With a lot of work in the gaming industry being remote for over a year now, game developers from several studios have opened up about how working from home can lead to unintentional crunch. Crunch has become synonymous with less-than-desirable business practices at game studios. Typically, crunch is a time period in development where workers are expected to work grueling hours in order to release a game on time. The practice has been widely panned by the gaming community and many of the industry. The controversy gained more traction this past year when despite crunch, Cyberpunk 2077 had a very buggy launch.
Crunch affects most of a studio to some degree, but programmers often take the brunt of it. Because there are so many interwoven components of a game and thousands upon thousands of lines of code, fixing one bug often means introducing several others that then need to be fixed. Over the past few years, many video game companies have stopped forcing their programmers into crunch. Almost universally, the idea of meeting a deadline has been deemed less important than the mental health of developers.
However, several interviews conducted by The Washington Post have brought to light unintended crunch that actually comes from the developers themselves. Chad Grenier, director of Respawn Entertainment’s Apex Legends says, “We’ve got a team of ‘the person that’s afraid to let everyone else down.’ So what you end up with is a bunch of closet crunchers.” Game developers are driven people, and it seems these sorts of traits and issues have come to the forefront with the introduction of remote work. Mojang Studio’s chief storyteller, Lydia Winters, goes on to discuss how “it’s just easy to continue working,” when one is already at home.
According to Winters, mental health has become a major topic at Mojang as personnel have moved their jobs to their homes. In the same spirit, Respawn and Riot Games, the team behind League of Legends, have offered an abundance of paid time off to their employees to ensure they’re mentally well and motivated. Remote work isn’t for everyone, to say the least. However, this long struggle with COVID has opened up future possibilities in business. Now that an entirely remote studio has proven to be possible, companies will likely be more open to hiring remote workers in the future. Respawn “has hired more people than will fit into [their physical locations]” according to Grenier. Electronic Arts’ senior vice president, Marija Radulovic-Nastic, claims that EA sees that in the future, they can also look towards remote workers. “We can find talent where the talent is…” says Radulovic-Nastic.
Remote work will no doubt become an increasingly interesting topic as people return to their in-person jobs. Radulovic-Nastic’s statements really open up the idea of getting more people opportunities in the industry. It’s no longer unlikely to think a supremely talented developer from the other side of the country, or even the world, could become an important member of a studio. However, with new examples of self-inflicted crunch, it’s hard not to wonder whether or not the potential mental health risks are worth it. Furthermore, while most of the gaming community and industry has stood up against crunch, there’s still an argument many make that crunch is a necessary part of the industry anyway. These many facets of the discussion leave much to explore in the near future.
Source: The Washington Post