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Naughty Dog crunch culture examined
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Creative people are bad at managing stuff. There's no end to how long you can keep working on art. When do you stop painting a picture? When is it really "done"?
I think it's the same with games. There's no real way to estimate when a game will be finished. It's either you don't set a launch date at all and it's done when it's done, or set a date and crunch to the limit.
I'd rather have the former and let these people work like human beings, but gamerz want their yearly shooters
I think it's the same with games. There's no real way to estimate when a game will be finished. It's either you don't set a launch date at all and it's done when it's done, or set a date and crunch to the limit.
I'd rather have the former and let these people work like human beings, but gamerz want their yearly shooters
What was the studio that was trying to establish a studio-wide culture that you did not have to work more just because your co-workers are? CDProjeckt?
I Imagine its really difficult to dispell the notion that you can go home fine while the other person beside you going to work five hours more. Probably gets people thinking its a trap to "catch" slackers.
I Imagine its really difficult to dispell the notion that you can go home fine while the other person beside you going to work five hours more. Probably gets people thinking its a trap to "catch" slackers.
I'll wait for their response to this but if they decide not to address any of the issues I'll have no problem boycotting the game, fuck them.
These people aren't painting the fucking Sistine Chapel or recreating Michelangelo's David. These employees who "want" to make sacrifices are programmers and coders who have to look at a computer monitor for 15-16 hours a day. These people are contracted QA workers who make just enough money to make their job seem like it's worth a damn. The problem is that crunch is implicitly mandated; in other words, workers feel compelled to crunch not out of some vague feeling of achievement or contribution to some glorious creation, but because they know higher-ups will look poorly on those who try to have a good work-life balance.
Prestige ain't worth a poor quality of life.
So shut up and don't do a thing about it is what you're saying?
Ok, fair enough, but you did change the tune here from "the EU does nothing" to "companies in the EU countries do what they can to circumvent the law". There is a HUGE difference.
Yes, there is systemic abuse of unskilled workers in all of Europe, regardless of where a given country fits on the GDP scale (just like German companies sometimes abuse Polish workforce, Polish companies sometimes abuse Ukranian workforce) - but that's not due to lack of regulation, rather than lack of proper oversight or companies using loopholes for their own profit. Still, for what it's worth, the regulatory bodies (on EU level, state level and regional level) are not passive in fighting this, even though your mileage may vary as to how effective actions taken by those bodies (especially regarding poorly represented minorities like immigrants). This however doesn't mean that we should not strive to impose solutions that could help fixing this.
That's the whole point of this discussion here too. It's not like there are no tools to fight abusive work conditions in IT companies. There are. They just need to be imposed, often through legal and state enforcement. It worked for multiple industries in the past (as it was already pointed out in this topic), it will work for IT industry too.
However, it's not the companies themselves that should be addressee of our complaints and demands, but polititians. This is a political and legal matter and should be handled as such.
As someone who's been subject to this whole repulsively passive-aggressive "he's a go-getter, aren't you??" culture of unreasonable due dates and free overtime, it made me close to nauseous reading this shit...as always unfortunately.
I just hope continued highlighting of this issue in gaming media will at least start chipping away at the iceberg.
I just hope continued highlighting of this issue in gaming media will at least start chipping away at the iceberg.
They reduce development costs/waste. Maybe they finally understand that all those extra features and details in games are actually not needed and less would do just fine? For example, spending months of work on "horse-balls-in-different-temperatures" -feature might not actually be needed in any game.
I have a feeling this will be posted at least once a page but...
because they make good games
It seems QA are really considered really poorly no matter what the studio is.
There isn't in any studio, nobody is stupid enough to do that. There is other insidious ways to do it.
Of course it's not needed but Houser is a perfectionist. Rockstar can also get away with one game every 6 years. Not many can.
CDPR is, like, 1/10th the size of Rockstar and somehow thay can get away with it.
Companies that can't get away with it are usually devs owned by publishers that have to appease the evergrowing hunger of investors for growth.
Still, and I will repeat this in every post I guess, it's not a problem that can be fixed by dev companies, but by legal bodies - so it doesn't really matter what is the size of this or that developer or what are the nuances between different companies.
They need to be made to comply. They will make it work, don't worry about them.
100%
I'm lucky to be in a decent studio where QA is treated as a part of the development pipeline, but I constantly hear horror stories about it, and it's always kind of just looming there because of that.
This just makes me think they really must have terrible managers at Naughty Dog. Like surely you would get better at your Managerial job after time and several games. Its kind of amazing honestly that they can continue to be this bad. Like treatment of staff is part of your job as management, its not just creating this game and making bank for their masters, its balancing that with the other real world factors.
Sony prob doesn't care at all, nor would they step down and talk to ND about this, aside from it becoming a major pr issue. Japanese work culture is even worse.
For the actors, directors & other bigwigs, yeah. Less so for CGI artists, from my understanding, They get treated like absolute crap & have similarly crunchy work-culture. If anything, their job might be worse because nowadays CGI is so prevelent that there is just one project after the another with no end in sight (when one MCU movie that is 90% CGI is done, the next one is already waiting in line) vs. games that can have more reasonable development periods when the release of the next game is still years away (though endless crunch in this era of GAAS has done much harm to the traditional development cycle that offered some breaks).
It seems to me that this kind of work environment in game development is not going to be sustainable in the long-term. That sucks for my favorite hobby, but I can't overlook the conditions that people are subjected to when making a video game.
Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that after all these years no one has figured out a way to streamline game development in such a way where developers are not working insanely long hours to the point of it being inhumane, yet can still turn out a finished title that will not suffer in quality.
With new consoles right around the corner, I am sure games will continue to grow in cost to create, while the customer is expecting a $60 MSRP and devs slave away for your next epic game that might be a resounding success or total flop. Again, something is going to give at some point and it won't be pretty.
The challenge is to figure out a way to treat developers better (maybe hire more of them) while not passing on the cost to the customer, right? I don't know if that's possible.
Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that after all these years no one has figured out a way to streamline game development in such a way where developers are not working insanely long hours to the point of it being inhumane, yet can still turn out a finished title that will not suffer in quality.
With new consoles right around the corner, I am sure games will continue to grow in cost to create, while the customer is expecting a $60 MSRP and devs slave away for your next epic game that might be a resounding success or total flop. Again, something is going to give at some point and it won't be pretty.
The challenge is to figure out a way to treat developers better (maybe hire more of them) while not passing on the cost to the customer, right? I don't know if that's possible.
I'm gonna step in here. I'm working 80 hour weeks. 80 fucking hours. It's killing me, I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I've gone to a therapist, had chest pains, anxiety attacks, whole 9 yards. I know in the past I've said some shit that makes it seem like I didn't care about crunch, but that was before I'd actually had to deal with it personally. Now I've got perspective and I'm so sorry. So quite frankly fuck ANY studio that lets this happen especially when you're already taking years to push out a product. I don't even work in the gaming industry, I'm doing shit that actually has to be done for the livelihood of others and I still don't like it. I'm under staffed and have very thin deadlines to get things straight for our employees. There's 3 people in my department currently attempting to work for almost 300. Shit sucks. But here's my difference I, unlike so few in these stories get paid 40 hours of overtime a week, I'm making myself do this as leadership so my younger team doesn't have to and once we get about 6 more people (I have interviews today) It'll be over. Crunch doesn't ever have to happen, weak and worthless leadership allows it to happen. You work 40 hours you go home. Salaried or otherwise. If you agree to overtime? Great. Shouldn't be forced or mandated. So again fuck ND and any other developer that puts some bullshit video game over the lives of the people you need to make it.
I didn't. The people at Naughty Dog are frequently the absolute top people in the industry. They're the type of people who will go home and continue learning or working on their own projects after their day shift. That's fine, but it also means they are overly open to working late shifts, which means the people there who want to have more normal lives (I'm guessing QA workers are less passionate about late work than say concept artists) are going to be pressured into having that same level of devotion.
There should be a mandatory limit of hours worked in a day of 10 hours or so, with mandatory weekends. They could implememt the option for employees to request additional time that would need to be approved by a manager and include bonuses. Maybe that's not the exact solution, but there has to be something.
Nobody in a game studio is less passionate than others just because they work in a different department.
I mean in terms of extracurricular activity. Most artists go home and continue drawing. In my own personal experiences, QA workers wouldn't usually go home and do QA side projects. I didn't mean to say they care less about their work.
Thank you for this post!
These kind of stories and perspectives are super important for people to know and understand what this shit means in reality.
Literally no one mentioned boycotting ND.
You brought it up and didnt even bother talking about the topic at hand?
They've released 3 (multiplatform) games since 2015 and two rather meaty expansions. They crunch though, hard unfortunately.
That's because you, much like I, imagine that making quality games is a linear process rather than a chaotic, by the seat of your pants, artistic process.
Except at some point given all the evidence from most top studios you have to wonder whether the process is just broken or it's part of the industry structure such as finance, law, medics and parts of tech.
Pretty much. When I used to work in QA, we often did this in the days just before a submission to cert. They would often ask for a few volunteers to stay all night to validate that the build made by devs finishing up their work late in the evening would be stable to test for the major subset of the test team coming in the next morning. Also if we found some obvious defects during that smoke test, the dev team coming in the morning would immediately have something to work on. There was no time to waste. If we didn't and it turned out the build wasn't stable (or crashed on boot, as we often saw), that would be an entire day worth of testing down the drain while the devs fixed it and produced another build. It can add up fast, and in those last days, every minute counts. You can't miss your cert date.
I assume this is why so many people jump ship so quickly after they release product's, quality isn't worth this type of shit
No game is worth their workers' health.
Disgusting practices.
Higher-ups are a bunch of incompetents when they fail to the talent working with them. No excuses.
Disgusting practices.
Higher-ups are a bunch of incompetents when they fail to the talent working with them. No excuses.
I know a lot of other QA testers in the speed running communities. just because it's not easy to perceive that they do stuff like that, doesn't mean it isn't happening.
That's true, but I was referring to the idea that only big devs can afford to take it slow with their production cycles - CDPR is not a huge developer, but still manage to take it somewhat slow with their development (and still make money, thought that's mostly because how Witcher 3 was sicc). Also, out of those 3 multiplatform games you mentioned, only one was a real AAA title, Gwent and Thronebreaker were more like side projects in a sense. Hard to tell how much development resource those two took, but it's safe to say that it was waaaaaaaaay less than Witcher 3.
Other than that, yeah, they didn't avoid crunch too. That's the point btw., it's not the short dev cycles, it's just devs using crunch as a tool because they can. With CDPR things cited as the cause of crunch was bad internal organization and chaotic development process that caused huge amounts of workhours to be wasted. If there was a real consequence to crunch for them, that would be first thing they would work on to fix. Since there is little to no consequence for that so far, they don't care for things that cause crunch and then claim that it's just industry standard.
I can't imagine that the stories of 24 hour work days are in anyway uplifting to you and I truly hope things to start to improve across the board. Soon would be nice. :\
Meh, I would say it's more indifference than anything. No one is forcing folks to work there or to do crunch. It's stated it's not mandatory, and really even if it was, what are we supposed to do about it? Raise hell on a gaming forum? Tweet at ND employee? Outrage is often misplaced IMO, we're talking about an entertainment industry, a lot of these ppl love what they do and know what they are getting into.
I also don't can't sympathize with some of these opinions. If there's peer pressure to crunch then ignore that shit! There's peer pressure throughout life to get involved with bogus things. You have to be your own person. Be the type of person who clocks out at 5, "y'all can go ahead and be great and have Shuhei give you a high five." Like what effect is this supposed to have on the average gamer?
Quit, find another job, find another industry, life is f'n hard for most of us man.
Insinuating that management wasn't probably heavily implying or encouraging it
More than likely used ND's pedigree and player expectations along with metacritic standard to get "volunteers". Worse part is management likely goes home the same time everyday.
Picture if a Ms studio like playground was the one doing this. We would have a 300 pages thread.
But good to call this bs practices. As the site has a hard on for anything Sony I really expected massive damage control from most users but this does not seem to be the case.
24 hour work days... How can you deliver a quality product when most of the workers have their brains turned into jello from working those insane shifts. And all that for games you can beat in a weekend and have little replay value.
But good to call this bs practices. As the site has a hard on for anything Sony I really expected massive damage control from most users but this does not seem to be the case.
24 hour work days... How can you deliver a quality product when most of the workers have their brains turned into jello from working those insane shifts. And all that for games you can beat in a weekend and have little replay value.
Amy Hennig has talked about this more than once too, most recently just this year. https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/22/...-video-game-and-inspiring-newcomers/view-all/
Edit: Also 2016 interview https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...tely-at-the-point-where-somethings-gotta-give
Edit: Also 2016 interview https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...tely-at-the-point-where-somethings-gotta-give
Funnily, it was also Cliffy B being critical of ND crunch that led to the "Most at Neogaf are cunts" Tweet. People didn't take it really well, that he was expressing his concern towards ND employee who was talking about sleeping at her work desk in preparation for E3. Good to see the attitudes have been changing a bit.
Oh sure, they didn't get the full workforce behind them like TW3 and CP77 do. But apparently the team size for Gwent was still around 100 people, which entered beta in early 2017 and full release 2018 with an expansion in 2019. And of course they did a big overhaul for the mechanics in 2.0 patch too. It's around the same amount of people that Ninja Theory in example employs. I'm happy to get those smaller titles too and I would be more than fine waiting longer for the games to come out, if it led to more humane working hours. Unfortunately it's not just about the patience of gamers that can solve the problem.
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Somehow I feel the quality of a game is not dependent on how much one's life is damaged.