Speaker A
Why is crunch culture prevalent and accepted in the video games industry in particular? Is it an inevitable consequence due to the nature of the industry? The term crunch in this instance refers to periods of intense work, often involving unpaid overtime aimed at accelerating project completion. Despite its widespread recognition as a problematic practice, it persists, suggesting a deeply ingrained cultural acceptance within the games industry. While the necessity of this practice is frequently questioned, there are also voices both in the games industry and the community that think that this practice is not only necessary but is the only viable option to make quality titles. How prevalent is crunch exactly in the video games industry? A team of academics at GameQ set out to analyze just that. In partnership with the International Game Developers Association and Western University Canada, they made research on practices relating to crunch in the games industry in Canada. The survey conducted in 2021 showed the following: among the game developers working in companies, 32% reported working overtime and longer hours during the work, and 35% of them confirmed that they experienced crunch time. When it comes to hours during crunch time combined, a total of 55% of employees work for more than 50 hours a week, and in the past two years, only 11% reported that they had undergone crunch time once. Sixteen percent reported two crunch periods per year; however, a staggering 58% reported having undergone crunch more than twice. In the survey, 43% of the respondents felt that the crunch was expected as a normal part of their job, while only 40% disagreed. Why is crunch accepted as normal in the games industry? Several possible reasons could be cited for this; however, primarily it could be that the economic constraints of game development and the passion of the developers themselves inadvertently created a cyclical system of crunch. An article published in the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies researched this by analyzing 125 game developer magazines published between the years 2000 to 2010. It observed that many developers not only accepted crunch as a norm but actually realized it as a sign of their commitment to producing high-quality games. Nearly every postmortem the researchers analyzed that discussed crunch also included some form of "ends justify the means" rationale. This tournament in particular would mean normalizing crunch as history because growing and contributing to a cultural environment, crunch is a normal and accepted practice. Speaking at the 2012 Game Dev Conference, Graham Deine said that improper production planning and scheduling led to a 41-day crunch, the team working 18 hours a day to get the game to its finished state. Reflecting on the crunch-heavy development, he had this to say: "Crunching still sucks, and it's incredibly expensive. Not only, you know, an hourly contractor hours but incredibly expensive on your soul, on your families, on everything. So, a lot we did wrong in this game, but I think the end result, when you look at the game, the game turned out fantastic. I'm not sure that the journey was always fantastic, but it's the end result that counts." Find Out More spoke to Joshua Dawson, 3D character artist working in the industry for the last two years, as JW, his opinions on the discourse that surrounds crunch and what he observed during his time in the industry. It has been around in the industry, I think, since games were being done. I mean, you look back to any of the old popular games like Halo. Those games, if you watch some of the old interviews, like the old documentaries about them, they all had times where they were like, "Yeah, we have like a year to get the second game done," and those had heavy crunch periods. "It's important for us to get excited about what we get done for E3 because we need to build that excitement up and go, 'God damn, we have a lot of work to do between now and E3.'" I think it's really important to be ambitious. I think it's important to have more balls in the air than you can catch at the end when it all comes down to it and you have to ship a game, but certainly, you can go too far. It has always kind of been around, and I think that's why it is kind of embedded into the culture of the industry because there are still people who work in the industry that have worked here since the first ever few games were coming out. So those guys are used to it; they've been through it, they've done it. Joshua then spoke how things can change during production and how crucial product release dates can be to a company. A lot of things happen during that time. Things change, ideas change. They could get a couple of months left to the project and be like, "Actually, we really don't like the idea of this. Can we completely change it?" And it's like, they still have that, like, "Okay, we have this release date." A lot of games have moved on to the whole kind of delaying games. CD Projekt Cyberpunk is a great example of a game that got delayed to hell and back. Cyberpunk 2077, the highly anticipated game from CD Projekt Red, has had its development marked by periods of crunch time. Despite the crunch, the game faced multiple delays. This brings me to another major factor that can influence the acceptance of crunch, in particular, the corporate processes that directly or indirectly build crunch into the equation to capitalize on its benefits. It all depends on company to company. From a business standpoint, obviously, you’ve got to make money, and so a lot of the times it's like it has to be released on that certain date; otherwise, the company either loses investment or they can't afford to carry on keeping the game in the investment cycle. Held in January 2020, the CEO of CDPR, Adam Kicinski, confirmed that there will be crunch to some degree during the final stretch of development. However, looking through the reporting on the game's development in 2020, the reports of crunch could be seen following after every delay. The implementation of crunch at CDPR was met by significant backlash in the media. However, there were other journalists who saw the issue under a different light. "There's a really important difference though with CD Projekt Red: one, the compensation is above and beyond what they're already getting; two, it's a short-term before launch; and from what I understand from talking to a few people there, there was a discussion on, 'Do we want to delay the game again or do we want to do this?' And from what I heard, it was a mass majority saying that they agreed to the six-day work week. Also, the Polish working system and cultural attitudes towards employment is very different than how it is here. Everyone I've talked to that's over there has not seen it as a crunch." In an article published in the journal New Media and Society, the researchers discuss the trends and general discourse that surrounded crunch. In their analysis, the researchers noted that crunch was seen as good if it was self-directed and carefully managed, in contrast to bad crunch, which is externally driven and can sometimes be forceful. Citing Cyberpunk as an example, they note that the idea that crunch may be necessary for good game development has been accepted into the game culture more widely. They also say that devs need to recognize that good crunch is at best only a moderate improvement over bad crunch and at worst the same thing in a prettier package. "Yeah, I understand that sometimes a company could take advantage of your kind of your passion and use that to be like, 'Oh, do you mind just working a bit?' Obviously, it's different for each company. I've not ever experienced it, and I don't really know anyone else in the industry who has at the companies that they work at. But I know it can be different for other companies. I know other companies can take a little bit of advantage of certain people being like working a bit of overtime but never really giving anything."
