> Blizzard Entertainment spokesperson Andrew Reynolds told The Post, “As you may know, game development in general, and ‘Diablo IV’ specifically, follows an iterative process where the scope evolves over time. Production on the game is going extremely well. Overtime is voluntary and limited to specific teams. We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years.”
Replace evolving scope with increasing scope and you've got the most common recipe for development failure being pitched as a good thing.
"Activision Blizzard employees developing the upcoming dark fantasy action role-playing game “Diablo IV” say it will be hard to meet a June 6, 2023, release date without working significant overtime, in a process they say has been plagued by mismanagement."
If you develop a feature and it turns out the feature is not great, you can choose to ship a game that's not great, or fix it.
Once you have committed to a ship date and moving the date is no longer an option, fixing it means working over time.
These crunches often come from the team themselves who are identifying that things aren't as good as they could be, want to fix it, but don't have the power to push dates back.
Update: One problem is that creative teams are rarely satisfied, and would love to polish things forever. The production team needs to be constantly pushing back on the creative team to leave things alone and call it done.
Working out what is "good enough" is really really hard.
Update:
Also, I wrote this comment before reading the article, and I don't mean to defend 6 months of crunch. That clearly _is_ bad management and exploitative. When you have a few bad features you can take a few weeks or a month to fix them. When you are 6 months out and only now just announcing a release date, there is lots you can do. You can cut the bad bits, you can hire more staff, you can move the date.
All software projects have changes in scope. And yes, that scope evolves. You get new customers (internal or external), new feature ideas, and functionality that is discovered to be unwanted or too complex.
Like any project, sometimes you have to drop the game and work on something else. Ideally using the assets you have from the failed game.
It's not an unusual tack to take even for regular software developers. Not all feature work. Smart folks will cut bait and focus on something that does.
I feel like my team lead has forgotten what iterative means, and expects much shorter turnout times in recent months for things that will absolutely not fit into a 2 week sprint. Since he kept going on about tickets that were getting stale due to last-minute unrelated scope expansions and me not being able to reprioritize new commitments on old tickets, I've just started being more strict. No, this ticket intended to literally just fix a typo is not also going to fix this unrelated bug qa discovered while testing.
I've found success in cutting tasks up in things that will fit in a sprint. If I have to write a feature, I commonly split it into a few tickets:
- Write the code
- Test the code
- Documentation changes
- Deploy the code
If it's a big enough change (or a new app), I might create a few sets of those tickets. E.g. one "write/test/document/deploy" set for the database schema to do Y, another one for the business logic to do Y, another for the HTTP endpoints for Y, etc.
The tickets are specific to the implementation, not to the feature, so they can't be expanded. New work can only come through new tickets, which get prioritized. Manager is happy because tickets get cleared. I'm happy because I can fight scope creep by pointing to my sprint and asking which tickets they want to bump for their new scope creep.
Tickets like "implement X feature" with a 2 week estimate are a landmine for engineers because it's broad enough for the scope to expand infinitely, and it starts to look like nothing is getting done to management.
I think this is a top-down issue caused by people in charge who fundamentally do not understand development lifecycles. When the requirements change at all I have to completely reassess the timeline.
Alternatively, evolving scope is decreasing scope as they cut ever more critical parts of the game to make the fixed deadline. Either way it isn’t a good sign to be changing scope this late in the development process.
I’m not in the games industry but all the war stories I’ve heard trend in the opposite direction. They start out with really broad scope and then increasingly drop and cut content and features as the deadline approaches. The only time I’ve heard of features being stuffed in and blowing out the timelines is in the major boondoggle cases where management was a complete shambles and it’s far more than just feature creep that goes wrong in those cases.
> I don't think waiting another year for Diablo 4 will be the end of the world.
Exactly. As I see it such things are much more crucial for games that might look/feel dated if they come out too late. The magic within the Diablo games (especially the first two) comes from the world it places us into, the way it is presented, the music, the story.
All of these are things that shouldn't break with one year of delay. The worst thing that xould happen with a Diablo 4, would be that fans of the series get the impression it was rushed.
> The company is incentivizing employees to “crunch,” an industry term referring to working late evenings and weekends outside of regular work hours, by promising them perks some workers say are paltry.
Though today I wouldn't manage a project to rely on crunch, nor expect anyone to crunch, it's still new to see a software development crunch described as something out of the ordinary and that needs incentives.
Starting with my first real software engineering job, crunches were something that just happened. And I didn't question it, because it wasn't that different than being a kid and coding into the night, or being in school with long "lab" hours.
My read of the tone of the WaPo is that the reader is supposed to see a crunch more like an hourly store clerk being expected to keep working after they've punched out on the time clock, rather than what used to just be the norm for software teams that wanted to ship.
Probably this is a good change, since we should be focusing on managing the project and greasing effectiveness in ways that mean hitting external deliverables, not assuming we can crunch.
My friends who've gone into 'normal' software development will work on things out-of-hours from time to time, especially if they're doing something interesting, and they're sometimes on call - but they're also making enough money that if they'd rather work a 4 day week, they can afford to.
My friends who've gone into game development report frequently working 10 hours a day Monday-Friday, and then going into work on both Saturday and Sunday. Or at least, they reported that the last time we saw them - you can imagine how hard it is to maintain friendships after a few years of such a work pattern.
I'm a bit over a decade removed from that industry but that largely lined up with my experiences(and from the tabs I've kept on things it doesn't seem like much has changed).
There's a constant stream of developers who have a high degree of interest in games so not only is crunch incredibly common but also compensation is significantly less(was about 1/2-1/3 standard SWE rates when I was in the industry). Combine that with publishers who pull recording industry contract style shenanigans and it's just a brutal industry. Tons of really interesting technical problems but even as someone who knew what they we going into at the time I advise people to think very carefully if it's a career option they want to pursue.
I'm about 15 years out. But I did the math on my hourly rate in the industry and it was about $25/hr. Some of the smartest, most fun people I've ever had the pleasure of working with, for sure. But while I was working the rest of my life was thrown by the wayside.
I quit after we shipped and rode my mountain bike for a year. It sucked because I didn't want to write code, a thing I'd previously loved. But it came back after a year of not working and a year of contracting part time.
There were opportunities to get back into games, but I turned them all down. I just don't want to get back into that environment.
> Employees said they were offered more stock to stay on based on their position and seniority, from around $5,000 in value for entry-level workers to upward of $50,000 for more senior employees.
Even $50k for a senior employee for years of working hard overtime is a joke compared to any other industry.
I've aware of royalties in some really, really rare cases(think north of 10M sales, in the < 1% of game sales category), but even in that case from what I heard the publisher had a cap on the upper limit per year in the contract.
It's part of the deal where I worked. I think the whole bad framing of game development is a bit one dimensional. It is a dream job in a very tough saturated market, often with perks inside the office, awesome release parties, passionate coworkers etc. You are missing out on the huge paycheck and work-life balance, but you got many other things. Already it is a privilege to have a job working on games. Not forced to work there, not forced to have a fun job for average pay.
My contract is for 38hrs a week so I work 38hrs a week. Teams I've been on have had "crunch", ie. team members working back late in some misguided effort to ship "on time". What I find interesting about this is that management never asks for it, it's just implied.
I've got the "oh you're leaving" when I get up at 5pm and leave, but never pulled aside by management for it. I don't really understand why others partake.
They'd have to incentivise the hell out of me to get me to do that.
I only ever saw an hourly contract once in my entire time in that industry and it took 2-3 weeks to sort out due to the fact that HR had never done one before at a pretty large-sized dev shop.
In all the places I worked there was an informal crunch period and then a very explicit one. Even during one of the formal crunch period I would catch shit for leaving at 10pm even though I was in at 8am. There was definitely a visibility aspect that if you were staying till 1-2am and rolling in at noon that was considered that you were contributing "more". There's a couple shops that do a decent job but large swaths of the industry are completely dysfunctional.
There's also a confirmation bias where if a successful game ships with crunch it is perceived as one of the contributing factor to their success and then further drives crunch across the industry.
The execs do get it. They consider bugs and missing features a small price to pay for hitting release date, when hitting release date means people buy your game for their kids.
Because reputation matters nothing? Or because, like EA, they’ve realized that there’s a certain (large) subset of people that will just buy the games anyway, bugs and all, every single time, like they’re in some kind of abusive relationship.
All have released absolute dogshit that sold based on their reputations alone. And that doesn't even account for the reports of everything from absurd quantities of mandatory crunch to rape and suicide.
All have eagerly awaited sequels and new IP. All are more profitable than ever before.
Remember when "It's ready when it's ready" worked and sold products, much to consumer delight? It's been awhile, but it feels like those folks have been driven out of the industry (or into the niche indie studios).
In my experience crunch time increases productivity for a couple of weeks and is a net negative from then on. Tired, stressed, and sick/absent developers just aren't as effective. Producing poorer code, even at a faster rate, is usually a loss as well.
Any software development organization that practices it would seem to be sabotaging themselves.
There have been studies on overtime and generally this is the finding. Overtime is effective in short bursts(a week to a month) with a clear objective in mind. Beyond that returns are diminished considerably.
It's one thing to work late because someone needs to be at the helm of a business (ie run the register, answer the phones, put out fires and revert builds), it's another to just work people extra hours because the owners failed to execute a plan that will meet whatever product release date they promised to their board or the public or whatever.
Sadly, there's more than a few folks working in the gaming industry that consider "crunch time" something to be proud about (it's an annual event for some franchises).
they're accomplishing a launch date and a paycheck, nearly any other quantifiable metric is reduced or removed during a launch crunch -- aside from all of the negative personnel effects from instigating such madness.
The Diablo franchise is, due to franchise reputation, basically above any scare of competition reducing sales. People waited 11 years from Diablo 2 to 3.
Some finance guy would have to take an extra long time explaining to me why crunching towards an arbitrary marketing launch date (and trampling all of the personal lives and well-being of the personnel) is going to somehow be better for our company's reputation than releasing some of the most volatile pay-to-win/monetization mechanisms in all of gaming. [0]
tl;dr : if at the end of a corporate instigated launch crunch you feel accomplished, more power to you -- but from where i'm at it just looks like more employee abuse with little incentive other than a pat on the back.
Here at Buzzard Entertainment, we value "great management." That's why we're planning six months of crunch time in order to lower productivity and reduce code quality while damaging the physical and mental health of our employees. This will, we understand, make it harder to hit our scheduled release date, so make sure to nerd harder so that we can push a barely adequate version of our next game over the finish line!
Ok, genuine question. I've been in a pretty niche field my entire career. But i've never worked more than 30 minutes a day unless I want to. Is it normal for people in some Dev roles to really do "Crunch" let alone actually produce work all day?!?
If I do bonus hours helping with recruiting or whatever, I get paid overtime and all the work has contract verbiage saying I can't work more than 40 hours a week without super high up approval.
What services though? I've done enterprise software systems and in the developer position, if it did break, they just rolled everything back. It's been genuinely years, but is that not common? I can kind of understand in game services, but I can't think of another situation i've been in. Given my experience with this was in 2000's with massive java apps.
Yes, for software people, actually working for long hours during crunch time is normal, most everywhere I've been.
IME, people usually don't burn very long hours at work unless they feel they need to.
(I've also seen places where it was nigh-impossible to get much work done, due to organizational dysfunction. But I don't think that can translate to long hours for very long, since people are already exploding at 40 hrs/wk of sitting through their work sabotaged, minute to minute. They'll tend to fill the hours with a combination of heroic sisyphean efforts, decompressing/timewasting, and bitter gossiping.)
(I recently watched a hilarious deadpan video of a day in the life of influencer intern/junior developer at Facebook, where it seemed only little time was spent on work. But that's not normal.)
For me, at least, bugfixing is rather rote work. I could probably do it for 12 hours straight, though I would hate myself afterwards. Coming up with some novel solution to some really hard problem isn't something I can do 12 hours a day, but that's like 1% of the bugs at most.
> We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years.
This reminds me of a story about bombers in the second world war. Bombers that come back full of bullet holes still come back. You need to strengthen the parts where there are never any bullet holes (implying the bombers dropped out of the sky, and couldn’t make it back).
In the same line, saying all your remaining developers are happy is not entirely surprising. All the ones that couldn’t stand you have already left.
Is it clear? Given the incredibly high turnover rate at any point of time in the games industry it does not sound like the worst assumption to make, true or not.
(And having worked in the industry myself not that long ago, none of my friends and colleagues from that time still work in it. But that is just anecdotal)
> the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years
Emphasis mine. It doesn’t say anything about the trend. For all we know a whole batch of people giving a 0 star rating just left, and therefore this year is positive.
Anyway, I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but you need more information to make a judgement.
> but you need more information to make a judgement
That is quite literally the entire point I was making, fwiw.
“Recent surveys show people are happier” “oh it must be because all the unhappy people left”. You can’t jump to that conclusion, or use the airplane analogy to get there, without a whole lot more info.
Worth reading: The Games Outcomes Project was a 5-part series analyzing the results of a 2014 survey of hundreds of game developers to determine how teamwork, culture, leadership, and project management contribute to game project success or failure.
> Our results clearly demonstrate that crunch doesn't lead to extraordinary results. In fact, on the whole, crunch makes games LESS successful wherever it is used, and when projects try to dig themselves out of a hole by crunching, it only digs the hole deeper.
The survey results showed project crunch was negatively correlated with both a game’s financial return on investment and MetaCritic score.
I've given up on Activision/Blizzard. The company's creative talent is held hostage by a combination of former cow milkers who have discovered the largely unregulated business of online teen casinos together with a legion of political correctness zealots who render the creative work devoid of any trace of identity so that it can be marketed to every possible type of audience without offending a single peanut.
> On an unrelated note, didn't the FTC seek to block the acquisition?
The FTC has to file suit in court to attempt to block the acquisition. Until that's done and the court actually sides with the FTC, everything regarding the acquisition is likely to basically proceed as scheduled. The FTC doesn't just get to say no the acquisition and be done with it.
This is just another example of Bobby Kotick and Activision executives being bad people. They've ruined the Blizzard brand and let the good people of Vicarious Visions down. Hopefully the game turns out well for all involved, but certainly not for the snake at the top who should have been gone after the harassment stuff.
I would say (from experience) if you are a small game team working on a game you love, you just work a lot because you want to. It's when it changes from "because you want to" to "because you have to", it's when it gets to be no fun.
If you're working on your own game, something where you share in the profits, that's certainly a different scenario.
But even then you still shouldn't go crazy with overtime, you'll still end up with diminishing returns, burnout, and eventually poor quality work. It's just a bad idea outside of emergency scenarios (eg, a serious crash bug in production that you can't just revert).
It's not even profits. Was on a mod team for a while until we bought by the company who's game we were modding. Hugely motivated to just make a free game that a lot of people liked. Pay just meant being able to invest more time in it.
This is a blurred line in the industry. Rarely does your superior walk up to you and tell you that you have to stay long hours or else.
Instead crunching in the games industry is much more passive aggressive. "Sure you can go home, but look at all the colleagues you are abandoning, I thought you were a team player, are we not a family? Do you not want this game to be the best it can be?"
And millions of small variations of that, praising only ever those that do crunch, building an atmosphere of immense peer pressure.
Your boss won't tell you to stay, he will actively build and nourish an environment in which you and your colleagues do that job for him. And that doesn't even include the whole topic of benefits, raises, and promotions.
Ultimately it is the same as "you have to", but still. Many have a false image of the way crunch is forced upon a team.
I worked with Activision on a game years ago. It was absolutely terrible. People were working 18 hour shifts and eating junk food. Everyone was completely stressed out and some looked positively sick. The producer was prancing about in storm-trooper boots and basically promising that the beatings would continue until morale improved. He just struck me as a sick sadist, attracted to the job for the same reasons we get bad cops.
I've heard similar stories from former EA folks, and others. It's just a shitty, crappy industry, that takes advantage of the perceived glamour to exploit people and burn them out without any conscience.
From the first sentence “mismanagement and scrupt changes” vs scheduling designed for a crunch, but I’m dubious of that given they’re already in a crunch 6 months before FCS, probably sooner given given there was time to write an article.
It seems some amount of crunch is unavoidable in large projects, but if you’re talking months of crunch time good management will either delay the release or cut features.
That said the games industry is notorious for shitty treatment of ICs, so perhaps 6 month crunch is just the norm?
It’s only “unavoidable” because of the profit motive - Diablo is hugely profitable for its owners and investors, and that is accomplished by maximizing margins including with the labor market (through constrained teams, as low wages as the market will bear, and demanding crunch periods)
There are diminishing returns after some duration of work. Whether it's 2, 6 or 10 hours at some point you get worse at it.
Diminishing returns is not zero though. There's another period after that threshold where you can still build working stuff, either slower or more carefully or choosing simpler things.
Then the third stage where everything you do makes things worse.
Whether that middle block is better spent working or doing something else comes down to opportunity cost and time. It's easy to write it off as "getting a bit sloppy now, time to stop", but that does mean lower total output.
> We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years.
Funny. Of course this is just my experience over the years, but I've rarely seen people "tell how it really is", no matter how garbage the project is. I admit I belong to that group as well, it's hard challenge the power that feeds you.
Wildly. They're making hundreds of millions off it.
Which makes me sad. It's a mediocre game built around hawking microtransactions at every turn. And it works, because those microtransactions make the payers more powerful than their non-paying peers.
The end game is PVP. And you can not be competitive without paying gobs of money.
Now, imagine what they'll bring into D4, a PC/console focused game...
D4 will not be pay-to-win, you can only buy cosmetic items. Pretty sure the mobile game revenue pays for a lot of other stuff, like D4. Not saying I like it, but it's a great commercial success.
I've been wondering lately how the attempted acquisition from Microsoft is impacting the schedule, combined with the high-rate environment, worker leverage, and economy. I wouldn't be surprised to see D4 pushed out until 2024 or even farther.
The release date is June 6, 2023, which was announced a couple of days ago. You can preorder it now. A delay from June or November of next year wouldn't be super surprising, but a delay to "2024 or even farther" is really, really unlikely.
A lot of press got their hands on it recently and the response was rather positive.
Not remotely possible in an industry where the workforce is practically volunteering their labor. Even if you could convince every college grad and drop out to sign on you’d still get steam rolled by all the indie studios that would be more than happy to eat your lunch.
Why would an indie studio working every hour they have be expected to outcompete an established company with unionised engineers?
I _want_ to believe the indie group would win that but it seems unlikely. Maybe one of a large number of small studios comes out ahead while most fail, but that doesn't help the failing ones much.
Replace evolving scope with increasing scope and you've got the most common recipe for development failure being pitched as a good thing.
Using it as an excuse for crunch is insane, because an iterative process with increasing scope needs to also have a flexible deadline.
Sure people cost money, so why hire them when you can exploit the ones you have already? The only way to stop that are unions/worker rights.
Not exactly a holiday release.
I mean, especially in this era of DLC, why the need to increase the scope, anyways? Punt the extra ideas for later release.
If you develop a feature and it turns out the feature is not great, you can choose to ship a game that's not great, or fix it.
Once you have committed to a ship date and moving the date is no longer an option, fixing it means working over time.
These crunches often come from the team themselves who are identifying that things aren't as good as they could be, want to fix it, but don't have the power to push dates back.
Update: One problem is that creative teams are rarely satisfied, and would love to polish things forever. The production team needs to be constantly pushing back on the creative team to leave things alone and call it done.
Working out what is "good enough" is really really hard.
Update: Also, I wrote this comment before reading the article, and I don't mean to defend 6 months of crunch. That clearly _is_ bad management and exploitative. When you have a few bad features you can take a few weeks or a month to fix them. When you are 6 months out and only now just announcing a release date, there is lots you can do. You can cut the bad bits, you can hire more staff, you can move the date.
It's not an unusual tack to take even for regular software developers. Not all feature work. Smart folks will cut bait and focus on something that does.
- Write the code - Test the code - Documentation changes - Deploy the code
If it's a big enough change (or a new app), I might create a few sets of those tickets. E.g. one "write/test/document/deploy" set for the database schema to do Y, another one for the business logic to do Y, another for the HTTP endpoints for Y, etc.
The tickets are specific to the implementation, not to the feature, so they can't be expanded. New work can only come through new tickets, which get prioritized. Manager is happy because tickets get cleared. I'm happy because I can fight scope creep by pointing to my sprint and asking which tickets they want to bump for their new scope creep.
Tickets like "implement X feature" with a 2 week estimate are a landmine for engineers because it's broad enough for the scope to expand infinitely, and it starts to look like nothing is getting done to management.
That's basically how it is supposed to work. If you need something to get fixed, create an item/bug for it and let it get prioritized.
Let's call it what it is: a series of waterfalls, all with unreasonable schedules
I don't think waiting another year for Diablo 4 will be the end of the world.
Though I'd like to see a WarCraft 4 someday too.
Exactly. As I see it such things are much more crucial for games that might look/feel dated if they come out too late. The magic within the Diablo games (especially the first two) comes from the world it places us into, the way it is presented, the music, the story.
All of these are things that shouldn't break with one year of delay. The worst thing that xould happen with a Diablo 4, would be that fans of the series get the impression it was rushed.
Though today I wouldn't manage a project to rely on crunch, nor expect anyone to crunch, it's still new to see a software development crunch described as something out of the ordinary and that needs incentives.
Starting with my first real software engineering job, crunches were something that just happened. And I didn't question it, because it wasn't that different than being a kid and coding into the night, or being in school with long "lab" hours.
My read of the tone of the WaPo is that the reader is supposed to see a crunch more like an hourly store clerk being expected to keep working after they've punched out on the time clock, rather than what used to just be the norm for software teams that wanted to ship.
Probably this is a good change, since we should be focusing on managing the project and greasing effectiveness in ways that mean hitting external deliverables, not assuming we can crunch.
My friends who've gone into 'normal' software development will work on things out-of-hours from time to time, especially if they're doing something interesting, and they're sometimes on call - but they're also making enough money that if they'd rather work a 4 day week, they can afford to.
My friends who've gone into game development report frequently working 10 hours a day Monday-Friday, and then going into work on both Saturday and Sunday. Or at least, they reported that the last time we saw them - you can imagine how hard it is to maintain friendships after a few years of such a work pattern.
There's a constant stream of developers who have a high degree of interest in games so not only is crunch incredibly common but also compensation is significantly less(was about 1/2-1/3 standard SWE rates when I was in the industry). Combine that with publishers who pull recording industry contract style shenanigans and it's just a brutal industry. Tons of really interesting technical problems but even as someone who knew what they we going into at the time I advise people to think very carefully if it's a career option they want to pursue.
I'm about 15 years out. But I did the math on my hourly rate in the industry and it was about $25/hr. Some of the smartest, most fun people I've ever had the pleasure of working with, for sure. But while I was working the rest of my life was thrown by the wayside.
I quit after we shipped and rode my mountain bike for a year. It sucked because I didn't want to write code, a thing I'd previously loved. But it came back after a year of not working and a year of contracting part time.
There were opportunities to get back into games, but I turned them all down. I just don't want to get back into that environment.
Even $50k for a senior employee for years of working hard overtime is a joke compared to any other industry.
I've aware of royalties in some really, really rare cases(think north of 10M sales, in the < 1% of game sales category), but even in that case from what I heard the publisher had a cap on the upper limit per year in the contract.
I've got the "oh you're leaving" when I get up at 5pm and leave, but never pulled aside by management for it. I don't really understand why others partake.
They'd have to incentivise the hell out of me to get me to do that.
In all the places I worked there was an informal crunch period and then a very explicit one. Even during one of the formal crunch period I would catch shit for leaving at 10pm even though I was in at 8am. There was definitely a visibility aspect that if you were staying till 1-2am and rolling in at noon that was considered that you were contributing "more". There's a couple shops that do a decent job but large swaths of the industry are completely dysfunctional.
There's also a confirmation bias where if a successful game ships with crunch it is perceived as one of the contributing factor to their success and then further drives crunch across the industry.
Especially with games where they apparently MUST be out by Christmas.
Ask Blizzard. Ask EA. Ask CDPR. Ask Ubisoft. Ask any AAA developer.
All have released absolute dogshit that sold based on their reputations alone. And that doesn't even account for the reports of everything from absurd quantities of mandatory crunch to rape and suicide.
All have eagerly awaited sequels and new IP. All are more profitable than ever before.
Some folks care, but a vast majority do not.
In my experience crunch time increases productivity for a couple of weeks and is a net negative from then on. Tired, stressed, and sick/absent developers just aren't as effective. Producing poorer code, even at a faster rate, is usually a loss as well.
Any software development organization that practices it would seem to be sabotaging themselves.
The Diablo franchise is, due to franchise reputation, basically above any scare of competition reducing sales. People waited 11 years from Diablo 2 to 3.
Some finance guy would have to take an extra long time explaining to me why crunching towards an arbitrary marketing launch date (and trampling all of the personal lives and well-being of the personnel) is going to somehow be better for our company's reputation than releasing some of the most volatile pay-to-win/monetization mechanisms in all of gaming. [0]
tl;dr : if at the end of a corporate instigated launch crunch you feel accomplished, more power to you -- but from where i'm at it just looks like more employee abuse with little incentive other than a pat on the back.
[0]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-pl...
If I do bonus hours helping with recruiting or whatever, I get paid overtime and all the work has contract verbiage saying I can't work more than 40 hours a week without super high up approval.
IME, people usually don't burn very long hours at work unless they feel they need to.
(I've also seen places where it was nigh-impossible to get much work done, due to organizational dysfunction. But I don't think that can translate to long hours for very long, since people are already exploding at 40 hrs/wk of sitting through their work sabotaged, minute to minute. They'll tend to fill the hours with a combination of heroic sisyphean efforts, decompressing/timewasting, and bitter gossiping.)
(I recently watched a hilarious deadpan video of a day in the life of influencer intern/junior developer at Facebook, where it seemed only little time was spent on work. But that's not normal.)
This reminds me of a story about bombers in the second world war. Bombers that come back full of bullet holes still come back. You need to strengthen the parts where there are never any bullet holes (implying the bombers dropped out of the sky, and couldn’t make it back).
In the same line, saying all your remaining developers are happy is not entirely surprising. All the ones that couldn’t stand you have already left.
By this logic any dev team that shows a positive trend in employee wellbeing is simply because the unhappy ones left. Which clearly is not true.
Is it clear? Given the incredibly high turnover rate at any point of time in the games industry it does not sound like the worst assumption to make, true or not.
(And having worked in the industry myself not that long ago, none of my friends and colleagues from that time still work in it. But that is just anecdotal)
Emphasis mine. It doesn’t say anything about the trend. For all we know a whole batch of people giving a 0 star rating just left, and therefore this year is positive.
Anyway, I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but you need more information to make a judgement.
That is quite literally the entire point I was making, fwiw.
“Recent surveys show people are happier” “oh it must be because all the unhappy people left”. You can’t jump to that conclusion, or use the airplane analogy to get there, without a whole lot more info.
> Our results clearly demonstrate that crunch doesn't lead to extraordinary results. In fact, on the whole, crunch makes games LESS successful wherever it is used, and when projects try to dig themselves out of a hole by crunching, it only digs the hole deeper.
The survey results showed project crunch was negatively correlated with both a game’s financial return on investment and MetaCritic score.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-pro...
On an unrelated note, didn't the FTC seek to block the acquisition? https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/... The WP article says that it's "set to close" rather ambiguously. Sounds like it won't actually close?
The FTC has to file suit in court to attempt to block the acquisition. Until that's done and the court actually sides with the FTC, everything regarding the acquisition is likely to basically proceed as scheduled. The FTC doesn't just get to say no the acquisition and be done with it.
"Today I'm implementing the soul sucking demon mechanics, and improved realism in the dismemberment physics engine"
But even then you still shouldn't go crazy with overtime, you'll still end up with diminishing returns, burnout, and eventually poor quality work. It's just a bad idea outside of emergency scenarios (eg, a serious crash bug in production that you can't just revert).
This is a blurred line in the industry. Rarely does your superior walk up to you and tell you that you have to stay long hours or else.
Instead crunching in the games industry is much more passive aggressive. "Sure you can go home, but look at all the colleagues you are abandoning, I thought you were a team player, are we not a family? Do you not want this game to be the best it can be?"
And millions of small variations of that, praising only ever those that do crunch, building an atmosphere of immense peer pressure.
Your boss won't tell you to stay, he will actively build and nourish an environment in which you and your colleagues do that job for him. And that doesn't even include the whole topic of benefits, raises, and promotions.
Ultimately it is the same as "you have to", but still. Many have a false image of the way crunch is forced upon a team.
I've heard similar stories from former EA folks, and others. It's just a shitty, crappy industry, that takes advantage of the perceived glamour to exploit people and burn them out without any conscience.
It seems some amount of crunch is unavoidable in large projects, but if you’re talking months of crunch time good management will either delay the release or cut features.
That said the games industry is notorious for shitty treatment of ICs, so perhaps 6 month crunch is just the norm?
Wow, what a generous perk!
Diminishing returns is not zero though. There's another period after that threshold where you can still build working stuff, either slower or more carefully or choosing simpler things.
Then the third stage where everything you do makes things worse.
Whether that middle block is better spent working or doing something else comes down to opportunity cost and time. It's easy to write it off as "getting a bit sloppy now, time to stop", but that does mean lower total output.
Funny. Of course this is just my experience over the years, but I've rarely seen people "tell how it really is", no matter how garbage the project is. I admit I belong to that group as well, it's hard challenge the power that feeds you.
Which makes me sad. It's a mediocre game built around hawking microtransactions at every turn. And it works, because those microtransactions make the payers more powerful than their non-paying peers.
The end game is PVP. And you can not be competitive without paying gobs of money.
Now, imagine what they'll bring into D4, a PC/console focused game...
Lied every gaming company ever. Blizzard has already lied about this with Overwatch. Why would anyone believe them when it comes to D4?
A lot of press got their hands on it recently and the response was rather positive.
you think you do, but you don't
I _want_ to believe the indie group would win that but it seems unlikely. Maybe one of a large number of small studios comes out ahead while most fail, but that doesn't help the failing ones much.
Do you have a mechanism in mind?