IGDA Discussion Over "Crunch Time" Development

Quote from Steppenwolf

wow, just wow, something from a producer at Epic:

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The company culture at Epic really seems to be a bit fucked up at this point. They are actualy planning crunches and think its something to be proud of.

With this attitude by management not a company i would want to work for no matter how good games they make.

Hell, now that's fucked up...

I'm undergoing my first crunch time now. We are not crunching due to bad management but to sudden schedule changes. The game we are working on must be done 2 months earlier than originally planned. I'm ok with it to be honest since it's our first project and we need to prove ourselves. We are gonna have additional days off after the project so I'm not pissed off at all. But I can't see myself doing pulling this for too long. I really wish it does not become a culture within the studio.

So maybe employers should hire on 12 hour a day work 60 hours per week job time... (+ weekends sometimes)

Quote from dux

Is that for real? I've never worked at a studio so have no idea of cruch and so forth. But working until 2am - that's insane

Better be aware of what you sign up for when Mike Capps knocks on your door and offers you a job

Quote from FrieChamp

Better be aware of what you sign up for when Mike Capps knocks on your door and offers you a job

Wasn't dux at RealBlood or something though?

Off-site, never crunched.

I think it is far worse that IGDA acts as it does, than that Epic says this. Where as it is irresponsible from Epic to say, IGDA is meant to represent us. It is far worse when they fuck up...

For example:

Quote

We do not all agree on the details. I, for example, think that the 40 hour per week gold standard is BS. At least here in the US, the people who work 40 hours per week are not more productive. They punch a time clock, do as little actual work as possible, and then go home. They are the people who look at work as necessary evil they put up with to make enough money to pay their bills. They think that a job is just showing up and their work is devoid of passion or even a modicum of pride in their work. For the most part, IMHO (and experience), people like this may have a place in our industry, but they are poison to a creative team.

This guy is one of the leaders of IGDA. He litterally says we should work more than 40 hours and those who do work only 40 hours "do not care about their job".

Congrats to this guy, he's just topped my list of biggest BS to come out in 2009

Personaly i think that even the 40 hour week might be sub-optimal for a creative job, at least in the traditional 8/5 shape, because you really have to focus and do something new every day. It's no job where you can turn off the brain and function on a pure mechanical level.

And for me its also impossible to do quality creative work when i feel tired. So i don't see how a 50-60-70 hour week can do anything good for a creative team. It's complete nonsense.

Where does this quote come from?

I don't necessarily mean to defend Epic, but it isn't like anybody gets forced to work for them right? I am surprised that so many of you seem to be surprised about the work times at Epic or many other studios for that matter. You know (or "should" know) that when you sign up for such a gig, that you will work on triple A titles that require lots of passion and effort to get them to the quality of what Epic puts out, hell it should be the reason why you want to work there to begin with. Also I'm sure Epic is good at weeding out those who don't deliver, they can afford it, there are enough talented people waiting in line to take the job. In fact you need a high amount of dedication to get into a place where you are considered to be a match for such a studio to begin with. Is it really Epic exploiting their employees or is this just a bunch of hardcore guys who love what they are doing - creating boundary pushing games? Either way it's uncalled for to badmouth people who just put in 40 hours a week, doing whatever job, I agree, but please consider that Epic is a special case.

About IGDA: Of course they don't comment, they won't speak out against the studio heads/bite the hand that feeds. It's a shame though, considering that their "quality of life" program takes the top spot in their "advocacy" section...

IGDA Forum where there is a heated discussion on this, don't have the exact link.

It are all the regular IGDA members who pay and who are left out in the cold. They are the hands.

Sure Epic can do whatever they want, but you can't go advocate these kind of things publicly. Epic is indeed special, and with that position come certain responsibilities. Very stupid example but imagine president Obama calling his wife a slut in public. If his wife would be ok with that, it would be fine right? And he didn't do anything illegal right? And still it would create a massive outcry because that is just done not, it would create a very bad example, and it will considerably lower the respect people would have for him. The same is true for this situation. This impacts our industry as a whole, this impacts your local german studios, and all of them now got a perfect excuse to exploit their employees "Epic does this too - and they are succesful because of it!!!11" while they forget the Epic standard salaries and projects... We already have a huge problem with studios exploiting graduates and all that. We really really do not need this.

In a way I can see where hes coming from. I mean I have worked 12 hour days with pleasure...on my own stuff... If you really are passionate about what you do, you can indeed easily work more than 40 hours. But that is the thing... Passion. And forcing people to stay late to work on some low budget game, in which they have no or very little creative input does not create passion. If you really want your people to work more than what you pay them for, one of the most important things to do is to make sure they want to work more, out of their own free will just because they like the project and their work so much. Achieving that however, is a whole damn lot more difficult than just forcing people to work over...

Improve the quality of life (both in the office and outside), and your people will become more productive by themselves. Force people and the opposite happens. That is not really rocketscience.

T=Machine blogs about quality of life and the IGDA; it's well worth a read -- particularly the bit about crunch being a blokey euphemism, when in fact it means "unpaid overtime".

Anyway, I don't understand how anyone is meant to get more work done during an extended crunch. The 'normal' amount of work done per hour can probably be sustained for a month or so (so that you get more work done at a similar quality level). However, beyond that you're effectively spreading the same amount of work (or less) over a longer period of time because, when doing a mentally demanding task, you cannot sustain it. If you devote 10 hours a day every day to a complex task, then there is absolutely no way in hell you can work with the same level of accuracy, quality and intensity. Most people's brains just don't keep going like that (I bet some folk can do it, but they are in the minority). I find myself flagging at the end of 8.5 hour days (1 hour lunch break), so I'd hate to have to face up to a lifestyle that involves waking up, going to work, going to the pub for an hour, then going to sleep.

You may be able to keep churning through it, especially if some of it is repetitious, but it's not sustainable. If you crunch hard, there is surely no other outcome than less work being done (per hour) and the work being of a poorer standard when compared to normal working conditions. I'm sure they've done studies on this -- you end up with ~6 weeks of crunch being sustainable and then, beyond that, things nosedive and everyone loses.

The project I work on has absolutely zero overtime and I've seen no pressure being placed on folk to do so. However, a few of my friends worked on Crackdown and it wasn't the same story there. What I will say is that one of my mates liked crunching. As alien as it may seem, he said it fostered a great team spirit and it was a lot of fun. Now that he has settled down, I'm not so sure he and his girlfriend would like it quite so much... Realtime has just introduced paid overtime too, so at least if we ever go down that road we will get some compensation for it.

FrieChamp:

The problem is that Epic is one of the leaders in the industry and as such other studios look at them and their methods. But their methods are an anachronism that should not be an example for others. It goes against everything that has been achieved for QoL of workers in the last 150 years in general and in the last couple of years within the gaming industry (since the EA spouse incident).

With working on triple A titles this has nothing to do at all. You can make kickass games without ruining the health of your employees, especialy a studio like Epic that sells so many units and outsources a big part of their content production anyway to cheaper companys. And why should the games industry be a different case from any other industry. Where is the difference if i produce a kickass game in a studio or a kickass car in a factory? It has nothing to do with the kind of product you work on.

I also get a bit emotional over that because i have a very good friend in my age who already suffered from burnout three times and his life is pretty much ruined after the last time. So for me who wants to stay in this industry for a long time its important that we can have work conditions that fit for human beings.

I was going to write a long paragraph about how many people in other industries work unpaid overtime (including car manufacturers), but I guess we can agree that the games industry has a special history of and relationship to unpaid overtime and this is a good occasion to talk about this again.

The article Defrag linked to is a good proposal to lay down some fundamentals that everyone in this industry should start to embrace.

People get exploited in many industries. But that can't really be an argument for saying it's normal or even RIGHT. It's not.

Luckily at Eidos for every hour I work extra I get an hour given back to me in vacation time. So I can't complain right now. And if I work overtime we're told to leave by 9:30 cause they want us to have lives and they don't want people to burn out. As long as the employees respect this gesture and work productively during the day and put in their hours I think this should be the way all companies should handle it.

Even that doesn't work out Dan. The company needs to have a safe way to measure the actual amount of work provided, and that's not easy.

For instance you can have numerous examples of people pretending to do overtime work, so they can get more compensation time at the end of the project. In reality these guys may very well come in at 10, leave at 4 to go to the gym until 5 or 6, then come back just in time to order food for the evening, eat their dinner at 7 and pack it all up and go home. These guys still have worked less than they should have in a normal day, but the only way to check the "overtime" is the number of times you've ordered food. Producers do that, and producers also give you your compensation days...you do the maths.

Where i work, the overtime hours are also unpaid and compensated into vacations time, although once you've done too many crunch hours, they don't let you come to work.

Assuming you're going to do crunch and planning for it sounds much more commendable than getting within sight of the deadline after 2 years and realising everyone is going to have to pull their socks up.

Quote from Furyo

Even that doesn't work out Dan. The company needs to have a safe way to measure the actual amount of work provided, and that's not easy.For instance you can have numerous examples of people pretending to do overtime work, so they can get more compensation time at the end of the project. In reality these guys may very well come in at 10, leave at 4 to go to the gym until 5 or 6, then come back just in time to order food for the evening, eat their dinner at 7 and pack it all up and go home. These guys still have worked less than they should have in a normal day, but the only way to check the "overtime" is the number of times you've ordered food. Producers do that, and producers also give you your compensation days...you do the maths.

Well I work at Eidos not at Ubisoft. Things are a bit different there. We work on a basis of trust as far as overtime hours is concerned. And so far nobody has abused the system. Keep in mind that it's not as big a studio as Ubisoft by far. Also, we don't have a gym inside the building. People who do the things you just described dont deserve to even get paid or work in this industry in the first place.

Also overtime worked can be checked by when you made perforce check-ins.... emails sent etc.. it's not that hard, and usually you're not alone anyway so if theres somebody whos claiming more overtime hours than he actually worked it's not that hard to check it, at least where I work.

Quote from KoKo5oVaR

Where i work, the overtime hours are also unpaid and compensated into vacations time, although once you've done too many crunch hours, they don't let you come to work.

Completely unpaid? Or no extra pay? Because not even getting your normal salary would cause me, personally, to not come in at all. If you're gonna work for free, might as well do something you have a personal investment in in your own time.