The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch

Think making games is a "dream job?" This story might make you think different.

From multimillion-dollar blockbusters like Call of Duty to niche RPGs like Trails, just about every video game in history is the net result of countless overtime hours, extra weekends, and free time sacrificed for the almighty deadline. This crunch comes in many different forms—sometimes it’s long and drawn-out; sometimes it’s just a few weeks at the end of a project—but for people who work in video games, it’s always there. And because most game developers work on salaries, it’s almost always unpaid.

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If they are paid on salary then they are being paid for what they are doing as agreed. That's what being paid on salary is all about, you work as needed without additional compensation, not counting bonuses, do the developers get bonuses? Is that something left out of the article?

I can think of many jobs with harsher detractors, those that include being shot at rate a bit higher in my book.

I think this article is very misleading. Sure the cold, draconian, oppressive management forcing overtime on the underpaid dev happens. I sure it happens all the time. However, there are just as many instances of the "crunch", as the article puts it, being self induced.

It's like when I was still trying to make it as a "rock star". Countless hours went in to everything from writing/practicing to sketching up album covers ideas and networking with other bands. Not because because some CEO said I had to but because I wanted to produce the absolute best product I could.

At the end of the day games are art, and as with most things that are art related, the creators have a deep need to give it their 125%. I think you would find this a common theme through a lot of the Indy or "underground" studios like Klei or Double Fine.

How is this still a thing to write an article about?

Look at all the years being mentioned in it, 2004, 2011, 2013, 2014, you'd think if this is such a rampant problem that something would be done about it already.

Well this is LOLtaku. They try to act like they're the good guys by pushing against developers and publishers when it is their own brand of yellow journalism that is poisoning the industry.

Yes, it still is my dream job. I love programming and watching something come to fruition. If that means working 16 hour days for a stretch of time to see your efforts finalized, then so be it.

people easily forget this can happen in ANY job there is a project with a deadline involved. i was a mechanical designer for about 6 years before i switched fields and this stuff happened there too...its not exclusive to the game industry.

THRESHIN said:

people easily forget this can happen in ANY job there is a project with a deadline involved. i was a mechanical designer for about 6 years before i switched fields and this stuff happened there too...its not exclusive to the game industry.

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Very true. I'm in the IT business now and I really don't have a schedule. I'm just expected to have everything running whenever it's needed. If that means I'm up at 3 am recovering something from a backup or whatever then that's what I have to do.

THRESHIN said:

people easily forget this can happen in ANY job there is a project with a deadline involved. i was a mechanical designer for about 6 years before i switched fields and this stuff happened there too...its not exclusive to the game industry.

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Yup. Happens all the time in the film industry. Countless 80+ hour work weeks.

It is the nature of being a professional paid by salary ... when I first started my career out of college I had a big project I was working on ... at the start it sent me on a three month continuous business trip (I spent more time in hotel rooms my first year than I did my apartment) ... later during our version of crunch I was working 7 days a week for about 3 months (on the weekdays I would literally go home, sleep, take a shower, come back again ... I had a few more hours of freedom on Saturday and Sunday) ... it happens ... if you don't like that in whatever field you are in then you can try to get promoted (the higher managers sometimes have more free time) or switch companies or careers

Yeah it really sucks at the end of the game dev cycle when the execs come around and make you pull features out of the PS4 version of the game to ensure console parity.

Yeah it's not just video games, but according to several game developers, crunch time virtually never ends. It only goes from bad working hours to much worse.

Dream job? I'm guessing someone doesn't know anyone in the games industry. I'm perfectly happy with my web development job thanks.

twonunpackmule said:

Yup. Happens all the time in the film industry. Countless 80+ hour work weeks.

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No wonder people are so soulless and miserable.

I like working hard and doing a good job but once I go over 50 hours and consistently sit there week after week it is objectively making me a worse person. Spending that much time on IT things means there's less time with family, less time to enrich yourself, and less time to interact with your community. The social cost of this stuff is pretty high... it makes for crappy children too.

InternationalHat said:

No wonder people are so soulless and miserable.

I like working hard and doing a good job but once I go over 50 hours and consistently sit there week after week it is objectively making me a worse person. Spending that much time on IT things means there's less time with family, less time to enrich yourself, and less time to interact with your community. The social cost of this stuff is pretty high... it makes for crappy children too.

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It's why I left. I turned 30 and started to realize that I wasn't enjoying myself. I rarely ever had time and money at the same time. So, vacations were rare and dating even more so.

LMT MFA said:

How is this still a thing to write an article about?

Look at all the years being mentioned in it, 2004, 2011, 2013, 2014, you'd think if this is such a rampant problem that something would be done about it already.

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That doesn't cover the real time frame. I've been in the industry 25 years and my first game I shipped in 1990 we ended up with 5 months of crunch because if we didn't the license would be lost. Other crunches are cause by different factors. Everyone likes throwing out arm chair quarterback crap: Just bad team management, no one can estimate etc. A lot of times this is not the problem.

The driving force most of the time are executive management and marketing. Usual bad setups from them are:
Well we told shareholders and Wall Street 13 months ago we were going to ship on this date. We don't care if it is shit shrink wrap it and ship it (know a dev who was given this exact phrase) You can do a day 1 patch(more crunch):

Well this game has these new features you need them too, no extra time or people make it happen,

We in Marketing have determined you need features x and y and have told management about this. X or Y will increase sales (theoretically) 5% according to Business Intelligence, together 20% (theoretically-numbers didn't actually pan out) - this was 1 month from beta and was going to take 3 extra months to do team was told no extra time or people just make it happen.

My personal favorite because I lived it: The VP of development (former VP of Marketing, you can guess the actual knowledge of development from that, had a delusion that a portion of the game could be done by a group that insufficient hardware (only ten machines) and would only do the processing at night as they left. I tried to explain that it would not work and did the actual math of the average processing time, how many passes would be required which ended up with them completing only their part of the pipeline in June for a game that HAD to ship in September the year before. That was blown off because she felt her solution should work. I ended up working 20 hours a day 7 days for 7 months to make the ship date. That involved me hijacking on average 85 systems every night after other dev teams left and having to do an average of 3 passes a night on each machine. Reason being were converting 24 bit images into a proprietor 8-bit movie format where you would get all sort of odd artifacts with colors being over averaged together (yes this was in the 90's). Had to find colors in the individual frames in the general time frame of the errors and reserve them, Made the date and then got chewed out for doing it by said VP.

The last issue that is out there is financial reality crunch and shipping. A good poster child for this is Anarchy Online. Basically they were running out of money. Crunch to get where they were and ship it not finished with the hope of raising enough through sales to fix what needed fixing or implemented. Financial reality often effects smaller developers working with publisher financing. Many of the bigs don't give a shit. They have a contract and deal with it or we'll kill your company. Several bigs have clauses that if they kill a project for ANY reason you have to pay them back. Before amateur hour chimes in about just walk away when you see the draft, you have a company 30-40 people and families relying on you and this is the only group that is willing to fund you at the time most take it. Financial Reality folks.

Very important item, if you walk out on companies during a crunch especially more than once, kiss your career goodbye. It will never be proven because it is always done verbally you'll get black balled. Key phrases include "Not a team player" "Not dedicated to their work" "Unreliable" "Trouble maker" etc.

Sorry for the rant but every time one of these articles come out I serious amounts of bullshit spouted out by people that really have no clue (not saying folks here at [H] do) but I needed to get this off my chest.

Croaker

Personally, I don't see what the problem is. If they charged ~$30 per year I would gladly pay it. If you think about it, you pay around $120 every 3 years or so for a new Windows version anyways (assuming you get an OEM copy like most PC enthusiasts). So 30-40 bucks per year is quite reasonable, especially considering that you will no longer have to worry about an expired copy and not getting updates. As long as your subscription is current your OS is up to date. To me it seems logical that the only people who would be pissed off about Microsoft potentially doing an annual or even monthly subscription are folks who get their OS from a site that rhymes with PilotDay.

Sorry. Wrong thread. Not sure how that happened. Can't edit my post for some reason. :/

When you're in your 20s and 30s its easy to do all the overtime. You're all excited about your career, want to make big bucks, etc.

Then when you turn to your 40s (like me), you are burnt out from all the corporate bend me over all the time. And when it comes time for layoffs, they don't care if you worked 80 hours a week and the best corporate arse licker to managment. They say sorry about all that hard work you did, see ya!

I'm over all the crap. I'm contractor now, have been for several years. Will not take a salaried job. If I have to work on a network outage on the weekend, I get paid for every hour I work. I also only do the minimum just to get by and get my stuff done. Anything beyond that forget it.

InternationalHat said:

No wonder people are so soulless and miserable.

I like working hard and doing a good job but once I go over 50 hours and consistently sit there week after week it is objectively making me a worse person. Spending that much time on IT things means there's less time with family, less time to enrich yourself, and less time to interact with your community. The social cost of this stuff is pretty high... it makes for crappy children too.

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Yea, like the year I worked in Iraq, 12+ hours a day seven days a week, stuck on a base the size of a small college campus, mostly hot until it was really cold, bad food, no alcohol, women you mostly didn't want but even if you did you risked getting fired getting caught with one. Then we got the occasional incoming rockets and mortar rounds, sniper fire, ohhh, and celebratory fire.

I did get paid, but as sick as the money seemed it damn sure wasn't enough.

Motley said:

When you're in your 20s and 30s its easy to do all the overtime. You're all excited about your career, want to make big bucks, etc.

Then when you turn to your 40s (like me), you are burnt out from all the corporate bend me over all the time. And when it comes time for layoffs, they don't care if you worked 80 hours a week and the best corporate arse licker to managment. They say sorry about all that hard work you did, see ya!

I'm over all the crap. I'm contractor now, have been for several years. Will not take a salaried job. If I have to work on a network outage on the weekend, I get paid for every hour I work. I also only do the minimum just to get by and get my stuff done. Anything beyond that forget it.

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A lot of this is why I moved to a small dev where I actually have skin in the game. I'm 48, I am well past dealing with 80 hour heroics to compensate for some dumbshit in executive management who either is dumb as a box of rocks or is more concerned about sucking up to the board.

This is every developers job, and if you are a developer and this isn't how your day is around the time you're trying to get to gold or get to production, you're about to be replaced by Offshores.

GroovYChickeN 2.o said:

I think this article is very misleading. Sure the cold, draconian, oppressive management forcing overtime on the underpaid dev happens. I sure it happens all the time. However, there are just as many instances of the "crunch", as the article puts it, being self induced.

It's like when I was still trying to make it as a "rock star". Countless hours went in to everything from writing/practicing to sketching up album covers ideas and networking with other bands. Not because because some CEO said I had to but because I wanted to produce the absolute best product I could.

At the end of the day games are art, and as with most things that are art related, the creators have a deep need to give it their 125%. I think you would find this a common theme through a lot of the Indy or "underground" studios like Klei or Double Fine.

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Your musician analogy isn't even remotely applicable. You were in an independent artist (an entrepreneur). Game developers and artists are just employees. And if you schedule your workplace such that everyone has to work 80-100 hours/week (and that sounds about right), you're not paying them enough. Hell, if they pay you 80k/year and you're only working 80 hours a week, that's less that $20.00/hour.

That fucking sucks balls. I made more significantly more than that straight out of college (almost 20 years ago) and I got paid 1.5x for overtime. If you adjust for inflation, I made $33.50/hour (not counting overtime).

These men/women would be better off if they all unionized. They're getting shafted.

That said, I saw this same type of thing at my last job. Employer sets a deadline for a project where they expect everyone to work overtime to get it done, which means that it's not a realistic deadline, because if you expect me to work overtime before we've started then there's no way you'll make the deadline. Shit always goes wrong. If shit doesn't go wrong, then the project is trivial.

The big difference is the the business world, companies pull this crap and when the project ends, people jump ship. We lost 5-10% after every big project. My group lost 40% after the last project (they should have lost 100%, but we're all Dilbert).

nilepez said:

These men/women would be better off if they all unionized. They're getting shafted.

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I completely agree. I've read a number of these articles and I can't believe people would live this way. 80 hour weeks? What the hell is that? When is your time for friends, family, hobbies, relaxing etc...

I'm a unionized salaried employee. I work 33.75 hours a week, get every second Friday off, I can bank that day and use it whenever I want, plus 3 weeks vacation. Life is good, and that is how life should be.

If these games companies think that making someone do a 12 hour day 6 days a week is getting them anywhere, they're wrong. By a certain point your employees fatigue levels and mistakes will outweigh the extra time.

Bootleg Usher said:

I completely agree. I've read a number of these articles and I can't believe people would live this way. 80 hour weeks? What the hell is that? When is your time for friends, family, hobbies, relaxing etc...

I'm a unionized salaried employee. I work 33.75 hours a week, get every second Friday off, I can bank that day and use it whenever I want, plus 3 weeks vacation. Life is good, and that is how life should be.

If these games companies think that making someone do a 12 hour day 6 days a week is getting them anywhere, they're wrong. By a certain point your employees fatigue levels and mistakes will outweigh the extra time.

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Problem is at least in California most positions are considered "Professional" employment and fixed salary. Now the other problem that is ignored by these idiots in management is that mandatory overtime is limited to a 6 month period per year. Most people don't know that. The other is that it also caps at 60 hours a week. California has been working towards, or maybe it has passed need to check the labor law books, about salaried employees getting overtime finally.

Croaker said:

My personal favorite because I lived it: The VP of development (former VP of Marketing, you can guess the actual knowledge of development from that, had a delusion that a portion of the game could be done by a group that insufficient hardware (only ten machines) and would only do the processing at night as they left. I tried to explain that it would not work and did the actual math of the average processing time, how many passes would be required which ended up with them completing only their part of the pipeline in June for a game that HAD to ship in September the year before. That was blown off because she felt her solution should work. I ended up working 20 hours a day 7 days for 7 months to make the ship date. That involved me hijacking on average 85 systems every night after other dev teams left and having to do an average of 3 passes a night on each machine. Reason being were converting 24 bit images into a proprietor 8-bit movie format where you would get all sort of odd artifacts with colors being over averaged together (yes this was in the 90's). Had to find colors in the individual frames in the general time frame of the errors and reserve them, Made the date and then got chewed out for doing it by said VP.

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Man that's justifiable homicide stuff right there. Whenever I hear people talk about business efficiency, stories like these are the ones that always come to mind.

"I can think of many jobs with harsher detractors, those that include being shot at rate a bit higher in my book." That's why unit cohesion is so important, nobody is gonna change a machine gun nest just because you don't want to drive a smart car (after all most/all of this shit seems to be over resources), but they might do it for their buddy.

Croaker said:

Problem is at least in California most positions are considered "Professional" employment and fixed salary. Now the other problem that is ignored by these idiots in management is that mandatory overtime is limited to a 6 month period per year. Most people don't know that. The other is that it also caps at 60 hours a week. California has been working towards, or maybe it has passed need to check the labor law books, about salaried employees getting overtime finally.

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Only if you make over a certain amount (80 or 90k I think). That's well over the median salary for game programmers and I think it's safe to say that they're mostly preying on younger developers. Eventually you're old enough to know you're getting fucked.

And because most game developers work on salaries, it’s almost always unpaid.

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This line makes no sense whatsoever. Salary is salary. Overtime is overtime. One has nothing to do with the other.

dgz said:

This line makes no sense whatsoever. Salary is salary. Overtime is overtime. One has nothing to do with the other.

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Well not necessarily. If you're hired with the story that you're usually working about 40 hours a week, with only an occasional crunch of 60 for a week or two, but then the reality is 70-80 week after week, month after month, that's pretty much unpaid time, because you were hired on false pretenses.

I don't understand this "well you are paid salary so that means you work as long as needed" belief being supported here. As someone who is paid a salary the above belief is absolute nonsense.

nilepez said:

Only if you make over a certain amount (80 or 90k I think). That's well over the median salary for game programmers and I think it's safe to say that they're mostly preying on younger developers. Eventually you're old enough to know you're getting fucked.

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The last time I had to dig through the books 45k qualified.

Basically what they leave out is that at the big companies management write up a list of stuff needing to be done. They work either insane hours hands on or they work a nine to five get upset when the game misses it milestones... causing them to make everyone work to fix the issues they were not there to see get done. Companies like RSI keep funding through donations and seem to be working livable hours... other companies the management manages people time and schedules instead of trying to be artists, programmers, writers, or what not, and they basically spend more time doing everyone else's job and causing all the over time usually. If you are going to fix these issues you need more control in the game companies hands so that the focus testing is done by people who actually understand who is playing the game. A focus test says every thing about your main hero with three months left is obviously not the target audience that every design doc was aimed at. If someone greenlite the project design document they damn well should not be whining with a few months left before release as it if was done at the correct time frame it would not require lots of over time. I have seen several game companies fail for different reasons but I have never seen a company fail because the main hero did not look the way the fans wanted. Even Diablo 3 which most of fans wanted tyral to look like them none of them were happy with the way he looked yet it sold a lot of copies and the problems they ran into were bugs that people hated because if the game is not fun that is what kills a game. Though I can see some people being annoied at the change from dragon age one to dragon age three but not enough to stop playing the game lol...

actually I thought of something else if the main is an issue do what a lot of MMO do make the character have different options.

tetris42 said:

Well not necessarily. If you're hired with the story that you're usually working about 40 hours a week, with only an occasional crunch of 60 for a week or two, but then the reality is 70-80 week after week, month after month, that's pretty much unpaid time, because you were hired on false pretenses.

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I am not sure I understand. Is overtime not paid for "salaried workers". That can't be legal.

Croaker said:

The last time I had to dig through the books 45k qualified.

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I read 80 or 90, but if it's 45 then it begs the question: why would anyone work in CA as a dev for 45k? Honestly, for the hours they're working, they should start at around 120k (and get out after 2 years). Even 120k isn't worth it for 80+ hours/week. Money is useless if you can't spend it.