I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to success. We're talking about one of the most successful companies in Poland that you only know about because they managed to produce some of the most popular and profitable games ever created, and they didn't get to this point by letting developers and managers take their sweet time.
Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? Of course not... it was developed with just as much of a crunch, pressure and "inhumane working conditions" [1] as Cyberpunk 2077, but because it was a resounding success on all platforms, no one batted an eye.
The issues with Cyberpunk 2077 have next to nothing to do with crunch time, they simply tried to make a game for a platform that was never going to be able to support it, regardless of how much time they took. The game on PC is a masterpiece of technology, it looks and feels amazing and it's a resounding success. The failure on PS4 and XBox is because those platforms were still very large markets and they wanted to take advantage of them and well push come to shove, there's just no way of making the game play well on them.
That's all there is to this story, making a game for a platform that can't support it is going to be a failure. Now that Cyberpunk has failed, people will use that failure as a way to argue about things that likely have nothing to do with the cause of the failure, and you know maybe that's a good thing and better working conditions come of it... I don't know... what I do know is even if CD Projekt Red decides to change its working culture for the next game they make, there's dozens of other new game studios rising up and it may be the case that the only way for them to compete with the existing giants is to work day and night to the bone on making the next masterpiece.
> I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to success
Take a look at the development for the game Hades. They took their time and polished everything, even having a pre release game in steam and incorporating community feedback. Rushing is not the only option
Hades is a good game. You might enjoy it more than witcher 3. But it's multiple orders of magnitude smaller no matter how you cut it. If you want to build enormous games, you tend to need enormous effort.
That may be true, but it doesn't justify worker exploitation and abuse. Unless you'd like to claim that is the only way any large project gets done in any industry. Which would be a bold claim indeed.
What you call worker exploitation and abuse is reasonably well known about the game industry. Every one who gets into that industry either does so willingly, or otherwise with gross neglect.
What happens between consenting adults ain't anybody else's business.
Employers aren't adults, they are massively powerful corporations. Worker exploitation happens between one passionate programmer, artist, QA and a massive corporate organization that holds all the power and has no qualms about deceiving, badgering, shaming it's way I to what it wants.
Worker exploitation and abuse happens in many industries and was once the norm. It is in society's interests to prevent systematized exploitation of society's members.
"Consenting adults" is a fine heuristic for what happens in a private bedroom between individuals with equal power. It does not apply to for-profit exploitation done by organizations with special legal privileges. Privileges they have only because we see commerce as generally beneficial and to be encouraged.
Sorry, there's no way I'm spoon-feeding you the whole history of labor. Maybe read Loomis's "A History of America in Ten Strikes" as a starting point. And then maybe Beckert's "Empire of Cotton" for the broader, systemic view.
Supergiant Games is a wonderful studio and they do not have the same kind of crunch that is endemic to other studios. Having said that, I don't know that you can compare the development of a 2D game with a very constrained and linear progression to a massive open 3D world like Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. I love Transistor and Bastion, haven't tried Hades... they are great games and I look forward to whatever is next from them, but we're comparing a game that cost about 6 million dollars to make with a game that cost 400 million dollars.
While I appreciate your point and even agree to a large degree with your point, the stakes are very different between these two products.
> I don't know that you can compare the development of a 2D game with a very constrained and linear progression to a massive open 3D world like Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3
This is part of the issue I think. AAA games are so high flying in their technical and artistic scope, and they have all the business and power bullshit that comes from their now massive, 100mil+ budgets. Their failures are spectacular because when there is so much complexity inherent in the system and teams, lots can go unnoticed, and it falls apart in many different ways.
You can't even really compare the clean delivery of a AAA war shooter from 2005 with one from 2021 for example, the technologies and disciplines involved have grown so much.
From a far removed distance, it seems to me that you can create AAA game with good labor conditions, with enough time. But the underlying technology moves so fast and the expectations along with it that you end up requiring to do so much in parallel in lockstep to get it to ship early enough, and with this parallelism comes great cost when things inevitably crop up.
Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely a dramatically bigger game than Hades, but it also had 400+ people working on it for twice as long as the couple dozen Supergiant employees worked on Hades
Tons of high quality games were created with a lot of crunching and squeezing (e.g. pretty much all ID games). People think too much about 9-5 or 4-day work but what is much more important is give developers the FREEDOM to create contents. Of course flexible work hours is part of the deal but more importantly you need a management that understands the business and refrain from imposing unreasonable deadlines or requirements.
BTW I believe the best place for a game developer is something similar to ID before Activision. It's small and flexible, but not too small to develop big titles. Nowadays you might need some 50-100 developers for a big title but if you go over the number and/or go public the productivity and more importantly the focus is going to be lost.
>>Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it?
Are you going to tell me that The Witcher 3 was a success because it was released May 19th 2015 instead of October 24th 2015 or even May 19th 2016?
I'm not saying there should be crunch but there is limited money (no idea for The Witcher). If you get funding for X amount of money you calculate your salaries plus overhead and you have a deadline. Miss the deadline then you renegotiate for more funding but at some point the funders will just pull the plug and your team are out of jobs.
It's unrealistic to believe there's no reason for deadlines. For a FAANG company, sure, they're making so much money they can -- mostly -- afford to do things without deadlines but few video game studios are at a level of funding that they can spend another 3, 6, 12, months.
The internet claims Cyberpunk 2077 had 500 to 5000 people working on it. I'm sure that 5000 number is not full time but it's not hard to believe the 500 number. Just paying 500 people $15 an hour, 40 hours a week $1.2 million a month, not counting rent/power/taxes etc... And of course some large percent of those people are probably getting closer or $30 per hour $60k yearly salary) to $60 per hour ($120k a year salary)
Witcher3 claims 150-250 employees so your delay, shipping October instead of May is easily $4 million needed and I suspect that number is low. $12 million if it took an extra year as you suggested and that's a low-ball estimate.
In retrospect no, The Witcher 3 would have been a success even if it were delayed by a year. But consider that CD Projekt almost went bankrupt over the development of Witcher 2 due to costs and delays and that video games are an incredibly risky business. There's a saying that businesses don't fail because they're unprofitable, they fail due to cash flow issues. Development costs only go up, so the longer a game takes the more expensive every single day of development ends up costing. Even if the game would ultimately prove to be successful, the huge risk that comes from having to fund its continued development for an extended period of time can put a company in jeopardy.
That The Witcher 3 ended up being a massive success is great but it was never a guarantee.
While I agree on the sentiment, what would have happened if it had gone out on Jan 2017 or 2018?
Development cost at least doubles, the graphics would start to look dated relative to other titles. Competition with other open world action rpgs increases.
The people responsible for making it the game that it is would have moved on, and other ideas would have come into the dev cycle.
I think you are missing what the comments point was.
Cyberpunk could have been delayed again, but it still would have been bad. The Witcher 3 could have had less crunch and released a year later and been as much of a success, but the studio would lose way more money.
Labor is extremely expensive and a year more of labor isn't worth it, so they rush. It just worked that time.
Final Fantasy XIV was a massive failure. The original version 1.0 was buggy, tedious and not very fun. People still had fun with it, it wasn't New World levels of complete failure, but it did not live up to the brand. So they replaced the two directors, who had previously worked on FFXI, with one Naoki Yoshida. Naoki-san had perhaps the worst task he could ever have. He had to figure out a way to turn a burning trash heap of an MMO into something that could proudly carry the name Final Fantasy (and make real profit).
He spent three months just on planning the design for a completely new MMO to replace the current one. Then went to upper management and told them to choose - they could have him just manage the current game, fix the bugs and issues, and make it a really polished, but still fundamentally flawed game, that would never have the kind of audience like WoW, one that would forever tarnish the brand; or, he could make a completely new MMO from scratch in one year, while also supporting the existing one. They chose the latter. Today FFXIV is the world's most popular MMO.
The process of getting there has been documented in interviews and it is what Naoki-san says in this one [1], that I want to bring attention to. Paraphrasing, "we could only get there by aggressively cutting down features and micromanaging daily tasks for each employee, to the point that the tasks fit into a standard 8 hour work day, which generally has about 6 hours of actual work done, when you factor out meetings and breaks".
This is a man tasked with fitting 5 years of work into 1, while also supporting the existing product, and he didn't immediately reach for overtime. He absolutely worked himself to death, but he didn't push the team beyond their limits. It helps that he was an MMO fan and had a full design document for the game he wanted to build, but it still shows that with good management you can deliver a product better than everyone else while not doing overtime.
To be fair, 6 hours of actual work is still a bit more than I hit most days. Having to work at full capacity every day would still be straining, but nothing on the order of doing 12 hour days 6 days per week for months.
I'm sorry, the game on PC was a crappy bugfest. And as for being "impossible" on consoles... Isn't it effectively GTA in a different setting? GTA managed to run fine, and Cyberpunk could, but they weren't able to reach it.
It’s still super popular, more so than Cyberpunk and did all the stuff Cyberpunk shipped with, better, a long time before it. It does help that Rockstar have been basically working on making that kind of game for decades whereas CDPR haven’t.
GTA is a crappy bugfest as well, the graphics are very outdated, and the NPCs are quite limited in what they do; the world isn't realistic at all and frame rates routinely drop for no real reason. I haven't played Cyberpunk 2077 (yet), but I highly doubt it's as simple a game and as limited as GTA, which I have played a lot. I think it failed in part because they tried to port the game to those consoles, and it was just too complex for them, after seeing gameplay footage from it a while ago.
GTA V is rock solid, better written, better tuned, and more immersive than Cyberpunk. Of any mechanic I'm aware of that both games have, Cyberpunk's implementation is not as good.
Compare being chased by the police in GTA vs Cyberpunk for example.
really? it took a player upset with its very slow load times to figure out how the code works and made the loading times way better.... a very simple thing if you had the source code to do and devs never bothered, online is a horrible mess everyone cheats, first person game play they added is horribly with its massive input lag, let alone trying to get online was a joke.
GTA Online is a mess but offline is completely fine, and has a quite a bit of art to it whereas Cyberpunk's world just feels like it's barely keeping hold of the reigns.
The game is simply better made than Cyberpunk. It's not really a knock against CDPR, it's their first attempt up against rockstar, but there is simply not enough polish, not enough game design etc. For me to say anything else.
I wanted to love cyberpunk, but the moment I picked my faction and then was immediately funneled into the same story as everyone else it kind of set the tone for the rest of the game.
I sincerely hope they keep developing it but at the moment I can't bring myself to play at all vs. GTA which is very satisfying just to drive about a bit before I go to bed.
You can try, but so many games have been released half-finished, never subsequently completed via patches, and as a result sunk their studio and the whole franchise they were a part of. Games that should have become classics instead remain half-finished, mostly forgotten messes, and all the work those people put into the game are wasted in the long run. Why? To meet a holiday ship date?
This is so patently absurd that it goes against around a century's worth of knowledge and scientific research. "Spending more time on a task without rest does not get a job done properly" is not only commonly accepted, but it has been put to the test repeatedly in controlled environments and shown to fail, every single time.
The first link is filled with early-mid 20th century resources on this subject. The rest are all from the 80s - 00s because people... stopped studying this. Most of the studies covered the same thing, and it very quickly became an uninteresting problem in the field of Clinical Psychology because the answer was almost unanimously, unequivocally, "yes, this makes people output lower quality work product". It's one of the most settled problems in Psychology that exists in the modern day.
The only people still researching it are non-profits, and their research serves simply as advocacy, because otherwise businesses won't listen that this extremely, absurdly well-known and well-supported fact is true.
Select quotations from papers quoted in that article:
"In a national Australian survey, employee cognition increased for hours worked up to 25 per week. Beyond that, cognitive abilities decreased. By 60-hours of work per week, cognition was lower than people who weren’t working at all (Kajitani, McKenzie, & Sakata, 2016)"
"In a large study of 4 US-based companies, productivity losses related to fatigue were estimated to cost the employers $1,967/employee each year (Rosekind, Gregory, Mallis, Brandt, Seal, & Lerner, 2010)."
"Lost productivity due to presenteeism (being at work while ill) is almost 7.5 times greater than that lost to absenteeism (Employers Health Coalition, 2000, p. 3)."
"In a study of a large, multi-employer, multi-site employee population, health care expenditures for employees with high levels of stress were 46% higher than those for employees who did not have high levels of stress (Goetzel et al., 1998)."
"People identified as workaholics were found to have higher rates of ADHD, OCD, anxiety and depression compared with those who weren’t ranked as being addicted to work (Andreassen, Griffiths, Sinha, Hetland, Pallesen, 2016)."
What I'm curious about is, if you can only be max productive at X for maybe 25-35 hours a week, can you also be max productive at Y and Z for 25 hours each in the same week, and how different do Y and Z have to be from X and from each other for cognitive fatigue not to carry over from one to the others?
Cos if you can be max productive at 3 challenging but sufficiently different cognitive/creative tasks for 15-25 hours per week each, that sounds like a super fun, productive, efficient, sustainable, healthy, and balanced life
Assuming what you say is true, and the studies apply etc: what do you think makes game companies ignore this research?
If what you are saying is true, you'd expect game companies that follow the advice to have a much easier time recruiting people (for less money even, probably) and deliver better games quicker?
What's going wrong? Is everyone involved an idiot or evil?
Games companies aren’t ignoring this, many companies have no crunch policies and try to make work-life balance a priority. I’ve done zero crunch in the last decade working in games.
There are still people that don’t approach things rationally though. And there are ignorant people who get funding that run their teams extremely badly. There are also “evil” people who think crunch is necessary (forged through adversity etc) to make a good product.
I’ve heard more stories of long working weeks from tech startups than I have games recently. Loads of people posting here seem to regularly clock in long working weeks when the topic comes up.
I've not seen any study that shows what's happening so the answer to that is that I don't even know that they aren't outcompeting the bad ones. There is simply no information about that I've seen.
I'd think though that the factors affecting the success of a company is very complex and to boil it down to one point is insufficient when talking about competition within the multiple markets that comprise 'games'.
Existing games companies were founded early in the industry and have the money and existing capital to leverage on PR, tooling, staff, etc. They also have a constantly influx of non-burned-out people, mostly interns, who want a Big Company on their CV. Whereas smaller companies are able to create good games, but can't throw people at problems in the same way. Worth noting that it's mostly only specific teams of developers that get treated as disposable, and not the marketing staff, HR, or other executive branches.
A strong incentive to maintain appearances. Even if less hours meant delivering a better game quicker, it would probably be difficult to get buy in and you take a large reputational risk.
If you don't deliver a better game quicker the change of process (I.e. less hours) and by extension you, will probably be blamed even if there are other legitimate reasons.
> Even if less hours meant delivering a better game quicker, it would probably be difficult to get buy in and you take a large reputational risk.
I see that this would apply to _most_ existing game studios. But if what fao_ says is true, studios that are explicitly set up to take advantage of the research should easily out-compete those that don't?
I went over your articles and they don't make a particularly strong case against crunch time. The first one tries to use construction work and other physically demanding jobs as a proxy for productivity. I think it's fair that working construction or manufacturing jobs for 60 hours a week for an extended period of time will result in lower productivity. It would be nice if the article had something more specific to software development or some other form of creative or technical endeavor. That said, it also says that crunch time for short periods of time on the order of two to three months does result in increased productivity.
The article relating loss of sleep to loss of productivity is fair and robust, it's worth taking seriously.
The article relating suicidal ideation with work hours is devastating, but it's hard to see how it relates to your point since the highest percentage of suicidal ideation is among those working less than 40 hours (17.2% suicidal ideation). The study itself is in Korean so I am not able to dig too deep into it but there is a table on p342 which I think is pretty revealing. Basically what it shows is that suicidal ideation is highly correlated to one's level of education; people who have little to no education showing the greatest level of suicidal ideation whereas those with a college education have very little suicidal ideation. My suspicion is that those with little education either work very long hours, or work very few hours which is why suicidal ideation is bimodal. Those with a college education are most likely to work within the 40-60 hours a week which had the lowest suicidal ideation.
The research linked to jstor.org is behind a pay wall, but I managed to find another source for it at [1] and it contradicts your point. It specifically states that no difference was found among those working an 84 hour work schedule compared to those working a 40 hour work schedule, and I quote right from the study which I link to below:
"In conclusion, working of one's own free will on an 84-hour workweek schedule with physically and mentally demanding job assignments does not necessarily induce greater physiological strain than working with similar tasks on an ordinary 40-hour workweek schedule."
It appears the problem with working long hours is not the duration of time, but rather the manner in which those hours are scheduled. The article points out that when people are able to schedule their own extended hours, they perform as well as those who work a given 40 hour schedule, at least as far as their physiology is concerned.
All told, the arguments you presented should not be quickly dismissed and need to be respected, but they are not as strong you made them seem and certainly do not establish my point as being patently absurd. On the contrary one of your sources says that crunch time over short periods of time from 2-3 months can produce an increase in productivity, and another one of your sources says that working long hours is fine so long as one is in control of their schedule. It is somewhat strange that you'd present said sources while also claiming that I'm being absurd.
> The research linked to jstor.org is behind a pay wall, but I managed to find another source for it at [1] and it contradicts your point. It specifically states that no difference was found among those working an 84 hour work schedule compared to those working a 40 hour work schedule, and I quote right from the study which I link to below:
Yes, follow up on the citations (It was written in the 80s) and you'll find it quickly contradicted.
> All told, the arguments you presented should not be quickly dismissed and need to be respected, but they are not as strong you made them seem
As I already said, we stopped bothering to do psychological research on this en masse, because it's not an "interesting" problem -- it's mostly been settled that it's unequivocally a bad idea. The idea that you think that you can look at 5 links and suddenly emerge with a complete understanding is very interesting though! Those were left as breadcrumbs for you to follow up on that I could gather in the shorted time possible, not as the complete picture.
You had every opportunity to present whatever justification you wanted to establish the categorical nature of your argument, and you chose to post some fairly mixed evidence and then turn around and make it seem like I'm the one who's supposed to come out of this an expert with a complete understanding of the topic.
I think posting a few links that you likely didn't bother to read through yourself (given that one is behind a paywall and another is Korean) and then proclaiming absolute confidence and authority on a subject shows not only poor critical thinking skills on your part but also a propensity to discuss challenging topics in bad faith.
> Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it?
No, and it showed. Witcher 3 was a success because of previous games. 3 was a dissapointment for a lot of people, they took the Ubisoft formula of repetitive content and diluted the experience until I got bored after about 100 hours.
W3 was a huge financial success but the writing was on the wall and only people who did not pay attention where surprised at Cyperpunk disaster. They tried to force a good game out with W3 and even more so with Cyberbunk. The results where clearly different than W2 which I personally think was their peak - a human curated story pace that left you dreaming for more.
Compare this with GTA games. Rockstar knows you can't rush things nor can you force industry revolutions in AI over night. Slow and steady wins the race. To which company do you think will the investor money go next?
This was my personal experience as well. I discovered W2 by accident, and enjoyed it so much I pre-ordered W3. While I did have a great time, I personally didn't enjoy it as much. The various quests of varying quality clashed with each other as well as the rather weak, main plot.
Cyberpunk was a real let down for me and made me return my pre-order purchase : (
While it's great to see games/companies become widely recognized, I feel that it always slowly gets poisoned by investors.
Anyways, cheers all - stay safe.
Witcher 3 was the first of the series I played, and I enjoyed the writing and play-through so much I 100%'d the game and playing it again from beginning. There were lots of people like me who really enjoyed it, so saying it was a disappointment feels a bit weird.
I was hoping they’d do something more novel with the gameplay like break the fourth wall gameplay where I can hack the engine to hack the world; replace doors with walls, and characters would react to the state change appropriately. Like a god game in an FPS.
I’ve not played but I hear AI is still dumb af, it’s COD with a cliche Hollywood cyberpunk style.
Pretty sad our art is still tethered to 80s-90s fanboy stylings. I feel like the obligation for things to fit such a literal expectation constrains creators. Then again the stories coming out of the the dudes running these places. Egh
Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? Of course not... it was developed with just as much of a crunch, pressure and "inhumane working conditions" [1] as Cyberpunk 2077, but because it was a resounding success on all platforms, no one batted an eye.
The issues with Cyberpunk 2077 have next to nothing to do with crunch time, they simply tried to make a game for a platform that was never going to be able to support it, regardless of how much time they took. The game on PC is a masterpiece of technology, it looks and feels amazing and it's a resounding success. The failure on PS4 and XBox is because those platforms were still very large markets and they wanted to take advantage of them and well push come to shove, there's just no way of making the game play well on them.
That's all there is to this story, making a game for a platform that can't support it is going to be a failure. Now that Cyberpunk has failed, people will use that failure as a way to argue about things that likely have nothing to do with the cause of the failure, and you know maybe that's a good thing and better working conditions come of it... I don't know... what I do know is even if CD Projekt Red decides to change its working culture for the next game they make, there's dozens of other new game studios rising up and it may be the case that the only way for them to compete with the existing giants is to work day and night to the bone on making the next masterpiece.
[1] https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period...