there are a few things more exciting to gamers than the launch of a hotly
anticipated new title but even with on sale dates announced far in advance
you'll hear tales of development studios having to delay their launches or
forcing their employees into something called crunch time in order to hit a
street date but what does crunch time consist of and why does it even happen
development crunch is when programmers and other employees have to put in extra
hours at work in order to meet a deadline if you're working in another
field like law or sales where time sensitive projects are often the norm
then you know this isn't a new concept but development crunch has made
headlines lately in mainstream media as video games have exploded in popularity
in general but even in the gaming world the modern history of development crunch
goes back at least to 2004 when the spouse of an ea employee famously wrote
a letter detailing how crunch time workers were on the job for 13 hours a
day seven days a week without even being offered any additional compensation
or time off even now 100 hour work weeks
are not uncommon in the development world during crunch time with one
infamous example being how telltale games laid off a couple hundred
employees right after some of them were on the job until three in the morning to
finish working on the walking dead but why have crunches that demand so much
from workers become so common well the difficulty studios face from getting a
game out on time comes in part from how many moving pieces there are from the
technical side of things to art and design to testing together these mean
that delays in any one part of the studio can have a ripple effect down the
line for example a small bug in the game's code may not become evident until
it causes problems for other departments that rely on that code and oftentimes
identifying and fixing a bug is a time-consuming process and because game
design is so collaborative it becomes tricky for the folks who work on games
to push back against crunch time business practices unlike a traditional
blue collar field like manufacturing where there are typically bright lines
between workers and management the fact that game studio employees are expected
to be creative problem solvers blurs those lines especially as game companies
much like other tech firms tend to have go-getter cultures in which workers
often feel like they have to keep up with the most dedicated employees lest
they be seen as low performing many folks who work in game development tend
to be relatively young and have flexible schedules so although crunch time is
unpleasant these employees might feel that their employers won't have much
sympathy for them wanting to use their free time for non-work purposes if a
deadline is looming and obviously there's nothing wrong with working hard
or expecting employees to do so but many are concerned that the development
industry has taken this concept to an extreme especially as mistakes tend to
pile up when workers don't have enough time to rest or pursue other activities
since coding requires a high degree of concentration that's harder to pull off
when you're stressed or sleep-deprived but development crunch
can result in an on-time release instead of months after the promise date so
despite calls for change that include everything from a labor union for game
developers to closing legal loopholes that allow companies to refuse paid
overtime crunch remains a common
practice in the industry because the business model of many studios has shifted away from cranking
out lots of separate titles and toward concentrating on a few popular
franchises and profiting off continuous dlc releases consumer demand for
frequent game updates is quite high meaning studios are always fighting
deadlines this pressure on devs to keep up with their competitors also means
11th hour requests for changes are common from management which often
require more crunch time the good news however is that with more attention
brought to the issue a number of large studios have begun to explore ways to
reduce the burden of crunch time in the meantime though if you happen to
know someone who works in game development a little emotional support
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