If publishers and developers are serious about people working around the clock, they should implement shifts. Have a 9-5 shift and a 5-1 shift. The reason why this doesn't happen is obvious: crunch is free labour. Greedy assholes.
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Jason Schreier: Video Game Delays Cause More Crunch
- Thread starter Atheerios
- Start date
That is absolutely heartbreaking. I feel for those people. If all hands on deck 24/7 won't get the job done then I don't know what will. Damn :/
Yes. And thank you. Now someone get this message to CDPR 🤷‍♂️.
I haven't really looked into what they are claiming to utilize this time for, but I'm assuming this is the case. They should be focusing on the current scope and making it as good as possible. They've got 7+ bloody months to Q&A the damn thing. I get it, game design is hard, but if that isn't enough...
If we believe their statement and reasoning for delay then game is content complete and locked with all fundamental gameplay mechanics in place. Delay is used for QA, technical improvements and general polish. It isn't scope and content creep.
"With very few exceptions".
I guess that's one of them.
Nintendo: Animal Crossing delay means avoiding crunch
The delay to Animal Crossing: New Horizons is in keeping with Nintendo's stance on crunch, Nintendo of America presiden…
www.gamesindustry.biz
I know some companies have said they are trying to get rid of crunch. Aside from the Animal Crossing example, what are some notable ones?
Doug Bowser is such a PR type guy though... You never know."With very few exceptions".
I guess that's one of them.
Nintendo: Animal Crossing delay means avoiding crunch
The delay to Animal Crossing: New Horizons is in keeping with Nintendo's stance on crunch, Nintendo of America presiden…
Take this with a grain of salt but the changes BioWare Edmonton has been implementing since this year are to make it a more family-friendly workplace.
But Crunch always happens when a project burns, so I think it's just wishful thinking whenever they've talked about avoiding it more.
A game getting delayed is always due to scope and feature creep. :)
Hopefully it's true, but Mr. Bowser is not exactly the Nintendo person to know all about Japan's crunch conditions... (Even more when it's Japan, they are not crunching, but how many hours are they working?)"With very few exceptions".
I guess that's one of them.
Nintendo: Animal Crossing delay means avoiding crunch
The delay to Animal Crossing: New Horizons is in keeping with Nintendo's stance on crunch, Nintendo of America presiden…
I think part of the issue that the games industry has is that they have a limited pool of talent to pull from. This isn't the fast food industry where your average person can flip burgers. At a game studio, you can't just sit someone in front of a computer and expect them to contribute to a project. As the scope and ambition continues to rise, the more this will become an issue for an industry that relies on these types of talents. So I think a few things are happening:
So what's the solution? I think unionizing will help and given the limited talent available (relatively speaking), the developers would be in the driver's seat if everyone got together. However, beyond that, the only thing I can see changing is either giving each game a longer development cycle or shrinking the scope of the game. The question then remains, how long is too long of a development cycle and are people willing to accept 5-10 hour experiences in favor of 20+ hour ones?
- The large game studios are diluting the talent pool by grabbing as many developers as possible for themselves
- Games are becoming way too ambitious in relation to the talent available
So what's the solution? I think unionizing will help and given the limited talent available (relatively speaking), the developers would be in the driver's seat if everyone got together. However, beyond that, the only thing I can see changing is either giving each game a longer development cycle or shrinking the scope of the game. The question then remains, how long is too long of a development cycle and are people willing to accept 5-10 hour experiences in favor of 20+ hour ones?
Maybe video game companies should stop setting release dates until the game itself has gone gold.
I realize CDPR isn't in America, but just saying "unionize" doesn't work for most employees, especially in the states. Most places will fire you if you're attempting to organize.
Real issue here is the market expectations and competition. Releasing a game is so hard right now because of the massive nitpicking and how easy people would share negative impressions around the net. This is probably one of reason why games such as movie tie in are not a thing anymore ( maybe for the best in this particular case ). You look at ME Andromeda and the first thing that people noticed were the subpar facial animations instead of the boring gameplay loop, mediocre open world and quest design.
Even with this crunch culture games take so long to release : 4-5 years and even more in some cases especially if we count pre production phase... You look back in 2006-7 and we had games like Uncharted Drake's Fortune which was a 6 hour game with no multiplayer. Now we have Uncharted 4 : a 14 hours long game with multiplayer...
Even with this crunch culture games take so long to release : 4-5 years and even more in some cases especially if we count pre production phase... You look back in 2006-7 and we had games like Uncharted Drake's Fortune which was a 6 hour game with no multiplayer. Now we have Uncharted 4 : a 14 hours long game with multiplayer...
Companies will need to double their workforce and adopt new production management techniques to continue to churn out the things of questionable value they churn out.
Or they could just sacrifice a generation of engineers on this altar of getting a game out synchronously with the marketing campaign
Or they could just sacrifice a generation of engineers on this altar of getting a game out synchronously with the marketing campaign
are there really people that thought delays lead to less crunch?
It's like this close to everywhere in the IT industry. you don't push back a release/patch/whatever-date because you are doing well.
It's because you realise that with the crunch you have already thrown at the problem you can't make it til the deadline.
It's like this close to everywhere in the IT industry. you don't push back a release/patch/whatever-date because you are doing well.
It's because you realise that with the crunch you have already thrown at the problem you can't make it til the deadline.
With delays , I often wonder how much difference can be made with the short delays, where it's a few weeks or a month.
if it's a few months it seems to make more sense
mind you I know little about game development so...
if it's a few months it seems to make more sense
mind you I know little about game development so...
I'm glad Schreier puts these explanations out, it's important work. The notion that delays lead to more crunch is really counterintuitive to an outsider like myself.
Stay sane, devs... and remember your loved ones come first.
Stay sane, devs... and remember your loved ones come first.
A few weeks is " fuck all kinds of things are crashing and we need more time to squash bugs". A few months is knowing not all content will be finished or is not polished/fun enough in time.
Doubling the workforce would achieve just exactly?
It isn't linear curve where increasing manhours on X increases efficiency and productivity linearly.
It's because the title really isn't accurate to what's said in the article, some one in the comments said it better then I could:
Bolding was me.
This, and it's tough when this is a creative industry as much as it's an entertainment industry. There's that balancing act between delivering on a vision and also getting a game out in a certain period of time so that making back the money spent is actually viable. It's so hard.
I think there's things that can certainly be done to alleviate crunch as much as possible, but from my experience that it's something that's inevitable, given how late in the day a lot of games actually start to come together - it's more a case of trying to reduce it as much as possible as making sure that employee's are being treated and compensated fairly. That's the bigger issue in my opinion, then hopefully from there we can minimise or wipe out crunch altogether...somehow.
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Exactly. I mean, naturally there will be more crunch with increased scope because you added tons of stuff later on (that maybe wasn't originally planned?) or change things last minute (because of mismanagement, cf. Mass Effect Andromeda as a prime example) or didn't calculate rightly from the beginning.
The problem I see here with the Schreier argument is that if more time leads to more crunch, then how do you avoid it? Just ship it without the delay? I think it kinda sends the wrong signals. Crunch has to be eradicated by proper management, fair working hours in general (independently of delays or not) and not by not delaying a game.
Totally random question that just popped in my head: do management-related positions like Producer, Assistant Producers or Project Managers crunch as hard as the others, or is it more one of those things left in the hands of those who actually develop (like artists, programmers and so on)? Just curious.
Presumably they still need gatekeepers and decision-makers to sign off on key issues and creative choices at regular intervals. If production crunches, the number of decisions that need signing off should also skyrocket so I can't see the leads chilling. However, they might be more removed from the psychological, social and physical toll that comes from forced creativity under pressure.
Good point, i didn't consider the need for decision makers and such.
I just wondered if it was one of those situation where they leave at normal hours and just go "ok you labor guys do the work and then tell me about it!".
But then again, as you say, doing 1+ hours of overtime is probably less heavy, both physically and psychologically, to a Producer than a Dev.
As a developer myself... uhhhhhhwhat? :D Plenty of games gets delayed because of uexpected factors. Having to help out with another project, the initial design being harder to do than anticipated, key personell leaving.. a thousand reasons. Some games that I worked on got cut features, decreased scope, more dev time AND larger team size, and there was still crunch. Its not like the reason is that simple.
Then I would argue that the project was overscoped for the time that you had been given and it should have been reduced in scope further. :)