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Ian Walker (Kotaku): Games Made Under Crunch Conditions Don’t Deserve ‘Best Direction’ Awards
- Thread starter BY2K
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User Banned (3 Days): Hostility and a history of past similar behavior
Fuck the devs, amirite?
Disqualify them then. Promote the games that were made ethically. "Lots of studios do it" is an awful defence.
Sakurai's a freelancer, not a Nintendo employee. There's literally nothing Nintendo themselves can really do to stop Sakurai from over-working himself.
That and Sakurai's a single project lead; he's not the entirety of the Smash Ultimate development team.
I'm talking about the fact that your entire flimsy argument lies on the fact that Hades didn't involve crunch, and Last of Us 2 did. Might as well find out the salaries and benefits for the employees of both companies and have that weigh into the award too.
Sakurai isn't a Nintendo employee, he's a freelancer. You could admittedly argue Nintendo should reign him in, and it's possible they ended up doing that given Ultimate's dev cycle was supposedly far smoother.
Ding ding. People want to judge these games in a bubble divorced from how they are made. Oh well it's best direction and innovation! how the fuck do you think they achieved that?
How many places have you worked where if the lead is working their ass off, they let the people under them do less work than them?
Sakurai even said at the time that there's no pressure from Nintendo for him to work the hours he does.
His schedule in general is ludicrous.
I'm not a "TLOU 2 hater". I think it's a good - at points great - game. I have no problem with the Big Controversial Plot beat nor its politics. I do, however, also think it has some serious flaws
I brought up these two extreme examples because they were recent and concrete, not just hypothetical. Maybe they were too extreme and I apologize for that, but the point still stands. Context always has mattered in all awards
And even then, Ubisoft did have multiple nominations last night even with all the accusations of sexual harassment.
Hard disagree, the award should be about creative vision, not management or working conditions. Which games had overtime and for how long isn't even normally public, so how would you enforce this.
I disagree more with the category having games that were designed by committee rather than nominating auteur directors and giving them the award rather than the games thenselves. That's what "game of the year" should be for.
I disagree more with the category having games that were designed by committee rather than nominating auteur directors and giving them the award rather than the games thenselves. That's what "game of the year" should be for.
We hear very small snippets about what happens over the course of a long production involving hundreds of people. We should be careful to remember just how incomplete that information is. We hear rare snippets about bad working practices and it is even rarer for good working practices to be publicised. We are essentially blind when it comes to determining this - the only people who really know what happens in a game studio are the people that work there.
It's not semantics. Arguing Naughty Dog shouldn't get the Best Game Direction award is arbitrary. If you want to argue that studios shouldn't receive awards if there are credible allegations of unethical workplace practice, I'd be more persuaded.
Imagine equating ND crunch with a pedophile rapist.
I don't understand this. Whose greed?
No matter how many resources you have, they are never infinite. AAA budgets and deadlines are entirely different to something like an early access game made by a small independent studio.
I mean, I wouldn't care about ending TGAs altogether, lol. I find them pretty vapid and cringy and hype culture annoys me. But we're getting off-topic, which isn't about whether or not TGAs should continue to exist.
This is difficult or nearly impossible to regulate.
I don't think that's what they mean by "best direction". Maybe if this were a best production award, sure. But I'm "well actually'ing" a "well actually" that's meant to dunk on a game I wasn't fond of to begin with, so whatever.
If Jason Schreier's articles are anything to go by it seems like it's less on publishers and more on upper management of the game's developer. BioWare for example was given ample opportunity to fix up Anthem and even could've learned from their Montreal studio's crunch but upper management kept dropping the ball.
Only really want a few things out of this thread.
1. That people learn that there are a bunch of studios that don't crunch, and we finally move away from "But you HAVE to crunch to make X game" (Arbitrary conditions like AAA, games of a certain size, yearly releases, etc.)
Developers working a couple of ten hour/day weeks is bad, working 12 hour/day months is a completely different ballgame.
3. It's their awards. They can decide how they award them. Not surprised and kinda bored by the several people getting into the weeds about wording and wasting time deciding on if crunch "fits" into Best Direction. Crunch is not a difference in genre, in game modes, in size of game, etc. Crunch is something that affects all kinds of jobs, and should not be encouraged. If the Game Awards wanted to, they could exclude every game that had "too much crunch" and they could arbitrarily decide the limit. I don't think it's a particularly interesting conversation since they're not going to, but it's at least a better conversation than this pedantic semantics argument and implicit defense of doing nothing about crunch.
1. That people learn that there are a bunch of studios that don't crunch, and we finally move away from "But you HAVE to crunch to make X game" (Arbitrary conditions like AAA, games of a certain size, yearly releases, etc.)
2. And this isn't to pick on the quote, that people wouldn't be so myopic about crunch. Some people in this thread are dividing things into "There is crunch" or "There isn't crunch". Tons of software development/game development have small periods of crunch, only a couple of days, maybe 1-2 weeks. And to be fair, even those periods of crunch are necessary. The crunch reports people like Jason Schreier have put out, and the potential that reports about Cyberpunks 1.5 years of crunch are true, should not even be in the same category as some of these other games.
Developers working a couple of ten hour/day weeks is bad, working 12 hour/day months is a completely different ballgame.
3. It's their awards. They can decide how they award them. Not surprised and kinda bored by the several people getting into the weeds about wording and wasting time deciding on if crunch "fits" into Best Direction. Crunch is not a difference in genre, in game modes, in size of game, etc. Crunch is something that affects all kinds of jobs, and should not be encouraged. If the Game Awards wanted to, they could exclude every game that had "too much crunch" and they could arbitrarily decide the limit. I don't think it's a particularly interesting conversation since they're not going to, but it's at least a better conversation than this pedantic semantics argument and implicit defense of doing nothing about crunch.
This is one of those articles you don't have to read to know is 100% correct based off of the title alone.
If it was one or two individuals, it's a failure on their part. If it's an entire department, it's the failure of the leadership team. This is something that's obvious in retail, hospitality, and damn near every other job on Earth. Why is it different for video games? If you have to work overtime several days a week for months at a time, management is fucking up. Fucking up time management, or fucking up by willingly exploiting labor.
If your staff has to constantly work overtime to get their work done, it's either a failure on their part or a failure on the leadership team for not having priorities straight.
If it was one or two individuals, it's a failure on their part. If it's an entire department, it's the failure of the leadership team. This is something that's obvious in retail, hospitality, and damn near every other job on Earth. Why is it different for video games? If you have to work overtime several days a week for months at a time, management is fucking up. Fucking up time management, or fucking up by willingly exploiting labor.
Project management is indivisible from creation vision, because creative vision and design is 100% tied to development resources and the use thereof. Creative vision is entirely about how the sausage gets made, because no matter how grand some theoretical vision is, it doesn't come across if it isn't executed, and how it gets executed is entirely about project management. It's inherently part of the discussion, and if you're a game that required massive amounts of crunch in order to execute, that has to be part of the record when we talk about direction.
Mate, those examples are way too inflammatory to make a comparison. There can be no sane discussion if we're suggesting Druckmann should be censured and excluded from awards in the same way as two rapists.
Yeah, exactly. You'd think Era of all places would have enough class consciousness to realise that the managerial class will never change as long as their methods provide results and their workers don't unionise.
But unionising would likely end up with a bunch more delays and/or less polished games and, well, we can't have that.
So you ignore that you were blatantly wrong before and then make up some random accusation that Sakurai's forcing all of his developers to crunch as much as he does?
OK?
Like I said a few posts ago, I'm not equating them. I might've been too extreme, I apologize. I'm just saying that context has always mattered in awards even if it had nothing to do with the categories descriptors.
ND crunch issue seems to be an extremely serious one and yet people handwave it because "the award descriptor doesn't mention working conditions!" while in other areas it's clear that stuff outside the official descriptors can and should matter when picking winners.
No offense, but who cares? It's a video game awards show, not the Department of Labor.
You cannot defend crunch. It's a toxic work practice that is extremely unproductive, causes stress and mental health issues... and almost always results in something coming out worse for it.
People cannot work their best when they're being overworked. More mistakes will happen, and you harm them in doing so. There is NO defense, I don't care what Triple A game standard exists. It exists because deadlines are made for the game that are unrealistic. Most of these games could easily get to a high bar of quality with better results by tacking on a year or two extra of development time. Does Nintendo crunch? Their games always seem to have extremely long development times, and if they do I know their average development time is somewhere in the ballpark of 5 years.
Make it 7 years. I don't care. The human cost to maintain these insanely tight release schedules is so unsustainable... and consumers need to chill with their impatience imo. It's a push for pull system. Consumers eat up new games like they're nothing, and get mad when there are lulls... Big companies want to maintain profits, PR, and marketing pushes to appease said hungry masses. Ugh.
Anyways, I agree with Ian. Hard agree. You should not be winning awards if you had to crack a whip over your dev team. That makes you unworthy of any award imo. It's bad enough that CP2077 is getting excused for the human toll that was taken... (and is even evident in the final product)
People cannot work their best when they're being overworked. More mistakes will happen, and you harm them in doing so. There is NO defense, I don't care what Triple A game standard exists. It exists because deadlines are made for the game that are unrealistic. Most of these games could easily get to a high bar of quality with better results by tacking on a year or two extra of development time. Does Nintendo crunch? Their games always seem to have extremely long development times, and if they do I know their average development time is somewhere in the ballpark of 5 years.
Make it 7 years. I don't care. The human cost to maintain these insanely tight release schedules is so unsustainable... and consumers need to chill with their impatience imo. It's a push for pull system. Consumers eat up new games like they're nothing, and get mad when there are lulls... Big companies want to maintain profits, PR, and marketing pushes to appease said hungry masses. Ugh.
Anyways, I agree with Ian. Hard agree. You should not be winning awards if you had to crack a whip over your dev team. That makes you unworthy of any award imo. It's bad enough that CP2077 is getting excused for the human toll that was taken... (and is even evident in the final product)
You can't, at least not from the perspective of people who weren't part of the development team while work was underway. For something like TGA, where it's voted on by journalists who don't have total transparency in regards to the development of all the games up for review, you can't separate the execution. You don't get to see the "creative vision", you only get to see the end product.
If this is what you think this award should be, what you're doing is making a good argument for "this award is nonsense and should not exist".
I don't get citations to the award description. The point is that good direction should include good project management. Change the description if need be.
Exactly. People pretend that TGA has any kind of integrity or independence from the businesses they are peddling for.
People will just dismiss this journalist and accuse him of being a "hater". It's quite clear that the gaming community likes journalists to take these companies to task until their favourite game/dev is in the crosshairs.
Well for starters if there's a detailed report about crunch, they probably weren't made ethically.
That's fair enough. I'll edit my post to remove names and make it a more broad statement. I didn't want it to be seen as bait or needlessly inflammatory.
It's not just the big premier studios, studios of all sizes crunch. Indies usually even more than bigger studios.
The second list is probably 50 times bigger than your first list.
Also, I don't believe for a second that none of these studios in the first list have never crunched during some point in development.
And yet a panel of experts thought The Last of Us Part II was the best example of a game with 'outstanding creative vision and innovation in game direction and design', so it obviously didn't compromise it that much.
That's not remotely fair. I'm a game developer (my studio doesn't crunch thankfully) and I absolutely care about these issues not least because one day I might be on the wrong end of them. My stance is that:
(1) It's arbitrary to make this argument about the Best Game Direction award based on a misunderstanding of what 'Best Game Direction' means
(2) The practicality of gate keeping which studios and games are eligible for awards on the basis of what goes on inside of them is non-existent
All those companies can comfortably afford to delay a game.
So why do they treat their staff like chattel instead of delaying the game? Why does a director who is complicit get to be awarded?
No one 'deserves' an award.
This is what I thought but maybe im relying too much on a movie definition
You can do a lot when your company is structured around fostering talent as opposed to massive hiring sprees followed by huge layoffs.Nintendo claims their average work day is 7 hours 45 minutes per day
Average Nintendo Japan employee earns $80,000, works less than 8 hours per day
Nintendo has revealed some interesting stats about its work culture, including average working hours and salary.A recru…www.gamesindustry.biz
You can choose to not believe them, but that's what they say.
Yes, the fact that they didn't compromise their own creative vision, instead compromised the health of their staff and were rewarded for it is the entire fucking problem.
Also I do not consider "don't abuse your staff" to be a very high bar of "gatekeeping". It's very simple.