Devs tweeting about their games that were made with no crunch.
- Thread starter Captain of Outer Space
- Start date
*including, but not limited to. Did you have something you wanted to add to that list?
Totally different scale of games, depth, number of systems within the engine. This is comparing apples to oranges.
And you're wrong to do it. Unless 'relatively crunch free' means 90 hour workweeks instead of 100, but reality is if they're happy about it it's probably SIGNIFICANTLY less.
It's comparing people to people. The games themselves don't matter - yes AAA games take more manhours than indies, but that doesn't mean the answer is to crunch your people harder, it means to make your procedures better and hire more and increase dev time.
If its anything like a normal office probably like this.
Start work at 9, ends around 5 or 6, but takes about an hour and a half to get home due to traffic. Yup.
But really this means, show up to work at 7:30 cause being on time for work is being late in this country. clean the office if your a woman, and do some important stuff like calls/paperwork early before the boss gets in. Have a morning meeting where everyone takes turns telling whats going on that day, probably listen to a nonsense story about the flowers outside, a story on the news, of a pseudo-english phrase to describe something that has a word already.
Leave work around 10:30 or later if you drive, cause you can't leave before your boss even if thats what the contract says. Opp hes gone, welp time to do actual work. Stay until late at night and then go home. Get about 4 hours sleep then repeat
typical office, and no thats sadly not an exaggeration, its more a brief summary of a typical Thursday, Japan has no crunch cause everyday is "crunch"
Also over time pay, hahahaha, a good worker would never request overtime since its a joy to work for a company, duh! any worker would be happy to do an extra unpaid 5+hours, screw social life/family/money
Leave work around 10:30 or later if you drive, cause you can't leave before your boss even if thats what the contract says. Opp hes gone, welp time to do actual work. Stay until late at night and then go home. Get about 4 hours sleep then repeat
typical office, and no thats sadly not an exaggeration, its more a brief summary of a typical Thursday, Japan has no crunch cause everyday is "crunch"
Also over time pay, hahahaha, a good worker would never request overtime since its a joy to work for a company, duh! any worker would be happy to do an extra unpaid 5+hours, screw social life/family/money
Team size and budget have a lot to do with it. That can be said about any industry.
I worked a month straight without a day off on the first Dark Souls. Was it worth it? I guess since they're still milking that series to this day. Nothing's going to change as long as people continue to buy the games.
Tiburon is the studio that works on the Madden games, so this makes sense. However, I know plenty of people at DICE and EA proper who do not hate it. For publishers like EA, I find there is a lot more nuance involved when talking about work conditions than there would be for studios like Rockstar which do not develop and publish multiple different franchises and have tons of studios and separate teams with their own politics and work culture.
And from my perspective those work hours are awful. You don't have time to do things before or after work hours. If your kids are young you would still barely see them. And that is without counting commute time. But I guess that I am used to wake up early and be done with work by 15:00-16:00.
I added my first game from No Pest Productions the list (A Bastard's tale). Currently working on a unannounced project without any crunch.
I have no employees but used several freelancer without any time pressure or crunch. As a father of 2 I cannot even comprehend crunch culture.
I have no employees but used several freelancer without any time pressure or crunch. As a father of 2 I cannot even comprehend crunch culture.
TIL: Games made by small devs and released digitally to little fan fare have 0 crunch.
I'm Shocked I say.. Shocked.
I'm Shocked I say.. Shocked.
I'd imagine there would be studies out there to show that work productivity goes down drastically when you have to be there 7 days a week for 12-14 hours each day. People will take twice as long to get things done (lot of mistake correcting) and morale will be extremely low. I wonder what the optimum "crunch" would be for people to still be very productive? People really need at least 1 day off to recharge so definitely a max work week of 6 days, not really sure about the hours but I can't imagine anyone being truly productive working 13-14 hours. Probably something more in the 10-11 hour range. I imagine the limited crunch for Insomniac was something like 60-70 hour work week for a month or so instead of a 90-100 hour work week for 8+ months like Rockstar...
Not sure why being owned has anything to do with it. You work for someone, they pay you, they're the ones demanding the absurd hours or not.
So you are gonna play these games just for that, and for quality or, I dunno, funfactor?
Small devs almost kill themselves making their games all the time. Having no crunch needs discipline (and rescources) to pull off. It's not the natural result of making a smaller game.
It's not even that it's a cost saving measure - it inevitably costs MORE to crunch, it's just a result of mismanagement pure and simple.
Your perspective is incredibly privileged, if you think 9-5 or 9-6 with 1+ hour for lunch is "awful".
Most the people here are all talk and just like to grandstand.
It has everything to do with it. Imagine I am paying you for a job and there's a contract in place. I then start demanding ridiculous requests and you just say "that's not how we work"
Now imagine that I own your company and there's a deadline that I want to hit. I can apply a lot more pressure. I don't need to give examples of what could be said but I'm sure you can think up a few scenarios.
If you don't think there's a difference I'd say you should look into it a little more.
The only way I could apply pressure if I was hiring you to do a job as s third party is if you were consistently breaking contract terms and missing key dates etc.
I think there are two points that really need to be made and kept in mind with video game labor topics
A. Crunch might actually be required to get the exact games we end up with out, on time, and within budget. It's a hard truth but what this means is that we may need to accept that fewer crazy AAAA games a year is acceptable. I think it is. This is important because it centers the discussion on treating employees humanely and less on the money and productivity side. I know people like to say, "crunch isn't efficent!!" But I don't really buy that. At least not for most games. If it wasn't then those in charge wouldn't expect it. This is about treating workers right.
B. The people at the top need to make less so those at the bottom can have longer schedules to make the game. This again means that we as games need to shut the fuck up about delays or lack of release dates. Who the hell knows what what is going on with Star Citizen but I do know that every time someone says something about how it's not a real game or it will never come out I worry that it could reinforce some shitty stuff managememt is doing. I hope not and while I would still be their fault I feel like there is a lot of thoughtless speech around this.
A. Crunch might actually be required to get the exact games we end up with out, on time, and within budget. It's a hard truth but what this means is that we may need to accept that fewer crazy AAAA games a year is acceptable. I think it is. This is important because it centers the discussion on treating employees humanely and less on the money and productivity side. I know people like to say, "crunch isn't efficent!!" But I don't really buy that. At least not for most games. If it wasn't then those in charge wouldn't expect it. This is about treating workers right.
B. The people at the top need to make less so those at the bottom can have longer schedules to make the game. This again means that we as games need to shut the fuck up about delays or lack of release dates. Who the hell knows what what is going on with Star Citizen but I do know that every time someone says something about how it's not a real game or it will never come out I worry that it could reinforce some shitty stuff managememt is doing. I hope not and while I would still be their fault I feel like there is a lot of thoughtless speech around this.
Whaaa? That kind of work hours is the norm here too (Indonesia), I never felt like I am overworked (I started at 8 AM, one hour break from 12 noon to 1 PM, and go back home at 5 PM).
It makes more sense that those times are viewed as normal and because of that there's no such investigation. Still, theory.
That's why Half-Life 3 is taking so long. But I am okay with that.
There is no crunch, as much as your job is your life from day 1. You live to work, not the other way around. This is just what living in Japan is like.
Even at companies with no crunch, I don't know many people who get off work before 8pm.
Um, you LITERALLY control the money either way, and from an employee perspective whether the person at the top is getting pressure from Sony or not is irrelevant. It's entirely a studio culture issue, whether Sony doesn't give you enough time or whether the studio signs a contract that is too strict for what their goals are, it's all about being realistic in expectations.
I was talking about 10:00-19:00 one. That is worst timeframe in my opinion. I work from 07:00-15:00.
LOL, they don't actually work those hours, homey. Those are the MINIMUM hours.
I've worked in Japan long enough to know that posted hours are just what is required by contract.
Availability of assets, and iterating on an existing engine (thanks Sunset), probably helped.
Different culture. If you don't like the hours, look elsewhere or negotiate them.
My previous-previous job before going self-employed was typically 9am to 5.30pm, but I negotiated 10am to 6pm.
Shame that the list is practically all indie. It's a big part of why I'm so hesitant to work in the games industry.
Time to get to work. :)
Time to get to work. :)
Completely unsurprised that no AAA games are on that list since marketing and suits decide release dates.
Very glad to see Guac 2
Very glad to see Guac 2
and the ones responsible for taking away their Cake Day: Rockstar. How lovely...
Breath of the Wild completion party - a mix of exhaustion and relief is quite visible:
This is actually making me think twice about my career path. I want to get my Bachelors in CompSci (already got an Associates), but these last few days with all the news about crunch and what game development is really about, I don't know if I'd be better served just trying to go for a general programming job or switch my major to business.
Maybe the only way for us to combat crunch time (by us I mean gamers) is to celebrate exclusively smaller more artistic experiences and not big flashy games. Dont promote those games, don't give them publicity, celebrate Child of Light over Assassin's Creed etc.
However it's not that simple and people will support the big juggernaut games that induce crunch time because they have all the money and big flashy graphics.
Heck, I'm guilty too. I want to buy Super Smash Bros on the Switch which is made in Japan which is a country notorious for harsh working conditions so that's probably got some brutal crunch time itself.
However it's not that simple and people will support the big juggernaut games that induce crunch time because they have all the money and big flashy graphics.
Heck, I'm guilty too. I want to buy Super Smash Bros on the Switch which is made in Japan which is a country notorious for harsh working conditions so that's probably got some brutal crunch time itself.
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Yeah, I keep noticing that more often nowadays. There are even tons of threads people complaining they don't game as much as they would like to and instead just browse Era. Welp...
Well, but it's not just an executive decision:
bigger/more complex games naturally need some time for all loose ends to be tightened up. It's necessary. Doesn't mean that it can't be organized as to not kill people though
Naughty Dog did horrible crunches. Not sure about how development of TLOU 2 is though.
I didn't want to exactly paint larger companies as villians and say something like support an indie company over a larger company because I feel like I would be asking for good people at these companies to suffer.
One of the best stealth games ever, Mark of the Ninja, along with Invisible Inc and Don't Starve were made without crunch thanks to Klei's work culture.
Thanks for this thread, it's good to see developers who care for their own wellbeing.