I'm weird I guess in that I would just be happy having a desk job that pays well and isn't subjecting me to back breaking labor for minimum wages.
Before I start, I should say that this comment cracked me up because it's pretty much the exact opposite of Office Space :P
Anyway; I see this sentiment echoed whenever this thread comes up. Someone says "These people should be grateful to have any job at all" and it's usually followed by someone else saying "If they don't like their job they should quit" - which I think shows a remarkable lack of empathy and a very shortsighted view of how employment actually works, and what crunch actually involves.
I've worked in VFX (computer graphics for films) for almost 10 years and we share a lot in common with the games industry when it comes to studio workflow and ethics, and as someone who has also done the "12 hours a day, 7 days a week" crunch for months on end, I feel pretty comfortable voicing my opinions on it here. To say it sucks is an understatement. It's a severe psychological mindfuck; It makes people manically stressed, depressed, borderline suicidal. People can't quit because these jobs often don't pay a lot, they don't have enough savings to be unemployed, and like me they're often working abroad (because work is so limited back home) which means to quit is to pack up their lives and move somewhere else, assuming they found another job which matches their incredibly specialist skillset. That's OK if you're a young 20-something with no responsibility, but what about people with families, kids, mortgages, responsibilities? Sometimes it's easier to stay in a shitty stressful job rather than uproot your entire life and subject your family to the uncertainty; these people are effectively trapped and their employers know that and take advantage of it; "If you don't work all this unpaid overtime then your short contract may not be extended" and "there's no promotion for you unless you're working harder than everyone else" - and despite that, all it takes is one delay, one budget cut, one poor client review, and suddenly there's a mass layoff and everyone is gone regardless of how hard they worked. That's incredibly stressful, and we haven't even got started on the actual work conditions! Most of the artists are working in dark rooms (with colour-corrected monitors), and when you work 12 hours a day in the winter months you get out so late that it's already dark, so you can go weeks without seeing the sun (pretty depressing regardless of everything else!). When you get home you're too tired to do anything other than eat and fall asleep - you don't even have the energy to watch tv and playing videogames reminds you so much of your job that the idea disgusts you. Your eyes burn from constantly staring at a monitor in a dark room, people develop back problems from being stuck at a desk for such long periods of time. And after a few weeks of crunch people are so tired they start losing their professional composure. Even the friendliest people snap at one another. People shout during everyday conversations, lock themselves in the bathroom to cry, and are generally emotionally exhausted. The office turns into a horrible place that you dread walking into, the staff are zombies. And when you escape, when your friends and family ask what you've been up to lately you can only say "nothing" because you've done literally nothing but work 12 hours a day for weeks - so you start feeling shut off from other people. You feel dull. And you can't do anything about it, because the project still isn't finished and you're still working this weekend.
Last time I got out of crunch I was considering resigning. It took me two weeks to decompress before I stopped feeling irritable and inexplicably angry and fed up with the entire shitty system. I decided to stay, but not everyone does. Some people do exactly this:
@frodobaggins: I would tell them to go fuck themselves, I'm going home. Then I would never work in the game industry again.
And that's completely understandable, but the result is that the industry is bleeding talent. People get burned out and they leave, and they take their experience with them. And high-quality game design isn't like working at a fast food restaurant, you can't just hire some kid straight out of college to fill the gap.
@bigsocrates: The issue with a lot of big software projects like this is that adding extra staff typically won't lead to an immediate increase in productivity and in fact often decreases productivity for some period of time.
It's the so called "mythical man-month" conundrum. In theory, if one programmer can complete X amount of work, then two programmers should be able to do 2X, three could do 3X, and so on. However, pretty much anyone that's worked on a project of any kind can see that's impossible.
Adding more programmers to a project that's behind schedule will often just delay it even more. There's time required to on-board and get the new employees up to speed with your big complex piece of software, and there is now some additional communication overhead because someone else needs to be in the loop on every conversation.
It's much easier for these companies to get a quick short-term boost to their productivity by just forcing their current employees to work insane hours. In the long term though, once that rubber band snaps back in the other direction, the detrimental impact to the mental and physical health of the employees as well as plummeting office morale will start to kill the project. A lot of people will leave for another job and the people that stay will be broken.
^^^ This is definitely true. Unfortunately it doesn't hold up in the Epic example because they're in perma-crunch, which means it's constant and not about hitting a single deadline. So this is literally just Epic treating their employees like shit to save money. As though they're short of it.
I've worked at a bunch of studios around the world and I've been involved in meetings with producers where people have been talking about crunch before the project has even been started - they plan for this and build it into their schedules. It's not a last resort, it's a tool to utilize at a fundamental level. These companies plan to knowingly subject their employees to everything I've talked about above. And that's why the game development industry is fucked, and that's why we should be fucking outraged that this is still happening.
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