Exactly. When I got hired by EA, I was new to the game industry and knew nothing about crunch time. The project I worked on went into crunch months before its release. It was the single worst period of my working life, and one of the worst personally, as well.
Crunch is evil, and it compromises everything.
- You feel guilty for not being with your family or loved ones when you're at work, and they'll be upset you're not around.
- You feel guilty when you're not at work, and there's a good chance your coworkers/managers notice every minute they're there and you're not.
- Your work quality goes down, because you can only do so much in a day or a week, especially when you're tired and stressed and preoccupied by how you're being a bad boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse/parent.
- Your home life quality goes down, because you're tired and stressed and you can never truly leave your job at the office, anyway.
- Your health goes in the crapper, because you're not exercising or sleeping or eating the way you would on a regular schedule.
Crunch is an unacceptable failure of management. And it's a failure by design. Most teams assume there will be crunch time -- some even schedule it in -- because that's how it's always been done, and because the company squeezes more for their money out of salaried workers.
I'd never work for another game company again, unless I could guarantee regular working hours throughout the project. I loved the people I worked with, and it was cool to say I made games for a living. But it just isn't worth it.
I don't believe a crunch in itself is inherently a bad thing, if you both really care about the project and the time allotted for crunch is reasonable. It's difficult to see how some form of crunch wouldn't be necessary on many occasions, unless of course you expect everything to go flawlessly, and for no snags to be hit during development. Sometimes even with a smooth and very efficient development process, there's just the release date that you have no control over. I'm not saying it can't possibly ever be abused, as I'm sure it is on many occasions. However, making a game is a team effort, and even without someone necessarily being in game development, people can still understand being there for their team, and making it clear in no uncertain terms to other members of that team, that you are doing your part and your work will be done in a timely fashion. Even in cases when you do happen to need a break, nobody should be able to question your level of commitment to the project.
I have a good friend in development, and they talk about this quite often, and they seem to have a very different view on crunch. They seem to take pride in it and have the most fun during crunch situations, and think it brings a team closer together, because it always gives them a much better understanding of how other people on the team work, and what you can do to make things easier for them, and so the time invested, as well the time you spend not just doing your own work, but casually talking with and really getting to know your co-workers, can lead to major breakthroughs in the overall development process, which makes the amount of crunch needed next time less necessary. In their view, the biggest cause for issues is specific team members just not wanting to inconvenience others by requesting some kind of help.
But even in the event that there's an expectation that there will be a lot of crunch time on a project, the trust and chemistry built up between members of the team, in their view, really does go a long ways towards making the entire crunch seem more like your average work day and a lot more manageable. They think the problem with crunches on more time strapped teams that they know about is that the management isn't being aware of the fact that people are, well, people, and so don't have very good instincts on what they can do to make things easier on them, or help keep morale high. For example, the studio managers up at my friend's studio had a crunch day where family, friends and even kids could come up to the studio and just chill and hang out. They had all sorts of activities planned. No obligation to work, just a day set aside for people in the studio to spend the day not seeing it as a work environment, but as a place where they could forget everything and just have fun. Funny enough the team went from maybe looking like they could use the break to being even more motivated and excited to work on the game some more, with my friend actually still programming with a child sleeping on their chest lol. So, I guess it totally depends on the studio environment and the people.
That tweet was unbelievable, what's next? *Insert corporation here* gloating for exploiting minimum wages and child labor?
The fact that crunch time is considered "normal" in this industry is appalling (and the main reason i quit as soon as i could), but bragging about exploiting the lives of your workers is downright scum.
I couldn't disagree more. People are extrapolating way too much from an innocent tweet meant to be for fun. They're scum for sounding like they're going all out to help make things as pleasant for their staff as possible? Did it ever occur to people that these people aren't necessarily being forced to crunch as much as they are, but are perhaps going the extra mile because they want to make the project they're working on even better? Does it have to be that they're treating them like scum? I suppose that's one take, but somehow I have my doubts.