Fog said:
That doesn"t make any sense to me. Suppose a game takes X man-hours for your team to complete. (Of course, X is a mystery in advance.) That X won"t be any smaller if you"re working 60-hour weeks instead of 40-hour weeks, right? It"ll just take 50% more days to finish with 40-hour weeks. I think we can all agree that you"re at least somewhat less productive in those extra 20 hours, so really the time difference won"t be quite as pronounced.
Either way, you could do the same work working 40-hour weeks if you had estimated your schedule right from the start, and calibrated your release dates appropriately. Correct? Of course, some companies and workers might want to work longer weeks to move things along, but it would get done either way.
I thought the issue was that management in the video game industry liked overtime because it"s largely unpaid overtime, and so they don"t really make any effort to create accurate 40-hour-week estimates, and leave you to make up the shortfall with "crunch time."
From an outsider point of view (I program for a living, but at a non-video-game-related company that doesn"t expect me to put in more than 40 hours a week) I feel kind of bad about the whole situation; it looks to me like companies just take advantage of the passion people have to fuck them over.
No.
There is a ton of effort to make accurate schedules. Specifically, EARS has invented new positions whose job it is to make sure the game can ship on time without causing crunch, but it still happens no matter how much effort is put into the schedule.
The thing about games is that shit can always be better, there can always be more stuff, and trying to estimate something like "make fun combat," is just not realistic. So while the 20 hours after 40 may be not as productive as they could be, it"s still more time. Most companies don"t get infinite time to produce a game, even blizzard with probably the most amount of pull in the industry to take as long as needed crunches insane amounts.
At some point you"re going to ship the game regardless of how complete it is, it"s just a matter of how much work you can get done in that time period. Companies like epic use their 2 years to their fullest, people working longer than 40 hour weeks to get that additional +3% metacritic when all is said and done.
Entertainment products aren"t like hardware, when you say something is "done," it doesn"t mean it"s going to score a 100% metacritic. In fact, no games ever score that meaning every game could have taken longer, could have used more work, etc.
What you"re saying is that regardless of time, a "quality" game could still be made in whatever time is allotted as long as the schedule is properly managed. But what does that mean? 80%? 85%? 90%? How can you determine how much time is needed to get what score? Half the time you don"t even identify what systems need to get reworked/polished further until they"re already implemented and you"re knee-deep in alpha.
The bottom line is that crunch is needed regardless, it happens in a ton of industries, not just video games. If there truly was some magical way to get around it, it wouldn"t be the case that literally EVERY company has it to varying degrees.
