This whole thing reminds me of the breakdown Naoki Yoshida gave in the Final Fantasy 14 Noclip Documentary. He went into how he was put on the project to try and save the 1.0 version that was an absolute disaster at launch. He gave a breakdown of how they started to to fix things little by little, scheduling time for different features in different patches. And the eventual choice he took to the head of Square Enix about fixing what they can in the meantime while starting development of a "new" version of Final Fantasy 14 along side it, to eventually replace the game and start over. The amount of micro managing required to do the work necessary to release a functional MMO on top of a broken MMO within 2 years was absolutely unbelievable. Not to mention to have it become as successful as it is now, a decade later. Him speaking about having to figure out and note down what sort of time frame each individual person on that team needed to get their work done and how they differed so much, is what came to mind when you were talking about university students and their time spent on projects. I don't envy the role and responsibilities of a director, but I still hope I get to find out firsthand one day.
As a programmer I can't be productive after 6 hours of focused work, I dedicate the rest of the day to team management. Regarding the estimation, I usually delegate the estimation to the programmer whom I assign a task to and add a personal offset made on the said programmer's previous performance. Time estimation delegation imposes a share of responsibility on the programmer who makes the estimation.
I think a big problem is that there's no standardized/reliable way to teach people about these fundamental skills. The schools certainly rarely teaches people about estimating level-of-effort, or adjusting room for error based on risk factors.
@@alexfrank5331 you can't really teach it. It comes from repeated practice that gives you the confidence to says task A will take around X units of time. School can't teach you that. At best it could teach you to better track your own performance relative to each task you perform and why that matters.
Yeah you got it in one. What's infuriating is that some companies counted on unpaid crunch. When Anthem happened we learned about the "bioware magic", an expression used by the suits about how no matter how poorly managed or poorly scoped a project was, it "magically" was always fine for release. The "magic" of course was unpaid crunch. Blizzard had a similar expression. It's really good that gamers have been demanding these last 10 years more respect for the people who make the games we love so much.
Gamers talk about making better conditions for developers, but then they buy the games anyway. If they are still buying the games then there is not much incentive to change anything, they just have to ignore the noise and keep doing what they’re doing.
Creative work is very hard to plan for. Of course crunch is going to happen, but there's a huge difference between a project being overly ambitious - or even unintentionally mismanaged - and companies who deliberately exploit the rules to get lots of free labor at the end of a cycle. It's really great to hear you advocate for unions! Unionizing will help by forcing companies to be financially responsible for those decisions while also letting employees know what's expected of them in return. It just makes sense.
@@alexfrank5331 A good manager doesn't need unions because a good manager should be able to treat their employees well. A good manager is also someone who knows their weakness and sets up a union representative to make their work easier. Both ways are good.
This makes me think of BG3. That is a studio with roughly 400 employees and I can't even fathom how much work there would be in having everything coming together perfectly with a hopefully smooth launch next week. Swen Vincke mentioned in an interview that a lot of his staff are huge Baldur's Gate fans, so I can imagine A LOT of them would have wanted to have one or several ideas coming to life in that game. How many darlings did they have to kill?:)
I think they probably got a lot of it out of their system on the Divinity games by that point, and when they started on BG3 they had a clearer idea of what they wanted to make and what stuff they have already done before and didn't want to do again, so BG3 ended up being leaner and more focused, instead of just being a creative dumping ground.
@@arcan762I know it's been some months already, but, for people seeing this now, the answer is no. A lot of things were cut in BG3. The whole Upper City in Act 3, the crafting system (did you ever wonder why the ingots you found didn't have any use?), the end of Karlach's arc, etc
“Crunch is always the result of bad management” “No…” I can’t tell you how much this helped me right now. I’ve been doing solo dev and I’ve been having problems with my games taking too much time and I chalked it all up to bad time estimates. In the first minute and a half you made it clear to me that I’m simply not doing as fast a job I could be. Love the videos Tim
In a world where workers are increasingly differentiated from company owners and c-suites, and where avenues for making meaningful interpersonal relationships are being quietly closed, Unionization is always a good idea. Appreciate the realistic take on this, Tim.
Certain rights workers have here in Scandinavia and I believe most of Europe, feel so obvious and are things I take for granted at my job. If you work overtime, you get paid more or get more time off later. Depending on the time of day, and if it's on a weekend or holiday, that compensation increases accordingly. You are also not allowed to work shifts too close together (miniumum of 11 hours in-between), just like you said film crews seem to have over there. Here it would be unthinkable to be employed (legally) anywhere and *not* have those rights. So, yeah, I understand crunch is necessary in a lot of industries, and sometimes unavoidable, but these compensations need to be in place. Otherwise companies *will* abuse their workers as much as possible.
A lot of people think the Scandinavian countries have it made and that we should model everything we do elsewhere after them. Canada did that with its healthcare system and, yet, corporations are still taking it over just as they are here in the States. There's a dark side to the Nordic model that Scandinavians themselves are likely more familiar with than anyone else. Most of us don't want to look at the dark side, though, despite that -- as Tim himself says -- there is darkness and light in everything.
Hi Tim! I just wanted to say that I’ve been loving all of your videos since I found you in my recommended. I love your work and just wanted to say thank you for sharing your perspectives and insights of designing games and the industry as a whole.
I absolutely agree. Crunch itself isn't necessarily bad, provided you're compensated for it, and there's limits around how much of the development cycle includes it. Even if the industry doesn't unionize, there should definitely be regulations around overtime. I'm pretty sure basic labour laws should cover that, but "salaried" jobs always seem to somehow skirt those rules.
Most industries in the US have a busy season where people are expected to work overtime. Kind of how it is unless there’s a major economic or cultural shift. And as Tim don’t think a union will protect you from crunch, my last union job I was compensated extremely well for overtime but still could be mandated to work 60 hours a week throughout the year if necessary.
The problem is that game development crunches because they're running out of money... I don't think they would have the extra money to pay double or even 150% overtime? With union, it forces managers to make sacrifices much earlier and wisely. If they don't, then the project will likely fail with no recourse.
Employees in the US also have fewer rights than in Europe. It should never be a "season". A day, a couple - that's fine. But you can't expect a person to work overtime for longer than a week.
I really appreciate the nuance and experience here. I don't have experience with games, but a lot of this rings true for the time I spent doing video work in the 00s and 2010s. From what my wife has said about nursing, this is not limited to creative or tech fields either. There's an understanding that projects are difficult to scope and that the best laid plans will sometimes go awry, but when someone is asking for an extended commitment all the time and not providing any incentive, it becomes too much, even if its something you love to do. I really like the idea of mandatory time off, overtime incentives (ideally some combination of the two).
I’m fallowing your channel since a couple of weeks, I‘m super hyped when I see you post something about your work experience. Super interesting. I would eat a broom to get an Autogramm from you…
@@Wuzhlesmaybe you've had primarily positive experiences, but from my own its hardly a panacea. this isn't an endorsement of worker exploitation, merely hope for many more alternative solutions
Fantastic video! It's great to see pro-union content. May I ask a quick question related to game-design? Do you have any rules of thumb related to hit points for player characters? At least in the start of the game. I understand it depends on a lot of factors. I'm just looking for any tips I can get.
I hope he answers for you. Depends what your game is. Mario made due with 1-2 HP, Link 3+, MMX had about 20 (may've been more like 6-10). In JRPG's, it's not too unlike for enemies to take 2-3 hits to go down. You can use HP as a buffer for player mistake, and sort of calculate how long you want a particular experience in a game to last. Reddit's Game Design had some decent thoughts on Dealing damage in a game.
Thanks for this take, I've crunched a lot back in the day and I would never call all of it "bad". There's a world of difference between crunch dictated by management and overtime driven by one's passion for the project.
I love your content Tim! I have a question but I don't know if you can or even would answer but in your experience is it true that games with Female Protagonists were usually a no no back in the earlier days of gaming? I know the majority, if not all your games have a character creator, but I was just wondering because there's always been talk about how games with a female lead are harder to "sell" and was interested in your opinion.
Awaiting Tim's response if he has one, but I doubt it was as much a "no-go" as a reflection of attitudes of the time and personally suspect that's because -- in the early days -- creating and playing video games was widely looked upon as something along the lines of a "boys and their toys" kind of thing. So, games were largely designed accordingly. I imagine the industry was pretty surprised to find that's not actually the case. For the longest time, statisticians insisted that the audience for video games and, especially, video games that involve combat or violence of any kind, were predominately young and male. Some still do, but the very idea slights both men and women, all of whom are expected to conform to a gender role with specifications they must adhere to or else. I get the impression the industry is beginning to realize this. I'm female and have no issue playing a male protagonist. In fact, it's afforded me a little insight on what it must be like to be male in our society. I also have no issue whatsoever with violence and combat sequences in video games unless it's obviously, purely gratuitous because it essentially represents the concept of internal struggle or strife, which is the meaning of Jihad and other spiritual terms for it. That's why we love stories such as LOTR, which is pretty obviously about the struggle between the denizens of Middle Earth and the agents of Sauron. How are you going to tell that story without epic battle sequences?
@@haveanotherpinacolada Riiiight. Thankfully, It's not as much a concern today given character creators allow players to play any gender, ethnicity, etc. they like unless the protagonist is prewritten in which case male protagonists still outstrip female and other protagonists by a large margin. I've not been as concerned myself with *whether* females have been portrayed as with how. I actually started playing male characters because I couldn't stand the juvenile portrayal of female characters, but especially the insipid noises they made. Even today, a great many female characters in video games are of the "voluptuous" (and baby-voiced) variety. Sexual objectification was and still is very much a thing in many games just as it is in every other form of media and it's not like the same thing, but polar opposite, isn't true for male characters who are generally portrayed as Rambo-like tough guys. That's just a reflection of longstanding "gender roles" we're expected to conform to whether they fit us or not. The Mass Effect series did this right just as the Alien franchise did it right. The way to write a good "female protagonist" is simply to write a good protagonist. Ridley Scott very likely had a male actor in mind when casting the character of Ripley, but most of the actors in the original Alien weren't actually hired to portray the characters they auditioned for initially. Instead, Scott matched them up with the characters they played according to which he felt best suited each role. In other words, it wasn't a "token" gesture on Scott's part for the main protagonist of Alien to be female. Very simply: Sigourney Weaver walked in; owned the role of Ripley; and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history. I know there's a lot of controversy raging over gender right now, but the aforementioned "gender role" expectations would be why.
It seems like overtime, whether motivated by passion or forced by management, is generally bad for people’s productivity and overall well-being. I would think the health of my teams and overall diminishing returns would be motivation enough to choose reducing scope or moving out timelines, over choosing to crunch. I understand not everyone feels the same way though.
That's what several studios are doing. For example, as far as I know that's what Mike Bithell is doing, taking responsibility for the mistakes of his company. Is one of the many gamedev veterans who are saying "crunch is always (or almost always) the fault of management", and he's been doing gamedev for what, 15 years now? And he has shipped 8 titles. But again, crunch is more than just overtime.
Estimates are often Guesstimates and when management puts pressure on you to make them smaller they'll become what I call "Wisthimates". That is the sure path towards Crunch in any (software) development project.
I think one of the worst instances of crunch being imposed on one of my teams was with platform compliance. Various platforms at one point had their own list of compliance rules we had to adhere to (they probably still do, but I've been out of game dev for a while now.) Fail to adhere to these rules, and they won't let you publish on that platform, pushing the project closer to being delayed. This one particular game I was working on was repeatedly rejected on one of these platforms. The worst part about it was when we were testing this ourselves, we considered ourselves to be adhering to those rules. We were pressed into a crunch phase, but couldn't do anything about it. Our only solution was to keep trying to submit builds and hope that one would get through, or somehow wrangle clearer definitions so we could fix the supposed compliance failure. Bizarrely the former was the one to eventually succeed.
@@plaidchuck Microsoft is also an option. But I probably shouldn't say which of these it was. I've had "Fun" with compliance testing with all of them, but only one of them seemed to have a puff of madness causing us to have a forced crunch.
I love hearing about people's experiences in different job types. It is wild, I would be livid if some company expected me to slave myself to their unreasonable desires/expectations.
I like Marty O'Donnell's "goose" analogy where execs and leads will essentially work their teams to near breaking points. We seen this with Bioware's Anthem where there were reports of devs having mental breakdowns and panic attacks during the workday, and one confirmed suicide. Something like that should never be allowed. And while I do agree that developers are passionate and want to work on their games, they shouldn't be EXPECTED to do such things. If there is a dev that has a family and they need to be with their family, they shouldn't be guilted into working extra hours because this dev doesn't share the same "passion" as the rest of the team. But bad apples like Bioware are overshadowing the good companies like SuperGiantGames, Klei Entertainment and Larian Studios, which have very loose crunch and everything is voluntary. I'm always, ALWAYS, against government intervention. But I do not see any way to solve this issue beyond the government getting involved. The big game companies have proven again and again that they cannot and will not self-regulate. There needs to be a strict rule regarding crunch, what is accepted and what is not. We can't have another Anthem.
I'm guilty of overusing "bad management" as a hyperbole and makes it sound like a blame-game. It should be more about knowledge and experience, and videos from industry veterans goes a long way to increase the amount of knowledge available to be learned. I would also love to see managers share their solutions to seemingly impossible problems. For example: Overpromise and underdeliver to be competitive? Yup. Though I've seen a older producer who promised big features to the man with the wallet, but he had the developers focus on the realistic core product, and just handwaved/fudged the embellishment. At the end, it all worked out, so I image he would say something like "It's a bummer that the technology just isn't ready for [overpromised nonsense] that you were so excited about, but our product was completed on-time and on-budget. It made a big return on your investment. Let's aim for the star again next project?" It's all too common that manager lie about progress. Seeing a manger who essentially used their "abilities" for good such that everyone ultimately wins... That's when I started thinking about managers differently.
It's interesting that you bring up the movie industry, since it's a perfect example of how to drastically reduce the chance of crunch. In the movie industry the end of production is often set to happen half a year before the release, and it's common practice to have finished everything in regards to distribution, potential fixes etc at least 3 months before the movie is finally released. Ofc for videogames half a year would often not be enough, but if publishers would be willing to have some patience and be willing to sit on finished games from time to time (which they obviously don't) crunch could be drastically reduced.
It's fine to do overtime out of passion on your project. It's not fine to force workers into extra hours with no recompense. Europe has good laws for it, you practically pay your workers twice for overtime. US has obvious problems with employee rights. As for the management thing, I kinda throw publishers into the management bracket because they often micromanage projects and mostly add problems. Either way, overworking people isn't a moral solution.
Honestly, I would love to see a video about Arcanum and what exactly would you change/cut in hindsight. Aaaand, unions in every industry would benefit everyone.
You're right, unions in game development need to be a conversation. This video has legs beyond this group of us here out of professional and personal respect for you, the picket lines in LA and New York wouldn't hurt from the legs this industry has out there showing support. Mobilizing a show out would be noticed, and the last 3 minutes of this could air on Good Morning America as is, Tim. While it would effect game publishers industry wide for Microsoft it's a win-win. They aren't invested in the film production space and their two direct competitors are.
I'd argue that publishers pushing for unreasonable deadlines also count as bad management, just not inside the studio. Though, from their point of view, squeezing extra work out of a studio is probably considered "good", as it maximises their profits. It's not technically management, but I think many people who make blanket statements like that would include what basically amounts to the investors not being willing to spend enough money to make the game without expecting the developers to crunch.
100% for unions in gaming. Mandatory overtime is such a strange thing for any employer to demand if it's not life saving work. Also took this video title as a reminder that my doctor said to exercise more and did... crunches!
Absolutely the most reasonable take. Many professions require awful periods of over work. The answer here is making certain overtime is paid even to salaried employees. Not only is it just more fair, it serves as a powerful built in incentive to only use crunch when there's simply no other option. It also will make publishers more likely to do a cost benefit analysis between crunch and delays. As less and less game sales are boxed delays will become easier and easier logistically. At which point the trade offs will be purely financial. Itll be a simple math equation weighing cost of delay vs cost of a ton of overtime.
I think a lot of this comes from the American work ethic. Even those Americans who do recognize crunch is bad and should be avoided will make excuses for it. I know. I was such an American. I'm currently living over seas and my entire career has been made up of studios that made an effort to avoid crunch, and not all of them have succeeded for all sorts of reasons. (incidentally, I think one additional reason crunch can happen is because young employees who have more free time, energy, and passion are willing to volunteer themselves to work extra hours off the books because they are that committed - that's a whole other topic though). Of the projects I worked dedicated to avoiding crunch, the only ones that succeeded, were the ones that made made it a top priority. this includes game jam projects as well as multimillion dollar projects that I worked on for years. I can have projects without crunch, but you have to accept that not every feature you want will get in, and in some cases, the quality of a feature won't be as high as you would like. Or maybe it means pushing the deadline back and spending more money. It's all about trade offs what what trade offs you are okay with. It is very rare though that a project never has crunch, but I know it can happen and you can still release a quality product. Now to watch part 2! Great videos as always!
Sorry i love commenting on your vids. Its interesting how we quantify the creative folks and the creative process, like there is objectivity, but... I don't know. I guess the folks with the money want you to make a life changing pieve of art or media in 24 hours.
Who dictates the release timeline for any title? Setting a hard external deadline is KNOWN to guarantee the need for crunch. Therefore all of the reasons (difficulty scoping, estimating time, engine bugs, etc.) still do no thave to result in crunch if a hard external deadline hadn't been set by the publisher or management.
if a design team overscopes, if devs work at an inconsistent rate and they cant complete the work in time without crunch and you cant afford to pay the devs more money for more time, or hiring extra devs, or if you let investors talk you into more features, not walking away from deals when you should, not cutting corners to match the pay and time you have available, not becoming the bad guy telling devs no, yes these all 100% come back to bad management. I can empathize and identify with the self exploitation startups demand of themselves, im doing that now, but asking anyone else to sacrifice work life balance, add to their burnout, trade their time with their families for your products quality, thats all managements failing.
I imagine crunch is also the result of an industry that is ultimately filled with perfectionists, as is probably necessary just to get modern games to even work.
Ah, right, so the problem isn't bad management, it's capitalism, gotcha. I'm being tongue-in-cheek, but also dead serious. If the conclusion is that we need unions (and I 100% agree with that), i.e. institutions run by workers for workers that run counter to the interests of the business owners, then yeah, the implication is that the system itself leads to crunch (and other indesirable situations). In that sense, I agree that saying "bad management" is always the problem is too general, but I'd argue too narrow also. A good manager by themself cannot singlehandedly counter the flaws of the system within which they, like anyone else, are working. I will say though, I don't think I've seen many people literally argue that ALL crunch is down to bad management, or that crunch is due to bad management ONLY. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention though, that's possible. Rather, I'll see a brief statement like "bad management causes crunch". It's pithy, it's a bit too generalized and vague, sure, but what I read it into that kind of claim really is "bad management is the number one cause we need to look into when it comes to crunch", and I feel you can definitely make a case for that. Lastly, people might get sloppy and "unreasonable" in their statements sometimes, true, but when you're being exploited to death by your employer, what are you to do? If business owners are being unreasonable in how they treat you, why would you give them the benefit of nuanced/reasonable takes? They sure won't extend you that courtesy.
This is probably such a naive question, but what is the deadlining factor? Like: if the crunch is necessary to do 80 hours, what is the reasoning behind doing one 80 hr week instead of two 40hr weeks? Is game dev salary not tied to the hours worked? Does managment not know the 80hrs over 2 weeks are "more bang for buck"? Like if a book is late, a book is late. If a game is late a game is late. The only thing I could think of is marketing opportunities (we have ad spots booked, we want to be at that demo-event etc.).
Thank you for this insightful video. I agree that with the current structure of games production, with set expected dates of delivery, and with the complexity, or impossibility of making a fixed plan for a project that will survive contact with work, there has to be crunch, or at the very least sizeable downscoping. Programmers in other industries have faced the same problems and have started advocating for working with no estimates, showing that estimating work and planning for the estimates often costs a lot more than simply working on the project. Do you think something like this could come to the games industry? Is there already something like this?
I have worked for a long time with teams that don't use traditional estimates, and I can tell you that it's not as simple as stopping to use them. You have to have something to replace them, which at least in part is flow metrics. Avoiding crunch is very much about culture and management model, including technical practices.
But that's just how it is, no? The ones who make the decision take responsibility. And yes, ofc as a team member I can only provide the owner a list of options and make them decide instead of me, it's not about every little thing in the code, but I simply don't have the full picture, the context all that stuff is hidden behind product owner abstraction for me so there's no other way to come to them for the decision that they should make based on the context available to them.
It's a creative product, run at the top by people who aren't creative and whose only love is money. It's inherently at odds this relationship. Also, they know how to, and abuse, 'passion' for their monetary benefits.
I don't have a lot of experience.... But my answer is usually no. If I was a lead, I'd tell them to write it down and we'll put it in the backlog and look it over when it comes up. Then if we have time we will actually look at it.
Those movie industry workers benefits are standard law here in Germany. Only a libertarians dream would submit workers to the whims of companies. They don't have enough of a voice to ever enforce those rules alone, there's way you get paid without regulations or unions. Always demand compensation and rest times or you will literally break apart. Btw, crunch here in Germany is 48 instead of 40 hours, all of which paid/reimbursed with time. You cannot legally work more than that. If you almost cannot crunch, you have to manage better or go under. Very effective!
Unions mean no crunch mean even worse products when flash incidents arise.... Anthem was a result of EXTREME anti-crunch policy. In the end they had to crunch for 7 months straight to get it done due to avoiding crunch.
What bugs me is when crunch happens and leadership is like "it was inevitable" or "it's your fault" when it was clearly stated early on that X was impossible to do that way from the get go, and every week was a reminder of it. They knew.
Thanks for sharing! Jumping off this video topic, I would love to hear if you had any thoughts on the training of new employees or those who are newly promoted. Perhaps there are ways to set expectations early on to avoid time wasters or the fallout from rejecting someone's ideas, etc. What was your experience training? What would you like to see, if anything? 🙂
I've heard crunch be blamed on bad management so many times that I just took it at face value. It's typically said by people who cover games rather than those actually making them, so it's nice to hear the other side from someone with so much experience working in industry. Now I have a video to point people towards whenever they just parrot what they have heard games' media people say on a podcast or whatever.
Game development is an art. I completely understand the idea that you got to have deadlines and schedules, but for game development you can't schedule creative ideas. Trying to force creative ideas into forced schedules is probably gonna lead to some poor designs. Just getting into game dev and working along someone else, its fun and engaging being able to look at a feature or what not and be like should we do it like this, does this feel right in the game. Of course, its gonna come to the point where its either like lets give this feature a chance to sit for a bit, or just implement it as is and continue moving forward and see how it feels with other features.
Dang. I hear there is so much difficulty pinning down scope-creep. It’s so hard to manage the insane amount of details needed to ship a video game on time. Thank you so much for your insight and valuable expert opinion, Tim. The one question I have is: who is Bill Cosby? I’m asking for a friend. He doesn’t speak English, and he has no idea how to use one of those google machines. Please let me know.
sometimes the publisher or the PR guys tell you there's some event 6 weeks from now your game needs to have a demo or whatever for and there's just no way to do it without crunch. ask me how i know >_> and they're usually right! so what do you do? you crunch
I assume that many gamedevs are also gamers and what gamers dislike the most is when stuff does not feel fair. And fairness means that if you put in the work, you get part of the loot. If you hear stories from the 90ies of teams crunching towards a now legendary classic and afterwards they get a ferrari, that's a nice story of putting in the work and getting a reward. In the last decade, Minecraft boss Notch was known to share the success with his team. That's a nice story of putting in the work and getting a reward. But then there's the other stories about people working lots of hours, and then they get fired and Bobby Kotick gets all the ferraris. That does not feel fair. In my regular devjob, working overtime happens, because shit goes wrong. But because we have labour laws, we get paid for every hour. And because we get paid, there is no monetary advantage for management to make us work unpaid overtime. Some countries allow it that you work for 80 hours while getting paid for 40 hours. So, do some companies plan to use unpaid overtime to get free work? I don't think anyone plans for missing deadlines. But...How often does something need to happen to see a pattern? So if a big publisher does the 50th game in row with massive unpaid overtime followed by record profits, is there a point where we can assume that some of that is on purpose because wages are a cost factor and getting lots of work for free has economic value? Something being "unavoidable" does not make it desirable. "Oh, it's just part of gamedev, if you can't deal with it, fuck off weakling" ..oh eff off ^_^
I'm glad I'm only the guy who comes to your office and talks with you about the meaning of life... and you think "how did we even get into this??? it's been hours" .... But hey, at least I didn't talk you into a feature that could potentially derail the schedule for multiple people on the team, only yours for that day, lol
Nothing Tim says here feels wrong. But I think there’s also an issue of insider-outsider communication with that wording. Many people who have used the statement at issue, that I’ve seen, are actually talking about the people providing the funding when they say “management”. Like with CDPR and Cyberpunk, where they are intertwined, or even external publishers. So the statement often should have become “publishers/funders need to accept the risks inherent to the business and be less tight-fisted when things inevitably don’t go as planned.” That means being a lot more willing to go over budget and over time. And yes; if crunch is necessary, then make it humane. Forcing people to work without proper rest for anything more than extremely short sprints is incredibly inefficient anyway, as far as the research I’ve heard on it anyway. It still doesn’t completely excuse the categorical language, but it changes perspective a bit, I think.
I’m immensely enjoying these videos btw. Every comment I’ve made that don’t 100% align with Tim’s views, are the tiny grains of perspective compared to the sea of wisdom I accept as presented 😉 Wonderful to be given all this for free! I sincerely hope many budding developers find these videos.
So here is the problem, it doesn't matter what lead up to the point of a game studio being forced to crunch, because the decision to force crunch can LITERALLY ONLY BE DONE BY MANAGEMENT! Yes, there are an infinite number of things that can get in the way of production, but crunch is never actually required, but is an intentional decision made by people that have power over others and an incentive to force them to crunch. You might be in middle management and feel like you have no other choice but to crunch, but that is only because upper management already made the decision to create the situation where you would be forced to crunch. It doesn't matter if it is crunch or any other workplace abuse; whoever is at the top either forced it to happen or created an environment that allows it to happen.
Is the crunch usually pre-release or after? If both: Crunch *after* release: - Is mostly just bugs (discovered by 1000s of ppl playing all of a sudden) right? - I don't see how to get this resolved except using AI "player" as bug testers (future solution) - I don't see this going away as games just get more complex, do you? Crunch *pre-release* - taking longer to release, could cut crunch in half (even if it's not always possible to just plan for 6 extra months of dev time) Could be wasteful if it turns out the extra 6 months wasn't needed. But overall the "pre-release" crunch could be addresed, but the after-release seems almost impossible.
Hi Timothy, if you don't mind could you make a video about salaries in game industry and compare it to non-game dev salaries ? Are there any big gap continues ? I'd love to hear your thoughts about that !
A big problem is also the corporate meddling, as stated do a thing at less then half the cost. It’s just not doable without putting unnecessary strain on the dev team…
Did you find that the risk of crunching is proportional to the average experience level of the individual devs and the degree of ambition of the project? Like if a team at an Obsidian is working on another Crpg using the eternity engine, could you confidently say you probably won't crunch?
In my opinion, work output estimation would need to become a required part of the discipline in all areas. I wish there could also be some objective measurements for poor managers who basically don't understand any of the professions of the workers they are managing...P.S. Damn does that Ferrari for the price of Toyota sound like a horror sign. Is it that common that some devs go around demanding their favorite features or they start talking shit about you, poisoning the work place? I need to believe this is not common or just the case with trouble-maker personalities.
A classic management fail is the "jocks vs geeks" mentality. Management wants to hold a monopoly on strategic business thinking, rationalize their own existence, and thus block engineers out of any high-level planning discussions. The startup and Indie games industries have shown that engineers are in fact capable of understanding and balancing the triangle. And when the layoffs come what's the ratio of engineers to non-engineers? ;) Good management and leads help engineers navigate the triangle; they don't just say "No" and "because I said so". Crunching is completely out of fashion these days; particularly internally instigated crunches. Marketing campaign lead times can be very short in 2023. Users are more and more expecting releases "when it's ready", or on a regular cadence with "what IS ready". The false need for a flawless schedule is being exposed for the sham it is.
What you are describing are common factors for any large project. Moreover, software projects are much more flexible than hardware ones. I might remind you of budget and time overruns while the US was developing the F-35 fighter; I think you can look for them on the internet. Consequently, I have a question: if these factors are common while only game development is notorious for crunches? I am sure Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon have crunches. I am sure SpaceX has crunches. I know that you are a game designer, so maybe it is not a question for you. However, why is there no outrage about inevitable crunches in other industries?
I would guess its because people see games as more trivial, they are more in the limelight, and the consumer base is more tuned in and more likely to be the type to complain.
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This whole thing reminds me of the breakdown Naoki Yoshida gave in the Final Fantasy 14 Noclip Documentary. He went into how he was put on the project to try and save the 1.0 version that was an absolute disaster at launch.
He gave a breakdown of how they started to to fix things little by little, scheduling time for different features in different patches. And the eventual choice he took to the head of Square Enix about fixing what they can in the meantime while starting development of a "new" version of Final Fantasy 14 along side it, to eventually replace the game and start over.
The amount of micro managing required to do the work necessary to release a functional MMO on top of a broken MMO within 2 years was absolutely unbelievable. Not to mention to have it become as successful as it is now, a decade later.
Him speaking about having to figure out and note down what sort of time frame each individual person on that team needed to get their work done and how they differed so much, is what came to mind when you were talking about university students and their time spent on projects.
I don't envy the role and responsibilities of a director, but I still hope I get to find out firsthand one day.
As a programmer I can't be productive after 6 hours of focused work, I dedicate the rest of the day to team management. Regarding the estimation, I usually delegate the estimation to the programmer whom I assign a task to and add a personal offset made on the said programmer's previous performance. Time estimation delegation imposes a share of responsibility on the programmer who makes the estimation.
I think a big problem is that there's no standardized/reliable way to teach people about these fundamental skills.
The schools certainly rarely teaches people about estimating level-of-effort, or adjusting room for error based on risk factors.
@@alexfrank5331 you can't really teach it. It comes from repeated practice that gives you the confidence to says task A will take around X units of time. School can't teach you that. At best it could teach you to better track your own performance relative to each task you perform and why that matters.
Yeah you got it in one. What's infuriating is that some companies counted on unpaid crunch. When Anthem happened we learned about the "bioware magic", an expression used by the suits about how no matter how poorly managed or poorly scoped a project was, it "magically" was always fine for release. The "magic" of course was unpaid crunch. Blizzard had a similar expression.
It's really good that gamers have been demanding these last 10 years more respect for the people who make the games we love so much.
Fuck that, any extra hours i do i take back if im not getting paid. Are there no labour laws in the US?
@@fyaunzaun Because they don't protest enough to get them back, would be my guess.
@@haveanotherpinacolada Have you read any news about the US ever?
Gamers talk about making better conditions for developers, but then they buy the games anyway.
If they are still buying the games then there is not much incentive to change anything, they just have to ignore the noise and keep doing what they’re doing.
@@piefliesvoting with your wallet is a neoliberal fantasy. The onus is on regulations and labor protections.
Creative work is very hard to plan for. Of course crunch is going to happen, but there's a huge difference between a project being overly ambitious - or even unintentionally mismanaged - and companies who deliberately exploit the rules to get lots of free labor at the end of a cycle. It's really great to hear you advocate for unions! Unionizing will help by forcing companies to be financially responsible for those decisions while also letting employees know what's expected of them in return. It just makes sense.
Good manager actually benefit from labor union as well! It highlights their abilities and experience to reduce/avoid crunch.
@@alexfrank5331 A good manager doesn't need unions because a good manager should be able to treat their employees well.
A good manager is also someone who knows their weakness and sets up a union representative to make their work easier. Both ways are good.
This makes me think of BG3. That is a studio with roughly 400 employees and I can't even fathom how much work there would be in having everything coming together perfectly with a hopefully smooth launch next week. Swen Vincke mentioned in an interview that a lot of his staff are huge Baldur's Gate fans, so I can imagine A LOT of them would have wanted to have one or several ideas coming to life in that game. How many darlings did they have to kill?:)
I think they probably got a lot of it out of their system on the Divinity games by that point, and when they started on BG3 they had a clearer idea of what they wanted to make and what stuff they have already done before and didn't want to do again, so BG3 ended up being leaner and more focused, instead of just being a creative dumping ground.
@@arcan762I know it's been some months already, but, for people seeing this now, the answer is no. A lot of things were cut in BG3. The whole Upper City in Act 3, the crafting system (did you ever wonder why the ingots you found didn't have any use?), the end of Karlach's arc, etc
“Crunch is always the result of bad management”
“No…”
I can’t tell you how much this helped me right now.
I’ve been doing solo dev and I’ve been having problems with my games taking too much time and I chalked it all up to bad time estimates. In the first minute and a half you made it clear to me that I’m simply not doing as fast a job I could be.
Love the videos Tim
In a world where workers are increasingly differentiated from company owners and c-suites, and where avenues for making meaningful interpersonal relationships are being quietly closed, Unionization is always a good idea. Appreciate the realistic take on this, Tim.
Certain rights workers have here in Scandinavia and I believe most of Europe, feel so obvious and are things I take for granted at my job. If you work overtime, you get paid more or get more time off later. Depending on the time of day, and if it's on a weekend or holiday, that compensation increases accordingly. You are also not allowed to work shifts too close together (miniumum of 11 hours in-between), just like you said film crews seem to have over there. Here it would be unthinkable to be employed (legally) anywhere and *not* have those rights.
So, yeah, I understand crunch is necessary in a lot of industries, and sometimes unavoidable, but these compensations need to be in place. Otherwise companies *will* abuse their workers as much as possible.
A lot of people think the Scandinavian countries have it made and that we should model everything we do elsewhere after them. Canada did that with its healthcare system and, yet, corporations are still taking it over just as they are here in the States. There's a dark side to the Nordic model that Scandinavians themselves are likely more familiar with than anyone else. Most of us don't want to look at the dark side, though, despite that -- as Tim himself says -- there is darkness and light in everything.
@@lrinfi So what's the Scandinavian catch? Tbh, @kaptenteo painted a pretty appealing picture.
@@Al1987ac Too much to sum up. I'd suggest looking it up. There is a lot of literature out there on the subject.
@@Al1987ac I might have added that the work of Jonathan Haidt is as good a place as any to start.
@@lrinfiI'll look him up.
Hi Tim! I just wanted to say that I’ve been loving all of your videos since I found you in my recommended. I love your work and just wanted to say thank you for sharing your perspectives and insights of designing games and the industry as a whole.
This channel is fascinating! Thank you for the insight!
Thanks again Tim for your daily talks ❤
Part of the reason I love these uploads is because they keep building on different themes. Very amazing content and I'm hooked.
I absolutely agree. Crunch itself isn't necessarily bad, provided you're compensated for it, and there's limits around how much of the development cycle includes it. Even if the industry doesn't unionize, there should definitely be regulations around overtime. I'm pretty sure basic labour laws should cover that, but "salaried" jobs always seem to somehow skirt those rules.
Most industries in the US have a busy season where people are expected to work overtime. Kind of how it is unless there’s a major economic or cultural shift.
And as Tim don’t think a union will protect you from crunch, my last union job I was compensated extremely well for overtime but still could be mandated to work 60 hours a week throughout the year if necessary.
But at least you got reimbursed adequately, while game developers do not. Unions would improve the situation.
@@IronKreiselabsolutely. It would be a start for sure.
The problem is that game development crunches because they're running out of money... I don't think they would have the extra money to pay double or even 150% overtime?
With union, it forces managers to make sacrifices much earlier and wisely. If they don't, then the project will likely fail with no recourse.
@@alexfrank5331 Record profits are being made, they are just not being distributed fairly. They can try making games without developers..
Employees in the US also have fewer rights than in Europe. It should never be a "season". A day, a couple - that's fine. But you can't expect a person to work overtime for longer than a week.
I really appreciate the nuance and experience here. I don't have experience with games, but a lot of this rings true for the time I spent doing video work in the 00s and 2010s. From what my wife has said about nursing, this is not limited to creative or tech fields either. There's an understanding that projects are difficult to scope and that the best laid plans will sometimes go awry, but when someone is asking for an extended commitment all the time and not providing any incentive, it becomes too much, even if its something you love to do. I really like the idea of mandatory time off, overtime incentives (ideally some combination of the two).
I’m fallowing your channel since a couple of weeks, I‘m super hyped when I see you post something about your work experience. Super interesting. I would eat a broom to get an Autogramm from you…
Please keep making those videos, it's extremely interesting
Unionization in the game dev industry is long past due! Love your videos and stories Tim!
Personally I believe that unionization in all industries is long past due. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
@@Wuzhles some industries have begun a while ago. Videogames are one of those industries that people don't take seriously unfortunately.
Yep. He could have left it at "we're being exploited by publishers with unreasonable expectations".
@@LordHengunThat wouldn't actually cover all the bases of the subject of crunch though.
@@Wuzhlesmaybe you've had primarily positive experiences, but from my own its hardly a panacea.
this isn't an endorsement of worker exploitation, merely hope for many more alternative solutions
Super interesting video, thank you Tim!
Fantastic video! It's great to see pro-union content.
May I ask a quick question related to game-design? Do you have any rules of thumb related to hit points for player characters? At least in the start of the game. I understand it depends on a lot of factors. I'm just looking for any tips I can get.
I hope he answers for you. Depends what your game is. Mario made due with 1-2 HP, Link 3+, MMX had about 20 (may've been more like 6-10). In JRPG's, it's not too unlike for enemies to take 2-3 hits to go down. You can use HP as a buffer for player mistake, and sort of calculate how long you want a particular experience in a game to last. Reddit's Game Design had some decent thoughts on Dealing damage in a game.
Great video Tim, very interesting - and thanks for Fallout !- massively transformative in my life.
Hey Tim, thank you for the video as always.
Thanks for this take, I've crunched a lot back in the day and I would never call all of it "bad". There's a world of difference between crunch dictated by management and overtime driven by one's passion for the project.
I love your content Tim! I have a question but I don't know if you can or even would answer but in your experience is it true that games with Female Protagonists were usually a no no back in the earlier days of gaming? I know the majority, if not all your games have a character creator, but I was just wondering because there's always been talk about how games with a female lead are harder to "sell" and was interested in your opinion.
Awaiting Tim's response if he has one, but I doubt it was as much a "no-go" as a reflection of attitudes of the time and personally suspect that's because -- in the early days -- creating and playing video games was widely looked upon as something along the lines of a "boys and their toys" kind of thing. So, games were largely designed accordingly. I imagine the industry was pretty surprised to find that's not actually the case. For the longest time, statisticians insisted that the audience for video games and, especially, video games that involve combat or violence of any kind, were predominately young and male. Some still do, but the very idea slights both men and women, all of whom are expected to conform to a gender role with specifications they must adhere to or else.
I get the impression the industry is beginning to realize this. I'm female and have no issue playing a male protagonist. In fact, it's afforded me a little insight on what it must be like to be male in our society. I also have no issue whatsoever with violence and combat sequences in video games unless it's obviously, purely gratuitous because it essentially represents the concept of internal struggle or strife, which is the meaning of Jihad and other spiritual terms for it. That's why we love stories such as LOTR, which is pretty obviously about the struggle between the denizens of Middle Earth and the agents of Sauron. How are you going to tell that story without epic battle sequences?
Plenty of games had female protagonists back in the day
@@haveanotherpinacolada Riiiight. Thankfully, It's not as much a concern today given character creators allow players to play any gender, ethnicity, etc. they like unless the protagonist is prewritten in which case male protagonists still outstrip female and other protagonists by a large margin.
I've not been as concerned myself with *whether* females have been portrayed as with how. I actually started playing male characters because I couldn't stand the juvenile portrayal of female characters, but especially the insipid noises they made. Even today, a great many female characters in video games are of the "voluptuous" (and baby-voiced) variety. Sexual objectification was and still is very much a thing in many games just as it is in every other form of media and it's not like the same thing, but polar opposite, isn't true for male characters who are generally portrayed as Rambo-like tough guys. That's just a reflection of longstanding "gender roles" we're expected to conform to whether they fit us or not.
The Mass Effect series did this right just as the Alien franchise did it right. The way to write a good "female protagonist" is simply to write a good protagonist. Ridley Scott very likely had a male actor in mind when casting the character of Ripley, but most of the actors in the original Alien weren't actually hired to portray the characters they auditioned for initially. Instead, Scott matched them up with the characters they played according to which he felt best suited each role. In other words, it wasn't a "token" gesture on Scott's part for the main protagonist of Alien to be female. Very simply: Sigourney Weaver walked in; owned the role of Ripley; and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history.
I know there's a lot of controversy raging over gender right now, but the aforementioned "gender role" expectations would be why.
Sir I side with you 100% on this.
It seems like overtime, whether motivated by passion or forced by management, is generally bad for people’s productivity and overall well-being. I would think the health of my teams and overall diminishing returns would be motivation enough to choose reducing scope or moving out timelines, over choosing to crunch. I understand not everyone feels the same way though.
That's what several studios are doing. For example, as far as I know that's what Mike Bithell is doing, taking responsibility for the mistakes of his company. Is one of the many gamedev veterans who are saying "crunch is always (or almost always) the fault of management", and he's been doing gamedev for what, 15 years now? And he has shipped 8 titles.
But again, crunch is more than just overtime.
Estimates are often Guesstimates and when management puts pressure on you to make them smaller they'll become what I call "Wisthimates".
That is the sure path towards Crunch in any (software) development project.
I think one of the worst instances of crunch being imposed on one of my teams was with platform compliance. Various platforms at one point had their own list of compliance rules we had to adhere to (they probably still do, but I've been out of game dev for a while now.) Fail to adhere to these rules, and they won't let you publish on that platform, pushing the project closer to being delayed. This one particular game I was working on was repeatedly rejected on one of these platforms. The worst part about it was when we were testing this ourselves, we considered ourselves to be adhering to those rules. We were pressed into a crunch phase, but couldn't do anything about it. Our only solution was to keep trying to submit builds and hope that one would get through, or somehow wrangle clearer definitions so we could fix the supposed compliance failure. Bizarrely the former was the one to eventually succeed.
Sony or Nintendo😂
@@plaidchuck Microsoft is also an option. But I probably shouldn't say which of these it was. I've had "Fun" with compliance testing with all of them, but only one of them seemed to have a puff of madness causing us to have a forced crunch.
I love hearing about people's experiences in different job types. It is wild, I would be livid if some company expected me to slave myself to their unreasonable desires/expectations.
I like Marty O'Donnell's "goose" analogy where execs and leads will essentially work their teams to near breaking points. We seen this with Bioware's Anthem where there were reports of devs having mental breakdowns and panic attacks during the workday, and one confirmed suicide. Something like that should never be allowed. And while I do agree that developers are passionate and want to work on their games, they shouldn't be EXPECTED to do such things. If there is a dev that has a family and they need to be with their family, they shouldn't be guilted into working extra hours because this dev doesn't share the same "passion" as the rest of the team.
But bad apples like Bioware are overshadowing the good companies like SuperGiantGames, Klei Entertainment and Larian Studios, which have very loose crunch and everything is voluntary.
I'm always, ALWAYS, against government intervention. But I do not see any way to solve this issue beyond the government getting involved. The big game companies have proven again and again that they cannot and will not self-regulate. There needs to be a strict rule regarding crunch, what is accepted and what is not. We can't have another Anthem.
In most of Europe, overtime *has* to be paid extra, union or not. And you also can't fire anyone over not complying to overtime.
Great perspective and rationality. The game industry needs unions.
I'm guilty of overusing "bad management" as a hyperbole and makes it sound like a blame-game.
It should be more about knowledge and experience, and videos from industry veterans goes a long way to increase the amount of knowledge available to be learned.
I would also love to see managers share their solutions to seemingly impossible problems. For example:
Overpromise and underdeliver to be competitive? Yup. Though I've seen a older producer who promised big features to the man with the wallet, but he had the developers focus on the realistic core product, and just handwaved/fudged the embellishment. At the end, it all worked out, so I image he would say something like "It's a bummer that the technology just isn't ready for [overpromised nonsense] that you were so excited about, but our product was completed on-time and on-budget. It made a big return on your investment. Let's aim for the star again next project?"
It's all too common that manager lie about progress. Seeing a manger who essentially used their "abilities" for good such that everyone ultimately wins... That's when I started thinking about managers differently.
"properly compensated" is the key, always
As far as Temple goes, Paladins, Druids, and Bards are core rulebook material. Wouldn't've made sense to leave them out.
It's interesting that you bring up the movie industry, since it's a perfect example of how to drastically reduce the chance of crunch. In the movie industry the end of production is often set to happen half a year before the release, and it's common practice to have finished everything in regards to distribution, potential fixes etc at least 3 months before the movie is finally released. Ofc for videogames half a year would often not be enough, but if publishers would be willing to have some patience and be willing to sit on finished games from time to time (which they obviously don't) crunch could be drastically reduced.
love your videos
Ditto
It's fine to do overtime out of passion on your project. It's not fine to force workers into extra hours with no recompense. Europe has good laws for it, you practically pay your workers twice for overtime. US has obvious problems with employee rights.
As for the management thing, I kinda throw publishers into the management bracket because they often micromanage projects and mostly add problems. Either way, overworking people isn't a moral solution.
Thank you Tim ❤
this video deserves WAY more views
Thanks for answering my question.
Honestly, I would love to see a video about Arcanum and what exactly would you change/cut in hindsight.
Aaaand, unions in every industry would benefit everyone.
You're right, unions in game development need to be a conversation. This video has legs beyond this group of us here out of professional and personal respect for you, the picket lines in LA and New York wouldn't hurt from the legs this industry has out there showing support. Mobilizing a show out would be noticed, and the last 3 minutes of this could air on Good Morning America as is, Tim. While it would effect game publishers industry wide for Microsoft it's a win-win. They aren't invested in the film production space and their two direct competitors are.
The other win is the PR and bragging rights to have one of their own leading that charge and demonstrating their being receptive to the idea.
Sometimes you drop those videos that innocently end up in the category "real talk" lol. I like those videos :D
I'd argue that publishers pushing for unreasonable deadlines also count as bad management, just not inside the studio.
Though, from their point of view, squeezing extra work out of a studio is probably considered "good", as it maximises their profits.
It's not technically management, but I think many people who make blanket statements like that would include what basically amounts to the investors not being willing to spend enough money to make the game without expecting the developers to crunch.
Great knowledge!
100% for unions in gaming. Mandatory overtime is such a strange thing for any employer to demand if it's not life saving work.
Also took this video title as a reminder that my doctor said to exercise more and did... crunches!
Chrunch isn’t bad if you enjoy what you are working on.
i liked this one. i could feel the catharsis :D
Absolutely the most reasonable take. Many professions require awful periods of over work. The answer here is making certain overtime is paid even to salaried employees. Not only is it just more fair, it serves as a powerful built in incentive to only use crunch when there's simply no other option.
It also will make publishers more likely to do a cost benefit analysis between crunch and delays.
As less and less game sales are boxed delays will become easier and easier logistically. At which point the trade offs will be purely financial.
Itll be a simple math equation weighing cost of delay vs cost of a ton of overtime.
Agreed. Btw I love your name.
I think a lot of this comes from the American work ethic. Even those Americans who do recognize crunch is bad and should be avoided will make excuses for it. I know. I was such an American.
I'm currently living over seas and my entire career has been made up of studios that made an effort to avoid crunch, and not all of them have succeeded for all sorts of reasons. (incidentally, I think one additional reason crunch can happen is because young employees who have more free time, energy, and passion are willing to volunteer themselves to work extra hours off the books because they are that committed - that's a whole other topic though). Of the projects I worked dedicated to avoiding crunch, the only ones that succeeded, were the ones that made made it a top priority. this includes game jam projects as well as multimillion dollar projects that I worked on for years.
I can have projects without crunch, but you have to accept that not every feature you want will get in, and in some cases, the quality of a feature won't be as high as you would like. Or maybe it means pushing the deadline back and spending more money. It's all about trade offs what what trade offs you are okay with. It is very rare though that a project never has crunch, but I know it can happen and you can still release a quality product.
Now to watch part 2! Great videos as always!
this is the most amazing video you've done. NOW PLEASE VTMB x3 :D
Sorry i love commenting on your vids. Its interesting how we quantify the creative folks and the creative process, like there is objectivity, but... I don't know. I guess the folks with the money want you to make a life changing pieve of art or media in 24 hours.
Who dictates the release timeline for any title? Setting a hard external deadline is KNOWN to guarantee the need for crunch. Therefore all of the reasons (difficulty scoping, estimating time, engine bugs, etc.) still do no thave to result in crunch if a hard external deadline hadn't been set by the publisher or management.
if a design team overscopes, if devs work at an inconsistent rate and they cant complete the work in time without crunch and you cant afford to pay the devs more money for more time, or hiring extra devs, or if you let investors talk you into more features, not walking away from deals when you should, not cutting corners to match the pay and time you have available, not becoming the bad guy telling devs no, yes these all 100% come back to bad management. I can empathize and identify with the self exploitation startups demand of themselves, im doing that now, but asking anyone else to sacrifice work life balance, add to their burnout, trade their time with their families for your products quality, thats all managements failing.
Great videos
I imagine crunch is also the result of an industry that is ultimately filled with perfectionists, as is probably necessary just to get modern games to even work.
Ah, right, so the problem isn't bad management, it's capitalism, gotcha. I'm being tongue-in-cheek, but also dead serious. If the conclusion is that we need unions (and I 100% agree with that), i.e. institutions run by workers for workers that run counter to the interests of the business owners, then yeah, the implication is that the system itself leads to crunch (and other indesirable situations). In that sense, I agree that saying "bad management" is always the problem is too general, but I'd argue too narrow also. A good manager by themself cannot singlehandedly counter the flaws of the system within which they, like anyone else, are working. I will say though, I don't think I've seen many people literally argue that ALL crunch is down to bad management, or that crunch is due to bad management ONLY. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention though, that's possible. Rather, I'll see a brief statement like "bad management causes crunch". It's pithy, it's a bit too generalized and vague, sure, but what I read it into that kind of claim really is "bad management is the number one cause we need to look into when it comes to crunch", and I feel you can definitely make a case for that.
Lastly, people might get sloppy and "unreasonable" in their statements sometimes, true, but when you're being exploited to death by your employer, what are you to do? If business owners are being unreasonable in how they treat you, why would you give them the benefit of nuanced/reasonable takes? They sure won't extend you that courtesy.
Ugh! This video was far TOO reasonable -- so much so that i have nothing to flame about -- and this makes me ANGRY! CAAAAAAAIIIIIN
This is probably such a naive question, but what is the deadlining factor?
Like: if the crunch is necessary to do 80 hours, what is the reasoning behind doing one 80 hr week instead of two 40hr weeks?
Is game dev salary not tied to the hours worked? Does managment not know the 80hrs over 2 weeks are "more bang for buck"?
Like if a book is late, a book is late. If a game is late a game is late.
The only thing I could think of is marketing opportunities (we have ad spots booked, we want to be at that demo-event etc.).
Thank you for this insightful video. I agree that with the current structure of games production, with set expected dates of delivery, and with the complexity, or impossibility of making a fixed plan for a project that will survive contact with work, there has to be crunch, or at the very least sizeable downscoping. Programmers in other industries have faced the same problems and have started advocating for working with no estimates, showing that estimating work and planning for the estimates often costs a lot more than simply working on the project. Do you think something like this could come to the games industry? Is there already something like this?
I have worked for a long time with teams that don't use traditional estimates, and I can tell you that it's not as simple as stopping to use them. You have to have something to replace them, which at least in part is flow metrics. Avoiding crunch is very much about culture and management model, including technical practices.
I can’t make a good estimate to save my life. I looked at a feature and said it would take two days, it took six weeks.
But that's just how it is, no?
The ones who make the decision take responsibility. And yes, ofc as a team member I can only provide the owner a list of options and make them decide instead of me, it's not about every little thing in the code, but I simply don't have the full picture, the context all that stuff is hidden behind product owner abstraction for me so there's no other way to come to them for the decision that they should make based on the context available to them.
It's a creative product, run at the top by people who aren't creative and whose only love is money. It's inherently at odds this relationship. Also, they know how to, and abuse, 'passion' for their monetary benefits.
I don't have a lot of experience.... But my answer is usually no.
If I was a lead, I'd tell them to write it down and we'll put it in the backlog and look it over when it comes up.
Then if we have time we will actually look at it.
usually.
but not always.
good message...... weird coincidence hearing this again...
Those movie industry workers benefits are standard law here in Germany. Only a libertarians dream would submit workers to the whims of companies. They don't have enough of a voice to ever enforce those rules alone, there's way you get paid without regulations or unions. Always demand compensation and rest times or you will literally break apart. Btw, crunch here in Germany is 48 instead of 40 hours, all of which paid/reimbursed with time. You cannot legally work more than that. If you almost cannot crunch, you have to manage better or go under. Very effective!
How many major games are made in Germany? Name them.
I'm so jealous of the students that got to be in your Programming Classes.
Unions mean no crunch mean even worse products when flash incidents arise.... Anthem was a result of EXTREME anti-crunch policy. In the end they had to crunch for 7 months straight to get it done due to avoiding crunch.
Yeah, unless you are 100% sure, you should usually use "almost always" when you want to say "always".
What bugs me is when crunch happens and leadership is like "it was inevitable" or "it's your fault" when it was clearly stated early on that X was impossible to do that way from the get go, and every week was a reminder of it. They knew.
Thanks for sharing! Jumping off this video topic, I would love to hear if you had any thoughts on the training of new employees or those who are newly promoted.
Perhaps there are ways to set expectations early on to avoid time wasters or the fallout from rejecting someone's ideas, etc.
What was your experience training? What would you like to see, if anything? 🙂
It’s always management’s responsibility. That is after all why they think they deserve the high salaries.
Fallout seems like it would be hard to scope.
An RPG with 8 or more locations with hundreds of NPCs. 15 guns,perks skills. Tons of dialogue....
I've heard crunch be blamed on bad management so many times that I just took it at face value. It's typically said by people who cover games rather than those actually making them, so it's nice to hear the other side from someone with so much experience working in industry. Now I have a video to point people towards whenever they just parrot what they have heard games' media people say on a podcast or whatever.
Unions are good in the short term and bad in the long term.
Game development is an art. I completely understand the idea that you got to have deadlines and schedules, but for game development you can't schedule creative ideas. Trying to force creative ideas into forced schedules is probably gonna lead to some poor designs. Just getting into game dev and working along someone else, its fun and engaging being able to look at a feature or what not and be like should we do it like this, does this feel right in the game. Of course, its gonna come to the point where its either like lets give this feature a chance to sit for a bit, or just implement it as is and continue moving forward and see how it feels with other features.
Sadly, most devs can't code on the level of John Carmack
Dang. I hear there is so much difficulty pinning down scope-creep. It’s so hard to manage the insane amount of details needed to ship a video game on time. Thank you so much for your insight and valuable expert opinion, Tim. The one question I have is: who is Bill Cosby? I’m asking for a friend. He doesn’t speak English, and he has no idea how to use one of those google machines. Please let me know.
sometimes the publisher or the PR guys tell you there's some event 6 weeks from now your game needs to have a demo or whatever for and there's just no way to do it without crunch. ask me how i know >_> and they're usually right! so what do you do? you crunch
I assume that many gamedevs are also gamers and what gamers dislike the most is when stuff does not feel fair. And fairness means that if you put in the work, you get part of the loot. If you hear stories from the 90ies of teams crunching towards a now legendary classic and afterwards they get a ferrari, that's a nice story of putting in the work and getting a reward. In the last decade, Minecraft boss Notch was known to share the success with his team. That's a nice story of putting in the work and getting a reward.
But then there's the other stories about people working lots of hours, and then they get fired and Bobby Kotick gets all the ferraris. That does not feel fair.
In my regular devjob, working overtime happens, because shit goes wrong. But because we have labour laws, we get paid for every hour. And because we get paid, there is no monetary advantage for management to make us work unpaid overtime.
Some countries allow it that you work for 80 hours while getting paid for 40 hours.
So, do some companies plan to use unpaid overtime to get free work? I don't think anyone plans for missing deadlines. But...How often does something need to happen to see a pattern?
So if a big publisher does the 50th game in row with massive unpaid overtime followed by record profits, is there a point where we can assume that some of that is on purpose because wages are a cost factor and getting lots of work for free has economic value?
Something being "unavoidable" does not make it desirable.
"Oh, it's just part of gamedev, if you can't deal with it, fuck off weakling" ..oh eff off ^_^
I'm glad I'm only the guy who comes to your office and talks with you about the meaning of life... and you think "how did we even get into this??? it's been hours" .... But hey, at least I didn't talk you into a feature that could potentially derail the schedule for multiple people on the team, only yours for that day, lol
Nothing Tim says here feels wrong.
But I think there’s also an issue of insider-outsider communication with that wording.
Many people who have used the statement at issue, that I’ve seen, are actually talking about the people providing the funding when they say “management”.
Like with CDPR and Cyberpunk, where they are intertwined, or even external publishers.
So the statement often should have become “publishers/funders need to accept the risks inherent to the business and be less tight-fisted when things inevitably don’t go as planned.”
That means being a lot more willing to go over budget and over time.
And yes; if crunch is necessary, then make it humane.
Forcing people to work without proper rest for anything more than extremely short sprints is incredibly inefficient anyway, as far as the research I’ve heard on it anyway.
It still doesn’t completely excuse the categorical language, but it changes perspective a bit, I think.
I’m immensely enjoying these videos btw.
Every comment I’ve made that don’t 100% align with Tim’s views, are the tiny grains of perspective compared to the sea of wisdom I accept as presented 😉
Wonderful to be given all this for free! I sincerely hope many budding developers find these videos.
So here is the problem, it doesn't matter what lead up to the point of a game studio being forced to crunch, because the decision to force crunch can LITERALLY ONLY BE DONE BY MANAGEMENT! Yes, there are an infinite number of things that can get in the way of production, but crunch is never actually required, but is an intentional decision made by people that have power over others and an incentive to force them to crunch. You might be in middle management and feel like you have no other choice but to crunch, but that is only because upper management already made the decision to create the situation where you would be forced to crunch. It doesn't matter if it is crunch or any other workplace abuse; whoever is at the top either forced it to happen or created an environment that allows it to happen.
Will you have Outer Worlds Cut Features video? Perhaps after sequel releases?
Is the crunch usually pre-release or after? If both:
Crunch *after* release:
- Is mostly just bugs (discovered by 1000s of ppl playing all of a sudden) right?
- I don't see how to get this resolved except using AI "player" as bug testers (future solution)
- I don't see this going away as games just get more complex, do you?
Crunch *pre-release*
- taking longer to release, could cut crunch in half
(even if it's not always possible to just plan for 6 extra months of dev time)
Could be wasteful if it turns out the extra 6 months wasn't needed.
But overall the "pre-release" crunch could be addresed, but the after-release seems almost impossible.
Hi Timothy, if you don't mind could you make a video about salaries in game industry and compare it to non-game dev salaries ? Are there any big gap continues ? I'd love to hear your thoughts about that !
I wonder if cut features in order to make deadlines can be revisited in dlc/expansions for games. 🤔
free tip: add crunch 2 link to description
5:54 oh boy, I haven't worked on gamedev, but that budget situation is uncomfortably familiar to me haha
I've encountered similar issues in the world of mechanical engineering/mfg haha
A big problem is also the corporate meddling, as stated do a thing at less then half the cost. It’s just not doable without putting unnecessary strain on the dev team…
Did you find that the risk of crunching is proportional to the average experience level of the individual devs and the degree of ambition of the project? Like if a team at an Obsidian is working on another Crpg using the eternity engine, could you confidently say you probably won't crunch?
You're the bad guy if (x), but then (w)
You're the bad guy if (y), but then (z)
sounds like you might as well roll 3d8 :)
In my opinion, work output estimation would need to become a required part of the discipline in all areas. I wish there could also be some objective measurements for poor managers who basically don't understand any of the professions of the workers they are managing...P.S. Damn does that Ferrari for the price of Toyota sound like a horror sign. Is it that common that some devs go around demanding their favorite features or they start talking shit about you, poisoning the work place? I need to believe this is not common or just the case with trouble-maker personalities.
When a game project doesn't have crunch, it's usually called "vaporware" and described as being in "development hell." There is no winning, it seems.
But have you tried using a cattleprod on workers?
Hospitals and nursing homes etc have "crunch" too. Many jobs do. How you account for it is everything.
Yea, my dad used to for for the water supply for the municipality and they had crunch too.
A classic management fail is the "jocks vs geeks" mentality. Management wants to hold a monopoly on strategic business thinking, rationalize their own existence, and thus block engineers out of any high-level planning discussions.
The startup and Indie games industries have shown that engineers are in fact capable of understanding and balancing the triangle. And when the layoffs come what's the ratio of engineers to non-engineers? ;) Good management and leads help engineers navigate the triangle; they don't just say "No" and "because I said so".
Crunching is completely out of fashion these days; particularly internally instigated crunches. Marketing campaign lead times can be very short in 2023. Users are more and more expecting releases "when it's ready", or on a regular cadence with "what IS ready". The false need for a flawless schedule is being exposed for the sham it is.
What you are describing are common factors for any large project. Moreover, software projects are much more flexible than hardware ones. I might remind you of budget and time overruns while the US was developing the F-35 fighter; I think you can look for them on the internet.
Consequently, I have a question: if these factors are common while only game development is notorious for crunches? I am sure Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon have crunches. I am sure SpaceX has crunches. I know that you are a game designer, so maybe it is not a question for you. However, why is there no outrage about inevitable crunches in other industries?
I would guess its because people see games as more trivial, they are more in the limelight, and the consumer base is more tuned in and more likely to be the type to complain.