joined, but the crunch was inevitable from the start. No paid overtime of course."
"Crunch is fairly low. Some intense periods during a project happen, almost guaranteed but not that much usually."
DICE (Sweden) Reviews: What Is It Like to Work At DICE (Sweden)?
55 DICE (Sweden) reviews. A free inside look at company reviews and salaries posted anonymously by employees.
Fair enough. I hadn't heard any talk from Dice about crunch. But that does feel a bit iffy. One review says, tons and tons of crunch. Another review says we had to crunch "is fairly low". Hard to get a read on it.
I will take issue with that. ND hasn't made a game that shoots as well as BF4 let alone BF1 or BF5. Granted they make different kinds of games so maybe the comparison isn't fair, but I just know if we are talking moment to moment gameplay mechanics. Dice's games feel better to play in general to me.
I'm talking mainly about how terribly buggy their games are on release even in the single player narrative driven components. They are also slow on content and fixing major issues always have been.
I mean you can compare it directly with there other direct competitors in the online multiplayer shooter world. Each of these other developers are known for hard crunch, DICE does smaller crunch cycles that aren't really heavy at all. But it shows many because EA isn't really all that down for delays like Sony
this shit is getting beyond creepy now...the tweets where uncomfortable, but now it's getting on levels of abuser who abused buys gifts to say sorry. It's makng my skiing crawl beyond all comprehension.
What's creepy is calling any of this abuse. if you polled anyone at ND, I bet you none would call it anything like that at all
Just a team proud of hard work paying off, but you guys act like that's something to be ashamed of just because they didn't clock in a 9-5
Just a team proud of hard work paying off, but you guys act like that's something to be ashamed of just because they didn't clock in a 9-5
If you want to use that line of thinking every job that has crazy over time and crunch buy gifts or do something for the for the abused .
Like those end of the year parties or when they finish a job etc etc .
the people who talk to jason say otherwise.
so you don't find it suspect that all of this praise is coming after an exposure article came out? Because it's super weird to me.
Yet if no one responds it'll be "OMG they're not saying anything everything is true Abuse Abuse Abuse!!!"
ND has been doing tweets for TLOU2 for years about how good , amazing , hard etc etc it has been .
Even Copper that made those tweets did some when he was working there.
Wait, so you are saying EVERY employee at naughty dog hates working there?
Apparently they're all slaving away and working more than 40 hours a week (of their own volition) is akin to torture
Sometimes I wonder if these posters making such claims actually hold down stead employment and know the realities of the workplace in any job.
Must be maddening if you're a ND employee hearing this stuff on social media. Imagine if those kind of comments made it out there by coworkers at your job?
That Cooper guy sure does seem like a swell individual
There's a slight chance someone from the celebratory pic tweets already spoke to Jason Schreier lol
Bold of you to assume some posters here have been employed to begin with.
User Banned (3 days): Inflammatory commentary
I see crunch time as the final push to win over a big battle. If you dont survive, you're out and if you do, it defines you and the games you make. Most of the ambitious AAA titles go through it. As for this guy, he was weak in handling this situation.
No, i just think it's weird that all of this praise & toasting is coming after the kotaku article.
so your just gonna ignore the people in Jason's article about how they felt pressure?
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Not going to ignore them..they're not with the company anymore, right?
It wasn't for them and they moved on. The pace may have been too much. For others? It may be fine.
Not everyone is going to react the same way to a given work environment
This thread reminds me of a story some of the Sony SM devs were talking and laughing about during an E3 party where if I remember the jest of it, one of the GoW team members went up to a Sony exec to shmooze and brown nose and after he introduced himself as part of the GoW SM team, the drunk exec picked up the dev by the collar and said something to the effect of "do you know how much you fuckers are costing me every week?" or some such before putting him down and walking away. Sony is definitely all in on these 1st and 2nd party game budgets from what I hear.
this is dumb. it's not a battle, it's a job making video games. If you think treating a job like this as a battle is ok, don't be surprised when 70% of a team burns out, leaves, and rightly exposes it.
There's just no excuse, it's bad management.
