Even better one:
Gaf strikes again, never disappoint. This is hilarious
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Ryse crunching team served 11,500 dinners by ship date #rysefacts
- Thread starter Wario64
- Start date
Gaf strikes again, never disappoint. This is hilarious
Prime crotch
Banned
I still get weird looks when talking to new trainees when I scoff their "it's only for this weekend, a last sprint is all is needed". Personally I've reached the point where I don't even give a rat's ass and I'd rather see the company go under
Complaining about people complaining is becoming a past-time for you. Are you starting your own forum?
Ironchef3500
Banned
AlphaTwo00
Member
You also run into the fact that crunches are for different "goals". Let's suppose it's a 2.5 year cycle dev, shipping for a November release: how many "stable builds" would you actually make within those last 11 months?
- Beta (? If it hasn't been done already)
- GDC/PAXEast
- E3
- Demo Build
- Gold Master
Each of these may be a fork of the actual final product, with slightly different cut of whatever mission/event/menu flow than the other. Each of them could be a crunch deadline, and worse of all, each of them will pull people away from the final product, resulting in more crunch for subsequent releases.
Blake'sGrave
Member
He compared crunch time to child labour. Sounds pretty hyperbolic to me.
The fact is that any industry you could care to name, from publishing to marketing to insurance or banking, has this issue, feigning outrage on Twitter for the sake of having n opinion isn't exactly constructive.
I just find it ridiculous seeing people pile onto this bandwagon, claiming that the tweet was 'boasting' about the mistreatment of their workers is patently ridiculous; the very idea that a company would willingly make such a huge PR blunder is nonsensical.
Heh
Who is 'he'? Have you just condensed all the posts by former and active employees in the industry down to one thing you find silly?And no, it doesn't exist in most other industries. Banking having crunch time? Are you high? The reason people are bothered is because it isn't the norm in other industries.
AlphaTwo00
Member
Checks my current work, compares that to my previous work.
HA.
One knows how to set realistic goals, makes the appropriate adjustments if things falls behind, the other doesn't.
RoninChaos
Member
Because no big companies have ever made PR blunders?
And no, not all industries has crunch. It's kind of crazy you're criticizing others when its obvious you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Blake'sGrave
Member
Heh
Who is 'he'? Have you just condensed all the posts by former and active employees in the industry down to one thing you find silly?And no, it doesn't exist in most other industries. Banking having crunch time? Are you high? The reason people are bothered is because it isn't the norm in other industries.
edit: just to clarify, I'm aware that 'crunch time' means a very specific thing, my point is that in other industries there are comparable practices that will have you working ridiculously hard for ridiculous fucking hours
'He' is the person I originally quoted, don't try and twist what I'm saying.
The reason people are bothered is:
A: they've experienced it first hand and find that Tweet in bad taste considering the working conditions during crunch time
or
B: standard gamer outrage over an issue they barely understand, recycling second hand opinions to bash a game/developer they dislike.
My problem is with the B group, the sort of people who equate the practice to child labour, which was what initially inspired me to post, because comments like that are offensive, not constructive, and depressingly typical of the knee-jerk response a lot of gamers seem to be inclined towards.
Really a thousand posts on this? Maybe if Team Ico had 11,500 crunch dinners that game would not be vapor ware. I have no stock in the success or failure of Ryse, and I have seen nothing that makes it a killer property worthy of excitement. But there is nothing horrible about the tweet. They worked their asses off to get a game ready for a new consoles launch, and gave out an interesting statistic to represent just how hard they worked to get it done.
it's public owning showing it's ugly head again.
LeeRoyBrown
Banned
The internet is full of assholes it seems.
Blake'sGrave
Member
exactly.
Your anecdote from your mother outweighs what everyone else has said in this thread? Try working in a few industries yourself first. Then come back when you are a bit more experienced.
And asking you to clarify 'he' is not twisting anything, learn what words mean.
Blake'sGrave
Member
yeah i removed the anecdote because it's not constructive, but on a personal level I can tell you how much of her family life she missed to work on important contracts or deals. It was lots, so the idea that there's nothing similar about the two practices just seems bizarre.
Long working hours are not crunch time. No other industry I can think of has anything like crunch time besides maybe a few others in the entertainment field.
If you sign up for 60 hour weeks, you expect to be compensated for them. If you sign up for 40 hour weeks and then are told to do 80 hour weeks it's a bit different.
endlessflood
Member
If that's how the tweet had been presented I don't think people would have been so upset. It's only because the tweet seemed to be flippant about the amount of overtime their employees were being forced to work that people got so upset. As an employer that's not really something you should be making light of.
giant_frying_pan
Member
Hopefully Ryse isn't delayed, otherwise that'll be one hungry team!
As I said earlier in the thread, any industry where you have to deliver a product on a schedule has crunch time.
I've finished my last crunch at the begin of this February.
I will not write my opinion of your opinion though: that would be offensive.
Maybe I need to read it again. I must be missing the smiley faces and "Kiss our asses" that are missing from the Tweet. If they only had more characters to work with they could have been specific enough to be offensive.
Maybe, sometimes, when needed. Not as a matter of course. Not as ubiquitously as it is an game development. It is not planned in before work starts, it is not bragged about.
To suggest otherwise is to be utterly dishonest about it. Ask architects/engineers how crunch time would work in the construction industry.
Pie and Beans
Look for me on the local news, I'll be the guy arrested for trying to burn down a Nintendo exec's house.
"Unavoidable several months long crunch" is the reason I could never personally dedicate myself fully to working in the games industry.
The poor planning of the executives and producers above you never results in repercussions as they jump from project to project to repeat the cycle, while the broken exhaust of all those underlings either have their spirits crushed in the process or abandon the industry entirely after realising "nothing is worth this".
All crunch is to me is a bizarre "imaginary extra budget" that doesnt exist since youre rarely paid the overtime and its just expected of you. You run out of actual budgeted man-hours and have to depend upon implication and peer pressure to extract more from your supposedly valued employees.
A terrible industry.
The poor planning of the executives and producers above you never results in repercussions as they jump from project to project to repeat the cycle, while the broken exhaust of all those underlings either have their spirits crushed in the process or abandon the industry entirely after realising "nothing is worth this".
All crunch is to me is a bizarre "imaginary extra budget" that doesnt exist since youre rarely paid the overtime and its just expected of you. You run out of actual budgeted man-hours and have to depend upon implication and peer pressure to extract more from your supposedly valued employees.
A terrible industry.
Ask computer hardware engineers. It's there. Meals, too, and they are appreciated.
I don't like the fact that the team/dept/company/corporation which relies on crunch time, gets used to the tiny burst in productivity during that specific time frame and then use it as a benchmark.
Then expect the same level of productivity across the entire length of a task/job/project for every other project hence forth, which damages/fatigues the team/dept/company across multiple task/job/projects.
.Instill Dissent
.Bringing down initiative
.Bringing down creativity
.Bringing down productivity
.Bringing down other non -job/-task/-project related activities in the team/dept/company (group activities)
.Attrition
.Lower budget henceforth
.After a while..there might be chances that the head team/dept/company/corporation closes down the later module in hierarchy because of lower productivity
Then expect the same level of productivity across the entire length of a task/job/project for every other project hence forth, which damages/fatigues the team/dept/company across multiple task/job/projects.
.Instill Dissent
.Bringing down initiative
.Bringing down creativity
.Bringing down productivity
.Bringing down other non -job/-task/-project related activities in the team/dept/company (group activities)
.Attrition
.Lower budget henceforth
.After a while..there might be chances that the head team/dept/company/corporation closes down the later module in hierarchy because of lower productivity
LOL, okay. So two industries are broken so you think that makes it common and acceptable. Nice work.
I've been on projects that meandered without delivery dates or deadlines. That's no fun, either. Employees like to feel that they are actually delivering a product. And no business can stay in business with those sorts of projects.
Deadlines produce crunch times. I honestly think it is unavoidable. Perhaps the length and extent of crunch time could be mitigated with better management. But sometimes you simply can't throw more people at a job because the work can't be divided any more. So what's the answer? More deadlines so that work is done more evenly rather than backloaded? It probably just means longer projects, though.
If you say that from the start, the project just won't get funded.
Prime crotch
Banned
Throwing more people into a project in hopes that will cover deadlines is a management problem and barely works. Management, unsurprisingly, is hard, thats why so few people get it right and software development industry is run by people who are just winging it.
TheBrain76
Member
I wonder how many dinners Ubisoft served to launch AC3.
Maybe true, but some of them are (rightly) justified. Crunch time shouldn't ever have to happen. Some of GAF's "defense force" for crunch time going "Oh this is just a standard part of the industry" is royally sad. How fast we have forgotten "EA_Spouse" ...
I'm sure CliffyB will be in to "TOO BAD MOTHERFUCKER" me, but it seems dev houses need to have a better project planning time-table to me. That or 3-year dev time with a "2-year dev time" time-table that is expanded to fill those "2-year" in a "3-year" frame.
Though I think also the problem is launch titles having to be "whiz-bang" graphics instead of being "last-gen with maybe a few more shaders" while the titles that have a bit longer to cook are the ones researching the horsepower of the new consoles.
The gaming industry has a lot of factors at play that make the severity of the crunch far worse than others. You've got an overabundance of talent that will work for peanuts just to get experience. The industry chews these bright-eyed grads up and spits them out the other side with regularity. The problem isn't necessarily that there is crunch. That's expected with deadlines. It's the regularity and the total lack of compensation on the part of the publisher/developer that is the problem.
See, in most every industry other than gaming, it's no secret which companies require you to spend more than 40 hours a week on the job. Witness Glassdoor's 'work/life balance' rating bar. These companies can either up their compensation or fail to do so and deal with a decreased level of available talent. How much talent is the gaming industry missing out on or failing to cultivate by having these sorts of practices? You can't see something you've never had. Why do the most celebrated games often come from development houses that attract top level talent and generally avoid crunch time where possible?
Publishers and developers treat the release date like the holy grail, cutting, crunching, trimming their way down to the wire. Maybe if the industry developed a little more reasonable attitude towards ship dates (this is something digital can help with) then this problem wouldn't be so large. Double the problem if you are publicly traded company. It's also too late to unionize. The major players like Sony and Microsoft would have to basically come out and say they won't allow games made with non unionized labor for such a thing to gain traction. The TV and movie business has unionized guys on the production side, despite tight deadlines, and the result is a wiser use of allocated resources. There's no incentive to do so in an industry where you can shove cheap talent into the fire as fast as you can hire them.
The industry can change. People just need to stop seeing crunch as 'unavoidable' when it's really a symptom of poor management and poor labor practices.
AlphaTwo00
Member
So what you're basically saying is that unrealistic projects have unrealistic goals, and the only way to get it done is to lie, get funded with the undeliverable goals, and the push everyone hard enough to make that goal happen, at the expense of the talent and resources that you can burn up.
Seems awfully short sighted.
Going to join GAF crunch defense force.
I think they're lucky getting fed while they hash out the rest of the development on this game. I also don't see why it is difficult to see that that crunching in this industry (while not at all praised) is just part of the job. Development being as project oriented as it is, can be swayed by so many variables. You can't always blame management. I tend to think back to college as well as my time in the military where you sometime have to burn that midnight oil to make sure projects get out on time.
I think they're lucky getting fed while they hash out the rest of the development on this game. I also don't see why it is difficult to see that that crunching in this industry (while not at all praised) is just part of the job. Development being as project oriented as it is, can be swayed by so many variables. You can't always blame management. I tend to think back to college as well as my time in the military where you sometime have to burn that midnight oil to make sure projects get out on time.
Crunch time isn't awful, and I enjoyed all those free meals when I got them, but it's not acceptable for the people that have wives and children and end up spending until 11PM at the office for weeks or months straight.
It is a sign of poor project management or development hurdles. The optimal and maybe non-obtainable state should be no crunch. In the absence of that (read: always), one should be a bit ashamed and very apologetic about crunch, not proud of it.
It is a sign of poor project management or development hurdles. The optimal and maybe non-obtainable state should be no crunch. In the absence of that (read: always), one should be a bit ashamed and very apologetic about crunch, not proud of it.
I'm sorry you think it is unavoidable.
I do wonder how publishers approach this sort of thing - if they *negotiate* with the intent of asking for an unrealistic goal, on the assumption that some of the content will have to be cut before release but having that requirement in hand gives them some leverage in the closing stages of development.
Yes of course they are lucky to get food whilst doing 2-3-4x there standard week with likely no overtime, they should be as blessed to be get a $10 meal as compensation for such a small effort.
My main problem with it is that its generally not compensated for, and that is just horrible.
AlphaTwo00
Member
There's a difference between, "well fuck, that didn't work, and we're now behind schedule" vs. "this component takes 3 months to make, but since we need to keep the budget down to 2 months, we'll write that in, and just plan the crunch".
I totally accept crunch as a "shit hits the fan" last resort, but when you see projects and timelines CONSISTENTLY hitting crunch, then your planning for schedule has failed somewhere.
So many great points in this post.
Pie and Beans
Look for me on the local news, I'll be the guy arrested for trying to burn down a Nintendo exec's house.
Great post and good to see such an enwisened junior join the ranks. I'm not sure most people are ever truly aware of just how seat-of-their-pants awful most of the gaming industry is run.
What also many seem to overlook is that crunch is often not paid-overtime at all, much less ever billed at higher "unreasonable hours" rates. The go to widely reported "this how bad it can get" example I feel still remains L.A Noire and Brendan McNamara's gross mismanagement of a project and its people. That wasn't some sort of rare occurrence mind, its just enough people started spilling out that others felt emboldened to speak out. The same peer pressure and "we could employ any kid who wants to work on videogames" mindset is what keeps not only people from doing untold quantities of unpaid hours (for someone else to get rich off of) but also to keep silent.
SenjutsuSage
Banned
An innocent and lighthearted tweet leads to 20+ pages where the word scum is being thrown around. This is Xbox One.
It's the fact they were proud of it. Crunch is a fact of life in software development, but if you're crunching to that degree then you're hurting the team, literally. People's real lives and well-being are impacted and so are their families. And it leads to an inferior product. Nobody wins.
An innocent and lighthearted tweet leads to 20+ pages where the word scum is being thrown around. This is Xbox One.
This is a studio being proud of the fact that there staff have to be in at work at dinner time, crunch is unavoidable, but lets no parade it around as something that should be strived to achieved, its something that should be minimised at every chance, and if that means slipping release dates to increase the relative mental or physical health of a person I can't see how any can advocate for having there game a couple months earlier.
An innocent and lighthearted tweet leads to 20+ pages where the word scum is being thrown around. This is Xbox One.
Sorry, gloating about workforce exploitation gets labelled as "scum" in my book, regardless of the company. And yes, crunching is unavoidable (i've never worked on a project that didn't require a crunch, and not just in games), but there is a difference between "a fact of life" and using it as a marketing nod, just like there is a difference between a last sprint effort and planning features based entirely on hypothetical crunch time performance (which is what i witnessed).
An innocent and lighthearted tweet leads to 20+ pages where the word scum is being thrown around. This is Xbox One.
Innocent and lighthearted? Come on man. Also get that bullshit out of here if you're implying this back lash is only cause it's the Xbox one. The same people would say the same things if it were sony, nintendo, sega, etc..