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Want AAA Games? Embrace Crunch, Reject Unions!
- Thread starter Deleted member 8196
- Start date
As someone working in management in construction, isn't crunch time applicable to any industry that's project based? Schedules rarely work to plan and there's always an "oh shit" moment where you've got to ramp up the hours. And to add, no, i don't get paid overtime either, such is salaried life.
AAA games are like 80% of all games that i play so i rather not see them die.
But i'm very much in favour of unions, better pay, more dev-time, etc.
I gladly pay 100€/$/etc. for a game like Cyberpunk, Breath of the Wild, GTA, etc. and wait longer to play them.
Also they could make these games shorter. I really, really don't need every game trying to fill a bigger map with stuff to kill time. I rather play a 20 hour GTA story than a 50 hour GTA story.
But i'm very much in favour of unions, better pay, more dev-time, etc.
I gladly pay 100€/$/etc. for a game like Cyberpunk, Breath of the Wild, GTA, etc. and wait longer to play them.
Also they could make these games shorter. I really, really don't need every game trying to fill a bigger map with stuff to kill time. I rather play a 20 hour GTA story than a 50 hour GTA story.
That shit about outsourcing is just dumb and flat out wrong. I work in software engineering. In Spain, we are part of one of the country's general worker unions. It works and our work isn't just outsourced, even though it's just software development. Stop making excuses for this shit.
It'll be that one interview that gets trotted out every time the subject of Nintendo and crunch comes up, which in no way actually says that Nintendo don't crunch.
Not a single doubt that all of them crunch, even Nintendo (Japanese work culture in general is crunch.) Having a deadline to meet, and a quality to uphold will always force crunch. Unless you're someone like Valve that has an infinite money generator like Steam and a few big money generators like DOTA 2, TF2 and CS:GO. Then you can take your sweet-ass time on a project, or even scrap it if you feel like it because you don't require the money from a project to stay afloat like most companies do.
Also, Nintendo just call it "Mario Time" instead of crunch:
"In those days, Miyamoto would come to us at 11 PM, after he finished all of his board-member work, and say, "It's Mario time." At that point, we'd start a planning meeting that would run until 2 AM. At that point, Miyamoto would go home, leaving us with the words, "You should return home soon, for your health." Over the next two or three hours, we'd write the game design documents and summarize the instructions for our artists and programmers. "
If it was as effective they would have done it already. It's going to be a much longer and a more expensive process which is not something that publishers are looking for.
The only reason his argument works is because america work culture has such a strange view on unions. The push shouldn't be for the video game industry to unionize, the push should be for all american workers to unionize. That way you can actually create meaningful, far-reaching, cultural change. Compartmentalizing unions, as I see it done in america, is only bad for the workers.
I also work in a 100% digital industry, and my labour rights are the same as everyone else, so I don't buy that argument.
I also work in a 100% digital industry, and my labour rights are the same as everyone else, so I don't buy that argument.
With how hellish development and organisational structure appear to be within game developers I do wonder if they couldn't keep making big nice games without working their employees to the bone.
Like, give them rights first, I'm sure effectivity will rise and then you can start laying some proper groundwork to streamline the development process.
Like, give them rights first, I'm sure effectivity will rise and then you can start laying some proper groundwork to streamline the development process.
A few interviews I had seen and I hadn't seen stories on this.
Seeing the Kotaku article above, clearly I was wrong.
Still, the overall point was that AAA games are possible without crunch, I just used a bad example.
I'd be fine if the AAA tier of games was euthanised. While I occasionally play a few of them I vastly prefer more creative indie titles, AA titles or VR games these days. The need to appeal to everybody makes most AAA titles perfectly bland and soulless. Let creators innovate and have reasonable working hours instead of having to slave away at trying to achieve ultra polished bland commercialism.
I think there's at least a possibility that he's right, that AAA development with non-abusive labor practices would cost too much to ever be a smart investment, but if that's the case then games should scale back to whatever is workable. We'll all learn to live with Control-sized, $30 million-budget games instead of Red Dead-sized, $100 million+ budget games.
It isn't. If you could get the same quality from overseas with a fraction of the cost, they would have been doing it a long time ago. Think about that.
1.) I'd gladly take AA games instead, if it meant no crunch.
2.) Crunch tends to lead to worse games because tired people make more mistakes and take longer to finish things. In dozens of industries, it has been found that long work hours leads to less weekly productivity in the long run.
All this means that is if games had better management in the first place, they could be done better and quicker with no crunch.
There's an issue that not a lot of people agree with that being correct. Despite decades of evidence showing that it is the case.
There's an issue that people who have lived in that crunch culture are more likely to accept crunch.
2.) Crunch tends to lead to worse games because tired people make more mistakes and take longer to finish things. In dozens of industries, it has been found that long work hours leads to less weekly productivity in the long run.
All this means that is if games had better management in the first place, they could be done better and quicker with no crunch.
There's an issue that not a lot of people agree with that being correct. Despite decades of evidence showing that it is the case.
There's an issue that people who have lived in that crunch culture are more likely to accept crunch.
How fucking stupid is that vid?
He thinks that if Cinema didn't unionize decades ago they would be left to their own device to unionize or something?
the only reason gaming industry is not full of union is because it's got a heavy center in the US and exploded after unions got destroyed in the US.
ALL COMPANIES OF OVER 50 EMPLOYEES HAVE UNIONS IN FRANCE.
Ubisoft haven't closed Montpellier, Annecy or Montreuil, heck they opened a new one in Bordeaux!
And you think that if the whole of Naughty Dog stopped working the heads would just outsource the whole thing to singapore or something?
And lose the talent that made their studio? and rework their costly pipeline? And spend more money for all this?
VAs are covered by unions and they've got a better deal than the rest of the dev teams for a reason.
Don't unionize if you wanna keep being treated like expandable cogs.
Also if AAA games means it's made at the expense of the dev team's health,
fuck that, it can disappear then.
He thinks that if Cinema didn't unionize decades ago they would be left to their own device to unionize or something?
the only reason gaming industry is not full of union is because it's got a heavy center in the US and exploded after unions got destroyed in the US.
ALL COMPANIES OF OVER 50 EMPLOYEES HAVE UNIONS IN FRANCE.
Ubisoft haven't closed Montpellier, Annecy or Montreuil, heck they opened a new one in Bordeaux!
And you think that if the whole of Naughty Dog stopped working the heads would just outsource the whole thing to singapore or something?
And lose the talent that made their studio? and rework their costly pipeline? And spend more money for all this?
VAs are covered by unions and they've got a better deal than the rest of the dev teams for a reason.
Don't unionize if you wanna keep being treated like expandable cogs.
Also if AAA games means it's made at the expense of the dev team's health,
fuck that, it can disappear then.
While I'm not familiar with working in the game industry, I am used to the "crunch" of a lowly retail manager, and the constant grind in life that came with it. Working 60... or 70... or 80+ hour weeks for the sake of the same pay as I would have at 50 is complete and absolute bullshit. There was never any reward in it. It was essentially free to labor to prop up a failing system. And I've said my sob story a bunch, but to put in that much effort to support a family, not because I want to do the job but because I'm desperate to support my loved ones as much as I want sucks. It sucks you don't get the time to spend with that family. And when someone in that family dies... like why did I work so much that I barely ever got to see my wife, to the point that when she was gone all I could think of was all the 14+ hour shifts I did performing meaningless garbage for a shitty system that never truly accomplished anything, I get so fucking mad. Nobody should work hours like that, period. Fuck capitalism.
And so, fuck crunch, fuck AAA games, fuck doing this to our fellow humans.
And so, fuck crunch, fuck AAA games, fuck doing this to our fellow humans.
If big publishers could just get up and move all production overseas for a fraction of the cost at the snap of their fingers they would already do it. What shareholder driven corporation wouldn't? Unionization wouldn't be the trigger for this. I am positive there aren't any AAA publishers that are not doing this already.
It's not a real point.
It's not a real point.
I'm working with two overseas companies right now.
One is implementing some reward system into our title and claimed they can do anything and have done it before.
They proposed it would be done by July 2019. It's rolled out to 2% of our users right now and still doesn't even support device rotation like they said they've been working on since then. It's been a literal nightmare.
The other has been just 4 software engineers. Every user-facing feature we've given them has had horrendous bugs that showed they did absolutely no testing. Every tech backlog task we've given them has taken so long that the task in itself is already outdated.
But hey, they're cheap! So keep throwing money at it.
...and you get what you pay for.
One of my last companies, we had these outsourcers. They were originally hired to replicate this concept program I made for this company. When I joined fulltime, they took a back seat. A few months on the job, there were repeated days of "bad weather, no internet, can't work today" messages. We decided to look up their building on Google Maps. Turns out, the weather was fine, but there was a big soccer match that day. We shitcanned them, but a year later I notice they were re-hired by my dumb ass bosses to work on some puzzle basketball title. They were months behind schedule and it never came out.
I honestly don't know why they think outsourcing engineers ever works because it just leads to wasted time and money. I can't communicate easily with them for language barriers, time differences and the fact they're not on site to ask questions or consult with us. PLUS because they're paid to deliver on the deliverables, they will give you exactly what you ask for which is the minimum possible.
My favorite example is once they were tasked with implementing an energy bar in the game. Do a task, the bar shrinks. Etc. They got it in. Then the designer clicked again, and the energy bar went negative. And kept going. They weren't instructed to implement a stopping mechanic, so they didn't.
Anyone who worked with offshoring have horror stories like that.
We didn't even do anything that complicated or fancy and we had an offshoring team do an absolute mess of a project.
It's like these wework jokers who think that you can just outsource or crowdsource everything and see revenue rolling in with no downside.
And the kind of shit where the specs didn't have everything spelled out to them so they don't care about it is the exact same issues everywhere.
If you want quality, at the end of the day you have to pay for it.
AAA aren't gonna skip on that.
Even when they don't you can end up with stuffs like AC Unity so imagine if they outsourced everything there.
How about we drop AAA production values from our games if that's really necessary? Just make AA Call of Duty games or whatever.
Two or three years ago our biggest client set a rule that all future bids must include x% offshoring to reduce costs. Now they're demanding that new projects don't do any offshoring...
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Yup. It's 100% predictable to be a mess every time. But they keep doing it. Because other engineers care too much to compensate for it, and sacrifice quality of life. It's an exploited personality flaw in so many in this industry they won't stand up for themselves.
It's why I felt so bad for the "EA Spouses" plea years ago. It's unfair to them.
It's why I felt so bad for the "EA Spouses" plea years ago. It's unfair to them.
I don't like agreeing with Jaffe, but he's not totally wrong.
Also seems pretty naive to believe publishers will simply do away with AAA development because of poor working conditions. There are numerous industries out there built on the backs of exploited workers.
Also seems pretty naive to believe publishers will simply do away with AAA development because of poor working conditions. There are numerous industries out there built on the backs of exploited workers.
That's the unmistakeable future of offshoring.
You start thinking you'll reduce costs.
When the costs are low but the quality goes with it, turns out customers care more about quality than just cost.
Ubisoft is one of the few that manages to do offshoring at the scale they're doing and it's anything but cheap.
And even take a big game that you want to offshore.
If you have the lead dev on 1 continent you won't have his team on the other side of the earth unless you want the absolute shittiest product ever.
And turns out that you can't really outsource that lead dev if he's at the inception of the product as well.
that Mario Rabbid game wasn't made with the lead dev in Italy with the rest of the team in Bucarest because cheap.
As far as software goes, gaming is among the worst.
There's no reason why entertainment has to have such appalling conditions when even the most performance and time sensitive software sectors make gaming look like absurdist hell.
Why gaming requires more off devs than high stake finance or medical?
Completely agreed. Entertainment is not important enough to sacrifice the well being of people. I just don't see a scenario at the moment that would get these big companies to change.
That being said, I do think that what we currently consider big budget AAA gaming will start to fade at some point in the next 15-20 years, though it won't have anything to do with working conditions or concern for employees. It's that smaller games with post-launch monetization and live service games are going to start looking more and more appealing to publishers. They can still make mountains of cash, but at a fraction of the cost and man power compared to something like God of War or Red Dead Redemption 2.
Or worse still, they'll find a way to combine the worst of all worlds to make the shittiest product ever.
If you think publishers are gonna be ok with doing away with big event launches, you haven't been following.
The path to the future is clear :
Big AAA game with big post-launch monetization as live services.
Red Dead 2 is actually a pretty good example of what the industry wants to generalize :
biggass game that bring in the numbers with big monetization to come later (or sooner really, I mean look at Ubisoft, they'll fix the marketplace bugs before the gamebreaking ones).
There's a number of things that I disagree with in that video (his assumption that all workers have signed up for awful working conditions akin to NFL players agreeing to get hit hard for one), but I think he nails a key point about mismanagement: it's an issue, but it's not necessarily THE issue. Videogames have always thrived on innovation, and they frequently have to build new tools to make games work. It's impossible to predict how systems will work (and/or be fun) until you've done it.
Therefore, if you set a deadline for 2023 based on the assumption that a system will be fun, but you don't find out it needs to be completely overhauled until 2022 you'll miss the original deadline. That's not mismanagement, that's you not knowing the future. Kicking back the deadline indefinitely is not something that happens in project management in any industry, which is how crunch happens (sometimes).
Regarding his point about unions, I'm not familiar enough with any of the industries he cites as examples to believe his claims. Also, while it's harder to unionize if it's easy for your employer to find cheaper replacement talent oversees, I think he's understating how much creative value current industry talent has. There's a reason these big publishers maintain studios in expensive, Western countries. A company like EA would've shuttered all of their North American studios if they thought they could get away with employing coders in other countries.
Therefore, if you set a deadline for 2023 based on the assumption that a system will be fun, but you don't find out it needs to be completely overhauled until 2022 you'll miss the original deadline. That's not mismanagement, that's you not knowing the future. Kicking back the deadline indefinitely is not something that happens in project management in any industry, which is how crunch happens (sometimes).
Regarding his point about unions, I'm not familiar enough with any of the industries he cites as examples to believe his claims. Also, while it's harder to unionize if it's easy for your employer to find cheaper replacement talent oversees, I think he's understating how much creative value current industry talent has. There's a reason these big publishers maintain studios in expensive, Western countries. A company like EA would've shuttered all of their North American studios if they thought they could get away with employing coders in other countries.
It just has to start from the top. QA can't unionize because of the revolving door of people to replace them. But if engineers got together, that would cripple a company if they had to get rid of all of them.
Look at the credits screen for any Assassin's Creed title. It takes the population of a small town to craft those.
Nope. More than enough exist to show your statement up, honestly.
That's actually very easy to do because no one makes AAA games in genres I like these days. Outside of Zelda and 3D Mario, there's actually not much for me. A lot of it is zombies, M rated gore fests or general intense heavy violence which is all taking its toll on industry artists having to look at decapitations videos, and without the help from the industry for their mental health. Then there's how incredibly safe AAA is that they're too big to fail because of how everything is thrown in to reach more people. And AAA only gets bigger and bigger with more and more things getting put in, which is killing the people who make the games.
AAA can absolutely die and I would not miss it.