Can we add EA to this list. They've made a lot of noise about eliminating long periods of crunch. Becuase, as people have said, it's inefficient. It lowers productivity and it's self defeating.
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Devs tweeting about their games that were made with no crunch.
- Thread starter Captain of Outer Space
- Start date
Actually, the original schedule was 10 months, but that changed when the movie was delayed basically a full year so Insomniac also got that kind of extra time. Still insane that both that and Spider-Man were shipped so fast
Ah yeah, I would hope that's the case but it's really hard to say. Especially if they have publishers who set deadlines for certain milestones.
Japanese work schedules outside of the games industry are already ridiculous. Crunch all the time, everywhere, very little overtime, very little lenience for disagreement.
I assume it is worse in the Japanese games industry itself, considering that non development industries are brutal on their own.
Basically what Jessie said above is very true.
Yay that Wandersong is on that list of games that didn't require crunch, even if its not surprising.
Great to see Insomniac is a developer who's uses reasonable work schedules for their employees. Insomniac continues to be one of the best employers in the games industry.
Great to see Insomniac is a developer who's uses reasonable work schedules for their employees. Insomniac continues to be one of the best employers in the games industry.
In the rapid fire question video with Alex of Media Molecule it stuck out to me that they are making Dreams crunch free. That game is likely screaming at them to put 100 hours a week per person into getting that game released, and kudos to them for resisting that.
Using Masahiro Sakurai as a metric, he normally works 50 hours/week.
https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2018...hedule-appears-be-much-healthier-time-around/
This might be a good indicator to look into how indie developers work on their games vs. those in large studios, and if its common for those making their titles to push themselves to the absolute brink.
I do not doubt more have felt that way I'm kinda interested in seeing who else goes through this.
He's not a good metric as he's the head of the dev team and isn't a Nintendo or Bamco employee. He's also crazy.
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I didn't say he's a good metric, but it's one of the more open developers from Nintendo relations in Japan that revealed their work schedule.
Also from the same source, Sakurai did say, "Apparently, working 45 more hours overtime in a month can cause an investigation."
I have heard absurd horror stories about From's development cycles for the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne. Basically straight crunch through the entire process for all of these games, 4 hours of overtime a day every day. Partly because Miyazaki is an insane workaholic and expects everyone to work as much as he does.
Yeahhh as awful as Rockstar's crunch and OT were handled, the final product is going to have infinitely more detail and scope than any of these games.
I don't see how AAA game development on that scale is possible without these shitty management issues. Too much money is on the line I think.
I don't see how AAA game development on that scale is possible without these shitty management issues. Too much money is on the line I think.
I posted this in a different crunch thread: passionate people need to be protected from themselves.
I did terrible damage to my health repeatedly over a period of time because I thought the hours were necessary.
No boss ever made me do it - they didn't need to. I was willing to be exploited to make the game "as good as it could be".
Anyone with that mentality needs to have limits put on them.
There's still a part of me that has a sense of pride about the horrific amount of work I put into certain projects and I'm very conflicted about that.
Is it possible that employees working exorbitant hours might be asked to sign a crunch-NDA in exchange for non-discussed status (high performance reviews, desired work choices, etc.) at work? Hypothetically of course.
Two guys died during the production of Panzer Dragoon Saga (20 years ago, mind you, but I doubt corporate culture has changed since)
Oh ok then, yeah. Just saying this because he's considered a workaholic even by japanese standards, but his column is pretty open about how things work over there
I never would have guessed given how fast they're cranking that one out.
One commited suicide and the other one had a traffic accident on his bike, presumably by driving while tired.
Lets not forget that two guys almost died, one having moved in to the office he was working, during the development of Sonic Xtreme before it was cancelled.
Endless Space 2 would count as AAA product - Amplitude were acquired by Sega in June 2016 and ES2 went live on Steam Early Access October 2016. Whilst the initial development would have been before acquisition, there's a few months there where crunch could've potentially been enforced by Sega, but wasn't. Early Access release also meant crunch was unnecessary.
This simplifies things a bit. Indie games/smaller publishers will have less cash-on-hand to survive a protracted development cycle than larger companies. Whilst a Sega or EA has profit/revenue forecasts to hit and quarterly earnings schedules to keep, they can also spend longer on a game, which in turn costs more money. A smaller company that is working on only 1 or 2 games at a time will have less cash in reserve, and so needs to complete a game faster to not only earn money quicker, but to (possibly) spend less on programmers/artists/marketing, etc.
Edit: Read David Galindo's post-mortem on CSD2 development to have a solid example of indie crunch.
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If you look at the long ass credits for Spider-Man and see how many other companies were involved in the production of that game in some capacity, you can't possibly rule out that people crunched to meet the deadlines for their contributions. I realize the tweet was just about Insomniac but AAA games are bigger than one studio these days.
I remember watching a making of one of the Gran Turismo games and one of the employees had a sleeping bag under his desk. At the time I thought that was funny and cool.
My magnum opus was made with no crunch. At least no forced ones... Sometimes I left the office at 8pm cos I want to fix something before leaving, but that's it
Man I'm 100% with you. Even now I'm planning my schedule for a game a year out and I'm already thinking about the periods of crunch I'm allotting to myself. It's a habit I have got to pull myself out of.
i've added a suggestion to your post to improve everyone's reading experience
Iirc, we saw a bunch of sleeping bags in some of the FFXV behind the scenes stuff. Mentioned in the FFXIV noclip doc too.
I think it's also worth pointing out that Monolith Soft (the developer of the Xenoblade games) has gone on record several times, stating that they stress the importance of a balanced life. Here's a few quotes:
Studio Director Tetsuya Takahashi, in a Gamespot interview (2015):
Later in the same interview:
From a recruitment message (via NintendoEverything) on Monolith Soft's website (2018):
Monolith Soft are a first-party developer, so obviously that does affect the situation quite a bit, as Takahashi himself pointed out. But it's cool to know that games as vast as Xenoblade Chronicles X and Xenoblade 2 are being developed without crazy overtime and crunch. Also, this is in Japan, where I'd argue work culture can be even more unhealthy than America, so the work-life balance they've achieved really is something to be quite proud of.
Studio Director Tetsuya Takahashi, in a Gamespot interview (2015):
Later in the same interview:
From a recruitment message (via NintendoEverything) on Monolith Soft's website (2018):
Monolith Soft are a first-party developer, so obviously that does affect the situation quite a bit, as Takahashi himself pointed out. But it's cool to know that games as vast as Xenoblade Chronicles X and Xenoblade 2 are being developed without crazy overtime and crunch. Also, this is in Japan, where I'd argue work culture can be even more unhealthy than America, so the work-life balance they've achieved really is something to be quite proud of.
"Sir, we somehow spent 3 years working on making the main waifu's hair just so. We don't have the rest of the game ready."
"Ok, how does 2 more years sound?"
"Could you make it 4, announce it at E3 this year, and set an impossible sales goal as well?"
"Done."
No, not at all. It's everywhere. One close friend have had to sleep under his desk even though he lives a couple miles away.
yeah isn't insomniac kind of well known as being a great place to work? I feel like that's something that I heard a lot about in the past.
I don't know about others since we don't have information but with Hal Laboratory, it's said on the site for different work functions:
https://www.hallab.co.jp/eng/create/jobs/03/
So, roughly 9-10 hours of work and they sleep in their house.
So am I a bad person for saying I don't like or have any real interest in pretty much all of the games on that list? Because I feel kind of bad. Dreams is one of the only things on the list that I have any interest in and I feel weird about that game being on that list since it's not done. Oh and Hohokum is cool so I guess that list has two games I'm into. lol
I work with an excellent scrum master that came from EA salt lake. They didn't crunch on his projects and they've been agile for many years. Truly shocking since I've crunched like hell during my time at EA.
You don't have to be a fan of the games personally. The whole point of a list like that is to push back against the notion the crunch is a necessary part of game development