I am writing this rebuttal to reports of statements made by Michael Pachter because it's something I feel very strongly about, and I want to see this kind of misguided support of crunch get shouted down as much as possible.
First, a bit about myself. I have been making games professionally for over twelve years now. By my estimate, in that time, I’ve worked about five years of crunch. And by crunch, I mean at least 60 hours a week. I’m not counting the odd day where I had to stay an extra two or three hours. In general, I’m not even counting the few days leading up to a milestone where I ate dinner at the office and kept working.
I’m talking about nearly living at the office, and being required to work extra either by fiat or by circumstance. Sacrificing my weekends, my evenings, my time with friends. Because that is ultimately what crunch is.
And in all that time, every single bit of crunch came down to poor planning, or a refusal to accept reality. And I’m not just putting the blame on the people I worked for, which is why I’m not naming names or pointing fingers. I’ve done plenty of crunch on my own, because of my own refusal to accept reality. There were more than a few times I took a nearly impossible set of features as a challenge, and then did the crunch to make them real.
It is rarely worth it.
Then you get someone like Michael Pachter, who has never actually worked in game development, broadly stating that crunch is something you have to accept. Well, it isn’t. He is wrong. He states that periods of crunch should last three to six months at the end of the project. Given that almost no games have a development period of more than two years any more, he’s saying that to make games, you may have to give up a quarter of your life. Or worse.
Bullshit.
Crunch is avoidable. But it requires a level of maturity and acceptance that the game industry sorely lacks. People argue that there’s always a period of crunch necessary at the end of a project. But that’s not true, either. If you are disciplined enough to accept deadlines and understand that there’s a point where you have to stop adding features, schedules can be planned with some lead time for debugging.
A problem we make for ourselves
But I have yet to work on a project, in twelve years, in which we actually stopped adding features more than a few weeks before releasing to manufacturing. Crunch is a problem we create ourselves, back-loading risk by assuming we can solve a problem later, refusing to accept when it is time to stop, and mistakenly believing that if you work hard enough you can fit in that last feature. As we become accustomed to accepting deadlines as real and absolute, we will also learn how to best manage our time so that we can achieve our goals without sacrificing what we want to achieve with the games we make.
Pachter excuses overtime practices with the belief that most developers receive bonuses and large payouts. But it is not in employees' best interest to believe that they have a bonus coming, when the majority of games don’t make enough money for payouts, and when a lot of companies are perfectly okay with simply laying off a dev team. And that’s assuming you work at one of the few companies that have a true profit sharing plan.
In fact, I wish more people joined the industry who weren’t willing to work more than a standard work week. Because nothing will change so long as there is an endless supply of people willing to keep working the wrong way.
These days, I limit my work hours, for my sanity, for my family, for my friends, and for my own self-respect. If I give a time estimate, I’ll hit it. If I’m delivered a deadline which isn’t realistic, I won’t commit to it. In fact, I’m pretty open about telling people when I won’t hit a deadline. But if it’s not realistic, then why should I sacrifice my personal life? I’ve already outlasted the vast majority of people who make games. And this is how I stop from leaving the industry altogether. Which is another problem directly related to this ridiculous crunch culture.
Some companies recognize the problems inherent to crunch, and take steps to curb the damage, such as Splash Damage. However, even this is just trying to put a positive spin on what is still a damaging habit. Remuneration plans are certainly a step in the right direction, but Paul Wedgwood still says something which, to me, smacks of treating symptoms: “When we do overtime, it's planned in advance.” Frankly, if you plan in such a way that overtime will be necessary, you can also plan to avoid it.
So I urge you as developers: fight against overtime and bad scheduling/management. I urge you as gamers, don’t support publishers and developers who treat their employees as disposable resources. And I urge you as human beings: don’t buy these lies about crunch being necessary.
Charles Randall is a programmer, most recently on the Assassin's Creed series at Ubisoft Montreal, and is currently working at Ubisoft Toronto. He has also worked at BioWare on Knights Of The Old Republic, Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights. He blogs at Bluh.org.
Comments
13Good article. It's completely true. There are only two reasons for Crunch. Poor planning and management, or deliberate dilution of wages by getting more hours per salary out of people. It's not accepted in the commercial world generally. However, the places it is accepted are considered "highly desirable" positions. In other words, employers can't take advantage of employees because the position is highly sort after. It's a bad business practice and explains why nearly all games have major flaws and bugs at release. Too busy to notice or fix them.
Great article, have to agree that poor planning plays a big part of it.
Great artticle, and a lot more restrained than my own reaction to Pachter's idiotic remarks.
Great read and spot on. The problem is that the majority of games companies see their employees personal time as a resource to be exploited when they should view it in the exact opposite way. The industry is currently hemorrhaging talent over this issue but scumbag publisher and studio heads will likely never change.
Not all studio heads / publishers are 'scumbags'. More and more are becoming progressive, out of necessity if not the goodness of their hearts.
However, it's not uncommon for middle managers to fail to understand the impact of overtime, and see it exactly as you say, and sometimes that can be overlooked. Or it's someone new who believes he has to prove himself and so chooses to do lots of overtime.
As I said, this isn't a problem where you can point at just a few people. It's everyone's problem, and it's going to take everyone to fix it.
I'm being harsh I admit, however my cynicism on this issue stems from years of experiece. I've personally sat with studio heads & middle managers (of major and beloved studios) in the pub while they laughed and joked about how they weren't sending the staff home that night, while all the time forgetting that they were sat with people who they had screwed over on a different night. Fair enough they are generally (but not always) going to stay in the office all night themselves but I don't think that that is the point.
If I had to bet i'd say that the industry will never change, they don't want genuine project management because they don't want to be told that their 'plan' for getting the game out on time is BS and won't work.
I'm sure this is partially true with respect to existing companies. But those companies won't exist forever as new companies spring up who function with proper work practices and eventually grow to be better all-around studios.
However, the ability for these companies to do what they do is reliant on having people willing to accept these practices. Change from the bottom will be just as effective as change from the top. As will promoting awareness of company habits.
Thank you for this article advocating emotional well-being and common sense!
While I agree wholeheartedly with what Randall says here I reserve some apprehension that it seems to be the highest-profile most "rock-n-roll" products like Gears of War and Red Dead Redemption emerging from studios known (or notorious) for long hours working culture. By contrast the output of Relentless, known for strictly not working beyond core hours, just isn't as much "the sexy product" - Buzz!, Blue Toad Murder Files*. I do think there is a connection between good working practices and not making "headline" games for the core gamer market; the competition when making "headline" titles squeezes studios into the funnel of delivering "more more more!" and risks need to be taken on expensive features that will differentiate the game from others, and which may take an unpredictably long time to get "just right". Whereas a studio cleverly targeting an underexploited market can be profitable without the same head-to-head competition against other studios.
It would be great to see a studio behind a big title like Fallout, Bioshock, Zelda, WarCraft, Assassins Creed, Grand Theft Auto etc. being able to stand up and say, "We accomplished this without crunch."
I think there are other factors that can make one long-hours company culture better than another. Being respected, having proper ownership over one's work and having the freedom to opt-in or out of the hours are just some important parts of the puzzle that could use more discussion.
* Not to be down on Relentless. I wish I had more examples of studios that have sensible hours to cite. I believe HotGen had decent working hours when they were working on plug-in-and-play TV games. Again, in contrast to "headlining" games.
Perhaps the unspoken (or perhaps it isn't so unspoken) economy here is that it's a "privilege" to work on headline games, one that may require staff to accept worse conditions. Smaller developers which don't work on big names, meanwhile, try to retain their staff by respecting them. I suspect this isn't the case across the board, of course.
I think this is certainly a part of it. Big name studios use crunch and abusive practices because they can -- even if they have a high turnover rate, which most of them do, there's an endless supply of people who are unaware of the practices, and who want to work on those awesome games.
The reality, of course, is that if these big studios were to move towards better working practices, they would likely end up putting out even better games, as they wouldn't be constantly incurring the falling productivity that crunch causes in employees.
Everything the author says is true. Denial ain't just the river in Egypt.
Unfortunately this isn't a problem just specific to the games industry. I've been in software for 11 years and I've seen the same thing in other places. A push for more features in an unrealistic timeline.
That line about it being a "privilege" to "work on something one-of-a-kind/word-class" or "be a part of a Fortune 500 team" is manipulation. It's a deception that's used to try and entice workers to believe their sacrifice is worth something.
I work at a small firm that makes middleware for other game companies. The project manager is good at his job, and the programmers are good at theirs, so we work no overtime.
It's been a lengthy debate going out here
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