Next-gen kicks off this November. That means there are a ton of developers out there busting their butts off to get launch games out on time — and Ryse: Son of Rome, an Xbox One exclusive developed by Crytek, is no different.
Today, the Ryse Twitter account boasted about feeding the developers working on the game through “crunch” — a term that refers to the practice of working long, sometimes gruelling hours to ship a product:
By the time #Ryse ships for #XboxOne, we will have served the crunching team more than 11,500 dinners throughout development. #RyseFacts
— Ryse: Son of Rome (@RyseGame) October 15, 2013
The thing about crunch is, while it does result in many of the games we know and love, it’s also kind of unhealthy. Crunch can get in the way of relationships, it can burn developers out and mess with their quality of life. Despite being a known problem, crunch is still around.
To generalize, there are people in three camps when it comes to crunch: there are those that view crunch as a testament to passion and work ethic, those who hate the practice and wish the industry would develop better practices, and those that see it as a necessary evil for the industry to continue working the way it does. But needless to say, people feel strongly about the subject…which is why it’s not so surprising that people responded strongly to the Ryse tweet. In fact, the hashtag included in the original Tweet has been taken over by mostly sarcastic or incisive comments about crunch culture, or Ryse itself:
The divorce of my parents eventually led me to a life of crime but, man, that launch game was REALLY polished.
#RyseFacts Facilitate the subjugation of countless peoples and the rise of Western European genocide, imperialism, and slavery
You have to perform a QTE to eat dinner during crunch.
(To contextualize, some of these tweets riff off the fact that you can mash to mastery in Ryse.)
#RyseFacts: Devs say that when #Ryse ships it will be like watching a baby be born, which they missed because they were crunching on #Ryse
#RyseFacts Stockholm syndrome can take many fun forms, like being proud of working 120 hours a week on QTE sequences.
#RyseFacts – devs love #Ryse more than their families but not quite as much as pizza. Who will you abandon for #Ryse when you play it?
#RyseFacts Help I’m trapped inside a game dev factory. Have not seen sun in 3 months. Send rescue. Miss loved ones. Sarah, I’m sorry
#RyseFacts It’s not worth sacrificing your personal life to ship a launch game. You should take time each day to appreciate your loved ones!
AAA Game Development: Where dinner is served with a side of exploitation. #Ryse#RyseFacts
I really hope #RyseFacts is a passive aggressive attempt by the @RyseGame production team to tell management to fuck off.
@RyseGame oh wow, I love dinner! Any tips on how to get into the games industry? #cool#dinner
@RyseGame That is disgusting. A well-managed studio wouldn’t need to be crunching in the first place. Do not take pride in this fact.
Great to see our overtime as a marketing achievement. Disgusting. #RyseFacts
Ryse wasn’t crunched in a day #Rysefacts
The #Ryse crunching team made 11,500 escape attempts during development. Our drones persuaded their return every time. #RyseFacts
“You will eat this McRib sandwich for the glory of Rome!” #RyseFacts#dinnertime
Not all of the responses are on Twitter, of course. Here’s a fantastic photoshop by xxracerxx on neoGAF:
We’ve contacted Crytek to ask about about the tweet and will update if they comment. For now, you can view all the tweets under the #RyseFacts hashtag here.
Comments
73 responses to “Xbox One Game Tweet Backfires Badly”
Waaaaaaaaaaa…. someone call the Waaambulance..
When you experience that kind of lifestyle, then you can come back and say that.
First world problem!!
I have experienced this kind of lifestyle, therefore i can repeat the sentiment: ‘Waaaaaa… someone call the Waaambulance.’
Yeah I know some people survive it and some thrive in it, but where you’re doing it and who with, is a huge factor, and in my experience, crunch SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED!! 14 hour days over 6 weeks, only being paid for 12 for much of that time, never for Sundays– I think I did something like 25 days straight at one point– I ate shit food and often, put on weight, got f-all sleep. Yeah, it sucked. BUT, we had a really tight crew, we all worked together to cover the gaps and to help reduce the tension and stress. Best crew I’ve ever worked with. I’d hate to think how long it would have taken to clean the blood off the walls had we not gotten along so well. So I have a lot of respect for the people who go through this crap year after year. Personally, I’d rather do back to back Mud Runs than do crunch again.
I was doing it in the arse-end of nowhere with people who barely spoke the language. 2 months of 14 hour days. I do appreciate that it gets rough. It’s also the job.
Good, healthy food helps. Alcohol, cigarettes, and an internet connection also helps. Perhaps marijuana if you’re that way inclined.
Yeah, they must be pretty weak if they can’t handle long days and longer nights, not being able to spend time with their family thus putting extra pressure on their friends and family because they can’t get home or out of the office, having potential health concerns, interruptions to their sleeping patterns, stress, anxiety, and other detrimental situations because of management’s poor planning.
For context, I’ve been a software developer for 10 years, on various projects (games included), in various office climates and had very few instances of an extended crunch due to better project planning. Several consecutive long nights and early mornings, but nothing to the extent that these companies force upon their employees. I have worked with people who have been through horrible crunches though and some ended up with health issues, others were incredibly wrecked by the end and others lamented not being able to spend time with their families. You aren’t going to earn any respect or e-peen points just because you have a lifestyle that can adapt to crunches and think everyone else is like you.
Y’know, that’s a pretty solid summation. Shame you muddled it with the second paragraph.
Yes, it can suck. Yes, it can be deleterious to your social life and ruin your chances for a cosy 8 hours. If you can’t handle that, don’t do it. Tadah, solution.
Somehow I highly doubt that
Well that is Fascinating. Or something.
Ever been a dept manager at a supermarket?
Mass hours of physical labour vs mass hours of sitting in a chair. Programmers get it easier than they like to admit.
Personally, I’d spend 120 hours a week programming. Because then I’d get to be programming, something I enjoy doing.
wth? Do you reckon you’d still enjoy it when you were being forced to work on someone else’s project for 120 hours a week? Because I don’t think you would. It’s nice that you enjoy programming, but there’s a lot of crappy work that needs to be done when you’re actually doing it as a living that you tend to avoid when you’re doing it as a hobby. Besides, putting in the sort of mental effort required to program well for 120 hours a week is just as exhausting as physical labor.
Sitting hunched over a computer for long hours can lead to bad wrists, poor eyesight, back injuries… all of which I suffer. So don’t think it doesn’t have its downsides too.
It’s apples and oranges, but have you ever almost copped an I beam to the chest? It’s not as funny as The Terminator makes it look. I laugh it off but I’ve almost lost limbs/been killed way too many times even though I worked in environments that took safety too seriously. Everything is done totally up to code by professionals and you still find yourself thinking far too often ‘shit, if I hadn’t been looking for a screw driver at that exact moment I wouldn’t have a hand, because a guy who puts all his attention into performing hundreds of tasks flawlessly every day made his one mistake for the year’. We both laugh because we don’t we have to acknowledge we narrowly avoided both our lives being ruined.
In other words there’s a reason why sitting in front of a computer half the time was such a big selling point when I started my own business. =P
I get that you literally don’t have the energy to go down the gym, or the time to go down the doctor’s to figure out what to do about your back pain, that you miss important stuff with zero say in the matter, but it’s hard to look past the non-crunch period where it’s an extremely comfortable job. You guys deserve better, they are totally exploiting people’s desire to work in games, and ultimately you guys do the work that makes the money for an absurdly disproportionate part of the reward, it’s despicable, just keep in mind that the kid pressured into working double shifts at KFC risking slipping and being scarred for life can’t just quit and take his hamburger flipping skills to another field.
You’re always going to find it hard to get the sympathy you deserve on this because game developers are seen as people who have chosen from a pretty wide field of options to do this specific job. Even though it’s do it or get replaced by the constant stream of fresh meat you can’t escape looking like you guys are willing participants.
There are permanent wounds on my hands from consistently knocking them on shelving. Infections come and go quite often. Not to mention RSI (opening a box doesn’t really change no matter how big, heavy or what it’s contents are. Wrists are heavily involved here (there’s five (maybe six) different crack noises when I roll my wrist now)).
Staring at the artificial light from a computer screen isn’t that much different from the artificial light in a store. I can and have gone more than one day without seeing natural light (dark when you arrive, dark when you leave). Hell, I can go hours not even knowing if it’s sunny outside.
Oh, you forgot to lift that one milk crate with your knees? Could explain why you’re sprawled on the coolroom floor screaming in pain… It’s a heavy lifting environment man, back injuries are par for the course in every supermarket environment.
Hi there! I’m Tibby. We have stuff in common, let’s be friends! =D
I didn’t say it doesn’t have it’s down sides, I said they have it better than they’d like to admit. But I look at it from a slightly different perspective:
A programmer earns what, 60k – 80k a year? I know of programmers out there that can earn upwards of five or six figures a year for being that good.
I earn 40k a year. 45k last year actually. I bend and break my body in many, many ways for 20k less than a software developer who sits in a comfortably warmed office all day. About the only thing we have in common aside from the injuries we receive at work is the water cooler in the staff room.
See why I tend to say Programmers have it easier than they would like to admit, now?
“back injuries are par for the course in every supermarket environment.” that’s nonsense, if you’re injuring your back in any way you’re not doing your job properly. Injuring your back permanently just from working? Screw that.
After seeing many Supermarket Managers, I would say that’s far from Physical labour.
I said department managers not store managers.
That’s a myth. I used to do 14 hour coding days and often only had one or two (at most) breaks in that period.
One time (after coding for 7 hours straight) I finally got up and fell to the floor as my legs for some reason didn’t work until a minute or two later.
So no, us programmers do not have it easier than we make it out. We have it just has hard but for different reasons.
Dude. I do that NOW as a HOBBY. (Or at least wish I could still. In between projects, job etc.) =/
In my teen years I’d sit behind code files not even getting up to relieve myself. It owned. As soon as the weekend started, 4pm Friday arvo to 8am Saturday morning. Sleep ’till midday and straight back at it. Guh I miss that.
Granted I don’t have deadlines and all that. But I’ll take that over 14 hours of intense physical labour (well okay, ten hours of intense physical labour and four hours paperwork).
I worked 16 hour days for 6 months, 7 days a week…. don’t like it… Quit don’t whine.
Nonsense, there should be opportunities out there for people who feel entitled to decent money but don’t like working long hours, doing anything that compromises their lifestyles or is in any way unpleasant. We should complain on other people’s behalf until it happens.
Tech support != software development :p
This sums up the crunch (NSFW):
You know nothing of the crunch. How dare you even speak of the crunch. You’ve never even been to the crunch.
All aboard the Kotaku xbone hate machine
Try and read the article. The console is incidental. Its all about game developments habit of extreme forced overtime
The console IS incidental, yet the headline says “Xbox One Game” and doesn’t mention the name of the game at all. It’s subtle, but it’s all building on the “I wonder what they f***ed up now?” narrative.
the “I wonder what they f***ed up now?” narrative.
That really is the narrative isn’t it!?
Yup, it’s so ridiculous. They are both black boxes that play videogames. Buy the box(es) that have the videogames you like.
To be fair a lot of the angst is coming from Xbox owners.
I’ve sat there there and watched as good exclusives dried up (seriously after 2010 everything is either Halo, Gears, Fable, Forza and Kinect) while Sony keeps pumping out varied exclusives and that PS+ deal.
Microsoft’s customers were already feeling neglected – the Xbone launch was just like throwing TNT into a gas chamber!
I reckon the number one issue for 360 owners holding them back is backwards compatibility – while being able to use the same gold account on two consoles is appealing if I were able to carry across my many digital purchases (something that Steam has no trouble with or even the WiiU!) the Xbone would be a day one purchase and not a year two maybe
Of course Patricia had to make sure we all knew it was an Xbone title. She couldn’t have written the title to be “Ryse”. Nope. had to be “Xbox One Game”.
So the curious Xbox fans would click and find out which game was the topic.
People who already knew about the game and weren’t interested wouldn’t click the link. Since people didn’t know what the game was, everyone clicked and there’s the money.
Exactly. Clickbait headline. At least the article was kind of interesting this time.
Crunch is something that (some) game companies take as a given rather than actually putting in place efficient processes to try and ensure it doesn’t happen. It takes advantage of hard working people who choose to accept this kind of treatment just because they are passionate about games and want to be working their “dream job”, so they accept a 100 hour week without any paid overtime. Oh, but it’s ok, because the company will pay for your dinner. if you stay back past 9pm.
This exactly.
Needing to crunch is a symptom of poor project and time management from the top down. Sure, the employees doing the Crunch should be praised for going that extra level to get the job done but the managers paying for the dinners though should be sacked for causing this issue.
A free dinner vs no overtime and the condemnation of my family? Tough choice!
Internet Knee-jerk Reaction #483
Exactly, what a ridiculous over-reaction.
Making fun of a company who is taking pride in forcing its workers to work overtime in order to complete a game, making up for said companies obvious lack of proper management…. Not an over reaction.
It is an over-reaction, for all you people know their “Crunching Team” is literally a small team of coders separate from their main team who were hired specifically to do 40+ hour weeks in high-pressure situations. Perhaps incentivized with a bonus if they meet deadline.
Everyone here is jumping to conclusions (such as yourself; “forcing it’s workers to work overtime”, without knowing the contractual obligations between employee and company) purely because the word crunch was used.
Would we see the same outrage if the tweet was:
Nope, but the word crunch was used, better take it in the worse way possible and start throwing my shit at the ceiling fan.
If it is a small team that team has still had 11500 dinners. That could be 3 – 6 months of 100 hour weeks, which is insane.
“for all you people know their “Crunching Team” is literally a small team of coders separate from their main team…”
Yeah… Probably just a small team of 5 people who each had 2300 dinners each over a 6 week “crunch” period…
While no one really knows the specifics of Ryse’s “crunch time”, i don’t buy into this ridiculous encouragement and protection from seemingly right-wing fanatics that everything large companies do is just, simply because “that’s the way it is” or “everyone does it”. Fact is that what we do know, historically is that crunch time in a number of high profile cases has included extended overtime without pay far beyond what could be considered reasonable. The accepted notion throughout the industry (most industries) is that crunch time is a result of poor management and (like the article says) is accepted as a given as opposed to an unfortunate necessity. From a business, morale and ethical (i had an ethics component in my business and legal subjects, it seems to have been removed from most universities) standpoint, “crunch time” – whatever it means to “Ryse” – should be discouraged. It could very well be a crunch team and they could be entirely happy with it. I just don’t see where or how that tells me or anyone else to enable the idea of crunch time, which is just a highlight of inefficiency.
People heard the words “crunch time” and hopefully publishers and developers see the public perception of real faults with the game industry. People can puff their chests and spout their “work hard and don’t ever complain” rhetoric but unfortunately for them there are rules against the things we see and hear come out of crunch time. However it relates to Ryse in particular is largely irrelevant. The practice of an expected and exploitative crunch time is bad and now the industry which is so often overlooked by regulatory bodies is seeing a stigma attach itself; that can only mean better things for overworked low-level employees cleaning up poor management without being paid.
I was following until you got here.
It almost seems like you’re saying regardless of what it is, it’s not allowed just because it uses the term “Crunch time”.
Hypothetical, let’s say their dev team has encountered more road blocks than expected, but management still wants to make deadline. So they hired a small team of developers specifically to work the extra hours to fix these road blocks in order to make deadline; with pay and bonuses.
Now hypothetically, Crytek could also be abusing their current employees into unpaid extra work that wasn’t agreed upon before hand.
But it seems like you’re saying that regardless of either scenario, it should be discouraged because they called it their crunch team and as a result, you’ve applied what you’ve learned about crunch to that.
Cause you 100% know the facts about what’s going on…..
Any proof?
Edit: I see the guys above me beat me to my point.
Either way, this game looks amazing, and if it sells well I am sure all these crunching people are gonna get nice tasty pay checks.
You’d think so, but historically in the games industry, overtime like that doesn’t result in tasty paychecks. That’s why folks are complaining about ‘being proud of exploitation.’
Fuck any company that allows their staff to go into “crunch” mode. I’m working a project right now, and I’d call it in crunch mode, no-where near as bad as these guys in the gaming industry have it, but a lot of long hours and hard deadlines none the less. I tell you what, it doesn’t feel good. Yes there’s a sense of achievement, but the cost to your health, personal life and even professional life (god knows you just want to quit) is far too great.
Any company that lets a project get that bad deserves to be hounded and called out. They are scum taking advantage of their employees and are literally hurting them.
Re: Watchdogs
I’ve found an easy solution: Every day the team has to crunch, the producer gets docked a days pay. Also, dinners don’t cut it! Crunchers need regular back rubs as well… and time off after the crunch, for 2x the duration of the crunch – full pay. 😀
I don’t believe in over time. If you have THAT much work that you need to work outside of business hours to finish it off, then you either have a shitty manager, or need better time management skills.
I will never operate my business in that way, ever. We all leave at 5pm on the dot.
That’s exactly it, if you have too much work for X amount of people to handle > hire more people!It’s bad for everyone to force people to work long unreasonable hours for little to no compensation.
It’s bad for the quality of work – it’s rushed and cobbled together
it’s bad for the employees, they don’t get job satisfaction and will want to leave
it’s bad for the bosses – they will have tp keep hiring as workers leave due to shitty work environment and horrible hours for crap pay
and ultimately all these things add up and are just plain bad for the business.
I agree that Crunch Time Is Bad, but “hire more people” is almost never a solution when approaching deadline on an IT project. The time taken to get new people up to speed and overheads in communication vastly exceeds the time contributed by any new staff. Refer “The Mythical Man-Month” and many similar tomes.
Working in a helpdesk environment (of the non-phone monkey variety), my rule of thumb was that any new staff member would typically be a time sink rather than actively productive for roughly their first month. After that they would know the material well enough to be a plus.
The real solution is to plan properly, including setting deadlines well in advance of when they become critical, and ensuring that you have enough staff to meet those deadlines.
It isn’t even necessarily a funding problem. If you think of “crunch time” as requiring double time for 4 hours overtime per staff member per day, that’s doubling the pay for your team for your crunch time. Take that extra cost and spread it out by hiring 10% more people a year before the game is due. You get roughly twice the amount of work for the same amount of money, and all your staff get to have a life without macho posing. All it takes is some proper project planning and the discipline to stick to it rather than slacking off because the release date is still a year away.
That’s just not an option in some jobs. I work as a sports journalist and my actual weekend starts long after my boss has stopped paying me. It sucks but the reality is that I have more work to do later in the week so I have to stay back. Hiring more staff to carry the load would prevent this but how many employers would be happy to wear the cost?
Crunching is a bad thing but it can be a neccesary evil, especially in gaming, to get work finished on time and under budget. To say that you will never let it happen in your business is all well and good but you clearly don’t work in an industry with the same deadline pressures.
…and that’s assuming the company has the funding and workspace to make adding extra temp staff feasible. Sometimes, this just isn’t possible, say, with small developers, and sometimes you do have to step up and do something extra to meet deadlines, often due to unforeseen events. That’s life. But I find it difficult to believe that, with some companies where time and workspace aren’t issues and funding isn’t either (especially if your annual turnover is in the many millions) that it’s a necessity to constantly have to resort to crunch, or even adopting it as standard practice. But then again, my experience was via a relatively small dev, and there could be a tonne of variables I’m not seeing, that justify their thinking. But, IMO, having the crunch as an integrated work strategy (ie, predicted/expected) when your company makes millions or billions, just make the events seem as disorganised and pedestrian as the effort to launch Sim-City was.
The other problem is that adding more staff isn’t always an option.
Many jobs experience periods in your schedule where – entirely the fault of factors outside your control, such as processes your vendors or clients won’t budge on – you end up with a workload bottleneck. You might be able to try and adapt your processes to work around it but sometimes there’s nothing for it but to accept you have a bottleneck.
And sometimes processing that workload is the only thing holding up a project and you want it done ASAP, putting all the onus on one person/team at a regular interval. IDEALLY you’d be able to distribute workloads so that that team/person has nothing else to do at that particular time (not always feasible) or that you have skilled staff to fill in at that particular moment only – again, not always feasible.
Adding the staff can be a problem. They need to be trained. And if the time it takes to train them is longer than the crunch period, you don’t bother. Also, once you have them trained, you need to keep them around for… what? That three day period in a month that they’re actually needed?
Multi-skilling/up-skilling, managing skill-sets and human resources is a pretty complicated biz, and that’s BEFORE you factor in that people are independent creatures with their own stupid ideas of what their career paths should be and when they should have personal time etc.
IDEALLY realistic deadlines and processes would be the order of the day, but in my experience, the people who would manage that are usually hamstrung by the upper management who insist on exceedingly optimistic deadlines, and to whom the words, “Margin for error,” equal, “Paying people to do nothing.” Which is like garlic to a vampire, for them.
***
tl;dr: Crunch is not unique to the games industry, but the severity of it we’ve seen described in the video game industry singles it out as an industry which callously, irresponsibly and unethically counts on ‘crunch’ as a tool in their box instead of a project hazard to be avoided at any reasonable cost.
ie: Crunch isn’t always avoidable, but it IS bad, and shouldn’t be relied upon to keep costs down the way game companies do.
Oops. Wrong spot.
Anybody who hasn’t done crunch, for weeks at a time, or watched the effect it has on people’s stress levels, family life and health, probably doesn’t understand how damaging it is for it to not only happen regularly, but for it to to be expected if you want to keep your job.
Obviously it’s not the worst thing in the world, many jobs are hard, but it’s unnecessarily exploitative, and it’s a practice that should be phased out completely. So a developer that is boasting about crunch needs to seriously reconsider it’s company culture.
Totally agree, crunch time is a growing problem in a number of industries and an exploitative culture is brewing.
Maybe the crunching team are the motion capture people who just had to do lots of crunches? You have to be in top physical condition to accurately capture all of those QTE animations.
Crunch time is a very normal part in game development, I have read plenty of articles and heard from a few sources that being involved in game development becomes a labor of love. The fact that Ryse is even taking time to acknowledge their workers is a good thing but people are just finding any reason to blow things out of proportion.
I also find it kind of funny how fanboys react towards this article in contrast to the intern fiasco with the assembly of the PS4. Where you see people disregard it as rumors or untrue, or saying the same is being done by Microsoft and even defending Sony saying there was no way they could know.
I wonder if the hatred would be as strong if the tweet was from Guerilla Games?
Pretty sure the responses would be akin to:
“So glad GG are working so hard to deliver us the best game ever!!!! *swoon”
the way I see it crunch is part of the development cycle, whether well managed or not, it’s that catch all phase were you make damn sure the game is finished and the best it can possibly be before your deadline, that being said free dinners are not enough.
a good crunch time should not be mandatory for the games development, it should be that little extra mile that makes the game shine overtime, and the fact that companies take advantage of it is terrible, crunch time should never be used to get extra hours out of your team without extra pay and good project management will leave crunch time mostly out of their planning so that it doesn’t become a prerequisite for release. that being said the extra work that goes into it needs to be recognized, because damn son, it takes its toll. if they don’t get some sort of reasonable financial bonus for that extra mile then they got thrown under some sort of bus, and something needs to be done to make sure they aren’t working themselves to death, or very near it.
crunch time isn’t inherently evil or abusive, but some companies do misuse it for such things.
Good to see people who’ve never been in games development (and most who haven’t been in software development at all) commenting on crunch. You’re worse than armchair psychologists.
Read Gustavsson’s reasoning on crunch:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/10/battlefield-4-dice-and-keeping-the-wolves-at-bay/
Also, good to see faux-outrage over a lighthearted tweet. The fact that they’re serving dinners is a step above most places. Classic twitter kneejerk reaction from people who have no idea about the subject.
Wow, this is disgusting behaviour from the gaming community. The vultures have come out to pick at every last little scrap they can get to satisfy their high-school egos.
I’ve seen dozens of studios quote how many snacks were consumed, or pizzas or whatever from dozens of studios (Bungie and Infinity Ward did it all the time) or at the end credits as a little in-joke.
All developers go into crunch-time, it is expected. 8-10 hour days suddenly turn to 12-16 hour days with most devs actually wanting to to make sure what they’ve been working on is up to scratch. People complain that games coming out buggy or needing more time in dev and now they’re picking on them for doing crunch hours. Double standards to whatever makes them feel good at the time.
This industry will grow up and become better when shit like this goes.
If “pride” is the only interpretable feeling we can get from that tweet, then I’d be more inclined to agree with everyone. As it stands, it could be many things, like a member on the team who understands what the team is going through and what crunch involves, and is trying to keep things light and jovial as possible.
I see nothing wrong in the tweet – if anything, the coders themselves may have a reason to grumble, but condemning the company based on a tweet?
There ARE contractual agreements in place for each employee. If the conditions allow for this, then the employee has agreed to it. Crummy, but that’s their agreement.
I put this outrage in the same basket as the “exacerbated outcry when games company’s finish a project, let the project-based team go”.
I have been in the programming industry for over 15 years and have crunched on various projects, and I can say to all that think crunch is from poor management is a complete fallacy. Changing market, competitors and even employees leaving during the project (new employment, sickness, babies) can impact greatly the technical direction and timeliness of the end product.
As much as the games industry’s products need to shirk the “just for kids” mentality, so to do we need to stop treating the creative at large as children. They are adults who have agreed to work under conditions. You or I may not like to work that way, but then, we don’t count in the matter!
It sucks. But lets be honest here, you cannot compare hard labour in an office environment to manual labour. Nobody stays in school so they can get that land that sweet gig unpacking trucks 60 hours a week.
Call me what you want for saying this, but unless you’ve worked years in low paid, high risk manual positions you have no idea what a shitty work life is.
“The #Ryse crunching team made 11,500 escape attempts during development. Our drones persuaded their return every time. #RyseFacts”
This is fantastic.
Re: crunching, this sounds symptomatic of an industry where it’s a buyers market for labour. Everyone wants to make games so the managers can get away with whatever.
Lol. So many people complaining about crunch time. Where i work, we have a crunch time that lasts about 4-5 months each year. I’m on a salary so i don’t get paid overtime. Every day is at least 10 hours for 7.5 hours pay however 12-14 hour days are very common. Weekend work? you betcha! Dinner provided? You’re wishing. We get free bottled water, free coffee and free milk. Not to mention fruit every 2 days. That’s it.
But i still come to work every day and do this. Why? Because that’s the way the world works boys. You want that promotion? You want to make it to the suits? you should be doing all of the above with a god damn smile while whipping everyone else in line who isn’t. People with big houses and nice cars aren’t the ones doing the minimum required.
I work for the company and the company pays me to work for them. So many people have this bitter sense of entitlement that they believe “deserve” more.
I’ll probably get a lot of hate for this post but it is the way it is.