
Crunch Makes Games Worse - larsiusprime
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20150120/234443/The_Game_Outcomes_Project_Part_4_Crunch_Makes_Games_Worse.php
======
serve_yay
> "Crunch sucks, but if it is seen by the team members as a fair cost of
> participating in an otherwise fantastic employment experience..."

Oh, I see: _workers_ should repay _employers_ for a "fantastic employment
experience".

Boy oh boy. I say if your industry is such that you must have this sort of in-
depth investigation in order to simply work normal work-weeks, your goose is
already cooked.

~~~
jiggy2011
If people continue to work in the games industry despite the workload and pay
they must be getting something out of it.

~~~
potatolicious
People continue to _join_ the games industry - attrition rates are sky high
and the vast majority do not last.

Perhaps the argument should be reframed as - why is it that despite high-
profile and commonly known, and _completely batshit insane_ working
conditions, do people still sign up (and then quit the industry entirely)?

Are we doing a poor job publicizing these conditions, or are the stories just
so horrifying that they become almost outlandishly unbelievable?

~~~
andrewfong
I'm armchair psychoanalyzing, but I think it's largely because the people
entering the games industry are young and it's exceptionally difficult to
grasp how terrible something like 80 hour work weeks are until you've been
through a few. I mean, it's fairly common for university students to forgo
sleep crunching for finals or spend ungodly amounts of time playing their
favorite game. Add in "it's not work if you love what you do" and "I'm a
special and unique," and you can see how someone might be persuaded to join
the games industry in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is a
terrible idea.

For what it's worth, this also seems to be true of the legal and medical
professions as well. And, more relevantly, startup founders.

~~~
andyjdavis
Its probably relevant that games, the law, medicine and start ups are all
perceived as being quite glamorous by many.

The games industry seems quite similar to the music and fashion industries in
some ways. They are all glamour industries that attract a lot of young people
with stars in their eyes who will put up with poor conditions and pay that can
be as low as zero. All for the chance to "make it".

~~~
yoklov
This isn't really a good comparison at all. Game developers make around 10-20k
less than a typical software engineers salary. That's still far more than a
lot of lines of work.

 _Maybe_ what you're saying is true if you're talking about self-employed
indie devs, but that's not who the article, or your parent post is talking
about. Also, very few of the tons of potential game developers go this route.
Most just apply to every gamedev shop in their area.

There's also really not a concept of making it big. Without looking any up,
can you name 5 game developers?

------
umanwizard
I work at a huge company for 6 figures total annual compensation, right out of
college. I come in and go home whenever I want to, and I probably clock an
average work-week in the high 30s. If I'm particularly interested in something
I'm working on, that number might go up a bit temporarily, completely of my
own volition.

I have never heard of someone being asked to work more hours, and I imagine a
manager even bringing it up would be very taboo.

This all applies only to my team, as I'm sure there are some at my company
under more pressure. But the point is the same: why would anyone do this to
themselves? We may be in a bubble, but at least for the moment, software
developer is a cushy job with lots of great opportunities available. Why
anyone would work 100 hour weeks in a sweatshop baffles me.

Who cares whether it makes games better or worse? I'm sure I could put out a
better product if I worked 80 hours instead of 40. But I'd rather go home,
sleep with my girlfriend, read a book, or (heh) play a video game. Our CEO is
doing fine and doesn't need my charity.

~~~
ploxiln
The games industry is like the fashion industry. Young boys, girls
respectively are super motivated to get a job in the industry, they think
they're not interested in doing any other job. That desperation enables the
industry to take great advantage of them at the lower levels: if they're not
willing to work under those terms, there are a number of eager replacements.

I'm not morally judging the situation, I think of it as a natural effect of
market forces. A rational person would just go to another industry. I'm a
software developer who was never anywhere near the game industry, fwiw, though
I have had an appreciation for computer games since childhood. But In these
industries, there are enough enthusiastic, perhaps not quite rational people,
to keep that workforce unusually pressurized, metaphorically speaking.

~~~
rwallace
I agree except for one thing: I am morally judging the situation. Just because
market forces have given you the power to ruin the lives of people who trusted
you, doesn't make it morally okay to do so.

~~~
deciplex
I guess you can judge the people, but I'm at a loss what you mean by judging
the _situation_. I mean, if the incentives align a certain way to make a thing
very likely to happen _that thing is going to happen_. The people responding
to the incentives might be assholes, but you can't really judge the situation
on the whole, any more than you can judge a seed for growing, once planted.

The thing is, it seems that the incentives don't actually line up in the first
place. According to this data, the most successful games companies will be the
ones where the developers work reasonable hours and are treated with respect.
So what's going on?

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j_baker
Who'd have thought that the business-types (Rubin and Spector) are supportive
of crunch, while the developer (Paxton) doesn't like crunch? Apparently, the
business types _like_ turning their organizations into meat grinders while the
developers like _not_ being overworked and exploited.

~~~
anon4
At this point I'm half-expecting they do it for the feeling of power, rather
than for the goal of making a better game.

------
famousactress
The priceless quote here for me is:

 _“Schedule 40 hours a week and you get 38. Schedule 50 and you get 39 and
everyone hates work, life, and you. Schedule 60 and you get 32 and wives start
demanding you send out resumes. "_

That's a pretty great approximation of my experience with the concept.

------
egypturnash
I used to work in the Hollywood animation industry. I had friends who worked
in the LA video game industry around then.

Crunch was, quite simply, an expected part of life in both industries. I think
it may be something that emerges from the way human brains work, when dealing
with projects that take more than a year to finish. People slack off near the
beginning because, wow, they have YEARS to get it done. (Or obsessively try to
polish a small part, because, again, wow, YEARS.) As the release date
approaches, it starts to feel more like an actual thing, and people start
panicking because there is a colossal amount of money involved in a big-budget
game or feature cartoon. You can't take longer because you're running out of
money, and you have a ton of sunk costs in the advertising that says a
specific date, there are merchandising tie-ins waiting for the release, all
kinds of things pushing towards "the team works crazy hours and burns out".

Me? I draw a graphic novel now. The only deadline I have to make is the self-
imposed one, and I'm lucky enough that my finances have enough slack that my
schedule can have some slack, too.

~~~
Animats
_I used to work in the Hollywood animation industry. I had friends who worked
in the LA video game industry around then. Crunch was, quite simply, an
expected part of life in both industries._

Much of Hollywood animation is unionized. (animationguild.org, IATSE Local
839). Crunches mean paid overtime. From the Animation Guild standard contract:
"All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per
week shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times the hourly rate provided
herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s sixth
(6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times
the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time
worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid
at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s
classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours
(including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden
Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided
herein for such employee’s classification."

This discourages unnecessary "crunches".

If you would like The Animation Guild to represent you and your fellow
employees at a game company, print up some of these cards and get your fellow
employees to sign them: [http://animationguild.org/wp-
content/uploads/2010/12/Represe...](http://animationguild.org/wp-
content/uploads/2010/12/RepresentationCard.pdf) You can force your employer to
have a union election.

------
morgante
What do people expect of an industry where supply and demand is completely out
of whack?

Supply of programmers in the games industry is almost completely inelastic. No
matter how little they get paid (relative to tech standards) and how poor
conditions become, young programmers will continue to flock to the games
industry because it's perceived as "cool."

Why people make employment decisions based on what they _play_ in their free
time I will never understand. I also love reading books, watching movies, and
eating food—but I have no delusions that those would be good career options.

More generally, I think the best way to improve working conditions across the
tech industry is to kill the meme that working on "sexy" tech is important. So
long as companies are able to attract talent through silly stories or sexy
projects, rather than a good work environment and competitive salaries,
programmers are going to continue to be abused and perceived as
unprofessional.

Lawyers don't choose which firm to join based on who has the coolest name.
It's time that programmers stopped chasing cool and started acting
professional.

------
ineedtosleep
From the article referenced
([http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-23-game-
devs-w...](http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-23-game-devs-when-
does-crunch-cross-the-line))

> As we get deeper into the process we discover that things that sounded good
> on paper don't work in practice. Things that worked in prototype don't work
> in a fully textured and lit level. And then the folks providing money or
> distribution randomize and disrupt by demanding demos or screenshots at the
> most inconvenient times!"

That quote was listed as one of positive quotes for crunch, but it solidifies
even more that the process is broken and/or better project management has to
be done.

~~~
jblow
You can't schedule something unknown.

------
rhino369
Welcome to white collar america programmers. It sorta sucks but at least you
can afford a boat you never use and a house for your ex-wife to raise your
kids. Signed Doctors, Bankers and Lawyers.

~~~
sbov
If you take out the boat and house, sure. Most game developers I know working
in the bay area don't make six figures.

~~~
iopq
No, they make like $95,000 which is only five figures.

------
ekianjo
The guy who wrote this is making linear correlations on likert scales?
SERIOUSLY? Looks like some pretty poor understanding of stats.

~~~
cecilpl
Why is this bad?

~~~
_delirium
A number of people argue that Likert scale responses are properly treated as
ordinal data, meaning that 1<2<3<4<5, but not necessarily that |1-2| = |2-3|
or avg(1,5)=3. Treating them as numerical data often (depending on what you're
doing) implicitly makes some assumptions about calibration of the ordinal
scale that might not be warranted (e.g. the distance between a "1" and "2"
response might be very different than the distance between a "2" and "3"
response).

------
Pinatubo
Could these results be driven by sequels? I would expect that a sequel would
need less crunch time (many big problems have already been solved) and have a
higher ROI (they're likely making a sequel because the franchise is popular,
and less effort is needed).

------
walru
Crunch is typically the result of poor planning or design on the fly or by
focus-group. So, to that end, it's not the crunch's fault, even though it
sucks, it's the fault of design and production not getting their ducks in a
row.

~~~
jjoonathan
Maybe, but that's not quite what their survey showed:

    
    
        The four strongest correlations with our crunch-related questions were:
         +0.51: “There was a lot of turnover on this project.”
         +0.50: “Team members would often work for weeks at a time without receiving feedback from project leads or managers.”
         +0.49: “The team’s leads and managers did not have a respectful relationship with the team’s developers.”
         -0.49: “The development plan for the game was clear and well-communicated to the team.”
    

(+ = this response was positively correlated with crunch)

~~~
walru
I'm just going off my experiences over the last seventeen years.

------
vehementi
Sony's H1Z1 launched its early access (i.e. alpha) late last week and their
president was saying the dev team was doing 18 hour days, and they worked 2 of
the 3 days of the MLK weekend. Again, early access, not release, etc.

------
pandaman
In my experience crunch is often caused by poor direction, political games,
understaffing, under-budgeting other such factors that are crippling to the
game quality. So, naturally, a project that is in crunch is likely to fail in
sales and in reviews. The article authors address this, but only at the angle
of "Does it help to salvage a failing project?" and I agree with their
negative conclusion. Crunching is not going to salvage anything.

Why would it? Your publisher changes the requirements every quarter and the
game's genre every year, your producers (managers) are busy trying to get each
other fired, people are leaving because they think the game is going to suck
and they have not seen a bonus in 5 years, you cannot hire anyone because they
think the game is going to suck and you don't have money anyway so you could
as well crunch trying to ship whatever with whomever is left but crunching is
not going to fix these issues.

Crunching can only improve a project that does not have any crippling
problems. And it usually does (again, from my experience). It works because
nobody can schedule 2+ years creative work for 200+ people with such a
precision that on the last day of the schedule you check in the last line of
code, export the last asset, pack a build and send an 80+ (hell, even 60+)
metacritic game to the manufacturing. Game production is an iterative process.
The more iterations you make - the better the game becomes in your eyes if not
in the reviews. This is why people crunch voluntarily. They want to ship
better games.

------
DigitalSea
I wholeheartedly agree, crunch is damaging to any industry over extended
periods of time. It doesn't matter if you're a game developer, web developer
or architect, crunch affects everyone. It is an outdated way of thinking that
the game industry has failed to let go of that the more people and effort you
throw at a problem, the quicker it gets solved.

The more hours you throw at a problem in my experience as a developer, you end
up with more problems than you started off trying to solve. You lose focus,
when you lose focus things that were once obvious are not in your peripheral
vision and you make mistakes. It is akin to driving a vehicle tired, you are
more likely to be in an accident.

Sadly the gaming industry is notorious for this kind of behaviour of expected
crunch. Yeah, you push yourself to get out a game, but then what? You start
working on another new game or DLC for the current game and you find yourself
working 80 hour weeks again, what was the benefit of those long hours other
than keeping your job? It is a repeating cycle.

People have been decrying the crunch in the gaming industry especially since
the 90's and yet, nothing ever changes or improves. Someone writes a blog post
or article, people unanimously agree things need to change and then it all
blows over until the next article comes along. What's it going to take: a
spate of sleep-deprived, stressed game developers taking their own lives?

I accept the fact that avoiding crunch altogether is unavoidable in any
industry, but we need to better manage it. We need to have a framework in
place that prevents people from being expected to work 80+ hour weeks for
years on end. Sometimes you need to put in some extra hours to finish a
project, that's cool, just don't factor it in every time, expect it for months
or years on end and above all: don't forgo compensation for the sacrifice your
employees are making under the guise of "we need to do this"

Look at mostly every single AAA game released in the last few years, more
issues than you can poke a stick at. Look at GTA V, when it launched people
couldn't even play the multiplayer component, same thing happened to the
highly anticipated and hyped Destiny and pretty much every _insert game name
here_ \- is it the fault of the developers who were enslaved to complete the
game? No. It is the lack of resources, lack of care for sane work hours, lack
of compassion or concern for employees that causes large games with budgets
that rival Hollywood movies to fail spectacularly on launch.

When is the last time a large company like Rockstar Games or Electronic Arts
released a game that wasn't broken or buggy to some extent on launch? Besides
having an extremely generous budget to hire the best and produce something
spectacular? I can't recall a time that happened in the last few years.
Perfection is not a priority, churn and burn is the name of the game. Get it
out now as long as it is complete and we'll sort out the bugs with a patch
shortly after launch. Oh, and hurry, the investors want to see a quick profit
on this one.

Some of you might recall the famous post from an anonymous blogger by the name
of EA Spouse. A wife of a video game developer working at Electronic Arts
pouring her heart out over the toll his long hours take on him and his family,
the excessive work hours he puts in: [http://ea-
spouse.livejournal.com/](http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/) \- large
publications lapped the story up, people were outraged and yet here we are in
2015 reading another article about long hours. Things will not change until
something bad happens (and probably not until it starts happening frequently).

We've been talking about things needing to change for far too long, but
nothing ever seems to get better.

~~~
onion2k
_Look at GTA V, when it launched people couldn 't even play the multiplayer
component_

A staggered release of features is quite a good solution to the problem.
There's no reason why a game has to be feature complete before it's released.
Some parts can be added in subsequent minor versions. It happens with every
other kind of software.

~~~
DigitalSea
You misunderstand. My point was millions of dollars were spent on producing
GTA V, years of development work put it and for a while after launch you
couldn't even play the GTA Online component which was one of the advertised
features. It wasn't so much there were issues or they were releasing it non-
feature complete. My final point being: you can make developers put in
excessive overtime to finish a game, but it won't be a pretty result.

------
forrestthewoods
Naughty Dog makes best in class games. They also have some of the worst crunch
in the industry. I therefore conclude the title somewhere between incomplete
and wrong. There's no blockbuster game on the market that wasn't crunched on.
That's not excuse, just a simple fact.

Can we have "crunch makes your startup worse" next? Then we an see a raise of
hands for how many now successful startups were born in crunch.

~~~
21echoes
did you read the article? the article addresses this in the second paragraph.
it then goes on to compare levels of crunch with metacritic scores and ROI
data, and finds that crunch statistically significantly hurts projects.

