Crushing an industry: Crunch culture and its effects on videogame developers

Crunch culture has run rampant in the videogame industry in recent years, and with the recent release of two games on the different ends of the quality spectrum in ‘Redfall’ and ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’, its effects are once again in the limelight.

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” – Shigeru Miyamoto

A toxic work environment can be created by many things, but when it’s created by the work itself, it can feel claustrophobic. In the videogame industry, the work cycle can be brutal especially around deadlines, as crunch culture rears its ugly head.

Chris Green, famous for his programming work at Valve said: “In almost all games there is a final crunch to get it into shippable form, which might last anywhere from a month to something awful like a year.

“When its minor, people are usually okay with it, and voluntarily work the extra hours because they care so much about the quality of the game.

“It may manifest itself as anything from staying late a few nights a week to sustained periods of 80 hr workweeks. At its worst, the strain can really burn out people, or make them quit.”

When burnout happens, work quality understandably drops with it. Without that passion, that fire, producing one’s best work is unfeasible in any profession.

But videogame developers are seen as “hyper passionate people” making project’s they’re “hyper passionate about”, making the effects of crunch culture even more damning. That’s according to Blake Hester, senior associate editor of Game Informer.

Blake continued: “You know, perfectionism does come up a lot.

“I do think there is at the very least, a baseline strive for a high level of quality.”

“It’s kind of this like vicious cycle right. Or two philosophical heads butting up. You want a quality project but if you overwork people, you don’t really get that. The work you do when you first wake up at 10 a.m., it’s going to be a lot better than the work you do at 2 a.m. after working for 12 hours.”  

In his many interviews with developers, Blake has come to know a lot about the work culture. He spoke about his time with Ikumi Nakamura, who recently started her own studio in Japan, Unseen. Ikumi previously worked at Tango Gameworks leading the team behind GhostWire: Tokyo, she left before development ended to found Unseen, citing overwork as one of her reasons.

Blake said Ikumi has strived for a proper work life balance at her new studio with an emphasis on a diverse, multicultural team.

Even so, in game development, horror stories have come out of studios from all over the world. In Scotland, Rockstar North, a subsidiary of Rockstar Studios, has been trying to reform their culture after the departure of co-founder Dan Houser. Under Houser, Rockstar had a “boys club culture” but has since reshaped itself completely. One of the most notable changes was that of its scheduling.

Scheduling is the cornerstone of the industry and has a large effect on crunch culture. One example is recent release from Arkane Studios, ‘Redfall’, which was delayed until May 2, but released a “technical mess” according to critics.

For a better example, however, just look to the troubled development of ‘Cyberpunk 2077’, compared to that of recently released ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’.

CD Projekt RED announced Cyberpunk’s planned release date before development was finished. As a result, the game saw three delays before eventually launching in a broken, glitchy state. The delays were short, at first three months, then two one-month delays. As Blake and Chris said, work quality plumets when crunch occurs; at CD Projekt RED, that’s exactly what happened.

Blake said: “Crunch is often a product of poor planning, of unrealistic schedules. If you are not creating a schedule realistic for the scale of the project you want to make, and then people have to crunch on it, well you’re getting a bad project because of planning and scheduling and a worse product because people are pushing themselves further than they should.

“It’s like a thing, b thing, c thing, they’re all leading to projects like Cyberpunk.

“Sometimes delays mean crunch goes on forever.”

Tears of the Kingdom was a sequel, so some assets could be reused. It was assumed that the game would come out quickly because of this, but Nintendo took their time. The release date wasn’t even announced until three years after the initial reveal in 2019. It launched with minor performance issues due to the weak processing power of the Nintendo Switch, but after just two weeks, it’s already considered one of the greatest games of all time.

But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t crunch on the project, just that the schedule was realistic.

Former graphic designer and associate producer at Nintendo Jim Wornell said: “With Ocarina of Time, I was a lot more involved [than usual]. With that game, there was a lot of long workdays; 8 am to 10 pm six days a week.

“I didn’t see deadlines move a lot. Sometimes they would shift purely for marketing reasons so titles wouldn’t compete against each other. Rarely they would delay a title for development reasons. Most of the time if a deadline was set, it was up to me to meet it however we had to – again long brutal workdays. If a game wasn’t up to snuff, Nintendo had no problem delaying its launch.”

So even if a game comes out and is a masterpiece such as Tears of the Kingdom and Ocarina of Time, it doesn’t mean development was healthy.

As Blake discussed, that can weigh on your conscience.

“I think a lot about this chapter in Blood, Sweat and Pixels, that book Jason Schreier wrote about the Stardew Valley developer.

“I think a lot about the passage where he would fall asleep at his computer working on it.”

“There’s sometimes if you’re against crunch and you’re against overwork, but you also like videogames, you’re in a tricky spot where it’s like to buy and enjoy a videogame in a lot of cases historically has been to give positive feedback through dollars and cents that the crunch was worth it.”

In the end, the situation for developers seems dire, crunch culture seems unavoidable, but with studios like Unseen and Rockstar fighting to change that, perhaps the future for developers is bright.