Why Game Developers Keep Getting Laid Off. Is Work-Life Balance Overrated? Who could argue against balance? It's the Aristotelian Golden Mean. Indeed, the Obama Administration uses the word "balanced" in selling a number of its initiatives, from debt concerns to illegal immigration. Yet as I think of my clients, colleagues, and friends, many of the people who feel best about their worklife and are most energized overall, who feel really content with their lives and made the biggest contribution, work long hours. They’re frequently denigrated as lacking work-life balance, often dubbed a workaholic---a term that evokes comparison with alcoholic-- addicted to something bad. But is that a fair way to describe a cancer researcher who works some nights and weekends to try additional experiments? Yes, some people work long hours to escape home.
Notes on "i am not busy" The not telling people “I am busy” plan.
I’ve been working on this plan for a while now. I just added it to my daily Lift habits so I thought I would write about it. When I first started working in tech I regularly worked 10 to 14 hour days. I’d be home by midnight, sleep, get up, shower, and drive back into work. I had the energy to do it, and it seemed like a good use of my time, even though I was being paid for the same number of hours of the day as my friends in HR or accounting. It felt like I was doing critical, valuable work. Everything was an emergency. But the truth is: nothing we did was all that important. Under Pressure. The issue tracker is overflowing and the deadline is inexorably coming near: The milestone 4 build has to be reached!
Feature-set B15 has to be fully implemented and needs to be QA approved but bugs still occur and some features haven’t even been worked on. Everything needs to be crunched in there somehow as bug fixing is not limited by the announced feature freeze… and so it happens that you go into overtime! Because of actual events in my last weeks and months this topic just pops up again and again with me: Crunch and Overtime! Nowadays, these are even accepted as “normal” in not only Games but general IT and Development. Game Devs: When Does Crunch Cross The Line? Last week, Crytek stepped into a world of trouble with a tweet about the development of Ryse: Son of Rome for Xbox One.
The company boasted of feeding its crunching team members "more than 11,500 dinners" during the game's development. The #RyseFacts hashtag was co-opted by Twitter to strike out against the idea of crunch development as a good thing. Inside the development crunch pandemic – part one. Inside the development crunch pandemic – part two. Talent burnout, hospitalisation and a culture of fear – is this what you sign up for when you enter games development?
VG247′s Dave Cook continues his investigation into crunch. You can find the first part of this feature here. In it, we discussed how Crytek’s tweet about Ryse: Son of Rome’s crunch period saw it hit by a public backlash, and I hear from developers working within the industry today about why they feel crunch happens. There are some pretty harrowing stories in there, some of which we elaborate on below. Working cultures vary on a company-to-company basis, so it’s clear that the definition of development crunch time is both malleable and occasionally misrepresented.
Dominik Gotojuch's Blog - Crunch or die? I don't think so. Crunch or die?
I don't think so. The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. 08-28-13 - How to Crunch. Baby is like the worst crunch ever.
Anyway it's got me thinking about things I've learned about how to cope with crunch. 1. There is no end date. Never push yourself at an unsustainable level, assuming it's going to be over soon. Oh, the milestone is in two weeks, I'll just go really hard and then recover after. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. The Game Industry's Crunching Problem: An Interview with Stardock's Derek Paxton. Yesterday evening, development studio Crytek boasted of how the team developing Ryse was served more than 11,500 dinners over the course of its development, which was described by the Twitter account as a "crunching team," implying that the game had been in crunch mode for a very long time under the hashtag #RyseFacts.
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 Many gamers, developers and industry insiders alike took offense to the notion that games should be developed under crunch time, with many expressing their disgust to the practice, which treated developers with a certain callousness rarely exhibited in industries outside of the game industry.