LinkedIn today is a terrible den of web3+ grifters, obsolete CVs, frog-boiling pressure to buy a subscription, and scurrilous journalists hunting for leaks in job listings. But every now and then it comes good. For example, there’s a discussion underway between various senior developers, including current and former staff of Remedy, Ubisoft and Naughty Dog, about the causes of crunch, aka ruinous overwork.
There’s a pervading atmosphere of former triple-A blokes warming up their soapboxes for a GDC talk down the line, and a certain amount of insider jargon about “pipelines” and so forth – somebody should probably do a piece on the etymology of “pipelines” in software development. But it’s otherwise a useful chat. There is minimal indulgence of the old saw about crunch being unavoidable because ‘passionate’ creative people are inherently prone to burning themselves out. The emphasis is on crunch as a structural phenomenon.
The chinwag’s instigator is Novaquark technical director John Walther, a former senior technical artist at Ubisoft, where he worked on the Anvil engine used by Assassin’s Creed and Ghost Recon. He kicks off with the hopeful assertion that “the big reason it’s so important for every studio to improve their pipelines and processes right now is because of the industry trending away from crunch.” Walther continues that “crunch has been used to make some of the biggest blockbuster AAAs but it’s not sustainable as it burns out dev teams” and as such, has been “universally rejected across the games industry.”
Less positively, he feels that “many companies are turning back to crunch as it’s the only way they know to find success”, with “pressure coming from publishers tightening their grip”. This may “work in the short term but the long term solution is improving pipelines and processes”. Walther argues that “scoping down” is “the easy and boring solution” to this. “I think we should continue to make ambitious games, we just need to work in a more efficient and organized manner.” I’m not sure I recognise the implied link between “ambition” and sheer production scale here, but I appreciate the sentiment.
People responding to the post include Robert Krekel, former audio director at Naughty Dog, who is now audio director at Atomic Arcade. “While crunch is often blamed on poor production, over-scoping, or broken processes which all absolutely contribute, there’s another factor that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough: ego,” he argues. “When you put a large number of high performers on the same team, there’s often an unspoken pressure to define what the ‘industry standard’ is in your specific discipline not because it’s required to ship the product, but because individuals want to be seen as the best at what they do by their peers. It’s an uncomfortable reality at studios like Naughty Dog. The studio attracts people with that mindset by design.”
As such, Krekel thinks studio managers need to both fix “broken processes” and “give people the autonomy to push boundaries, exercise real agency, and feel genuine pride in their work, while also putting guardrails in place to protect them from themselves.”
Going by his comments, I would suggest that Naughty Dog especially still need to undergo some more general reflection about whether they want to cultivate this behaviour from the point of recruitment onward. This is assuming a fair bit of good faith on the part of bosses and parent company Sony, of course. Naughty Dog have long had a reputation for crunch culture – they made headlines recently for requiring developers to work longer hours on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet in the run-up to Xmas.
Josh DiCarlo – former Insomniac Games principal character technical director, and current creative technology director of Persona AI – feels that “crunch is not a SCOPE problem, it’s – at its core – an institutional problem and it’s almost entirely avoidable.” He begins by comparing his experiences of game development to his time in the film biz, commenting that “I’ve worked on films from beginning to end that had virtually no overtime – I have never heard of a modern AAA title that didn’t have a soul crushing crunch period.”
“The problem is that solving crunch requires more than a verbal commitment from the studio to avoid it,” DiCarlo argues. “It requires buy-in and investment at ALL levels. To develop streamlined, holistic, automated pipelines that tackle asset publishing, versioning, and review material without reliance on individual contributors to follow elaborate processes. To enforce regular standardized reviews to buyoff and approve assets. To meticulously track development in a project and asset-centric way rather than a ticket centric one – and to have a financial consequence (i.e. OVERTIME).”
Some more context: Insomniac have seen their share of crunch, but they caused a stir back in 2021 for allegedly avoiding mandatory overwork during development of Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.
Remedy’s principal audio designer Ville Petteri Sorsa has the snappiest reply. “Crunch is the easiest workaround for failures in management and project planning,” he says. “It usually emerges as a response to financial pressure and deadlines that were never realistic to begin with.”
I’ve crunched myself for various employers. It has always been due to some combination of inadequate project structure, not enough resources to do work I’m proud of, and putting myself under unnecessary pressure to deliver quantifiable results.
My workplace experiences are very different from those of game developers labouring on just the one release for years, milestone to milestone, amid a changing industry. How about you? Any memories of crunch – or successfully avoiding crunch – to share? Some follow-up material: back in 2021, People Make Games ran a video about how even companies that avoid crunch may outsource it to studios overseas.
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