This week's Jury Service hits deadline day
Recent developments and accusations have turned our Develop Jury to the topic of overtime, quality of life, and workers’ rights.
This week’s question is:
How damaging is crunch and overtime to studios and their projects?
There are a number of issues you can approach with your response, so we’ll leave it open to you.
Are crunch phases just part of the job? Is overtime a result of passion for your work, or is it an expectation placed on by the management? What impact does crunch have on the work atmosphere? What effect does it have on projects? Who’s to blame? Rising development costs? Financial risks? Poor management? Unrealistic deadlines? Publishers?
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All industry responses emailed to us will be published later in the week, like this.
You can of course speak anonymously, though we encourage open debate.
If you’re a developer or work in the game industry, email your response to rob.crossley@intentmedia.co.uk.
My PD just told me to bring a sleeping bag in. I wish I was kidding. FML.
It's the #1 problem in game development.
Its an ugly situation. A few nights is certainly managagable as you approach a build, but if its a culture, then its not on. Ive got kids and they have a father. Ive been in this industry long enough to understand that if a producer pushes the issue, they are covering their own bad planning. I stick 30 mins at the front, 30 mins lunch and an hour at the end. Finish no later than 6.30.
6.30? jeez, I dont usually finish at 6.30 on a normal day, never mind crunch time :)
I believe its the fault of poor planning and unrealistic deadlines.
The European Union Working Time Directive has been part of UK law since 1998 - utilise it ffs
/facepalm
The real issue is when the upper management schedules crunch as part of the normal dev cycle. Real crunch should be to handle unforseen circumstances. As we all know in game development this will always happen. If you schedule crunch is as part of the normal development cycle (wee! we get extra hours from the employees!) you end up with crunch hours ON TOP of scheduled "crunch" hours. This usually comes from producers and project managers who come from outside the industry where you can put out a half finished product and then patch it to death.
As developers we need to stop taking this abuse of "scheduled crunch".
