Phew, good thing Druckman supressed that union! Imagine a pesky strike interfering with the mandated crunch.
Ew, couldn’t imagine slaving away on a game like this.
Gonna be real funny when it flops.
Why am I not surprised. Overtime is always ordered by the folks who clock out at 3.
Often it is ordered by folks who are pathological workaholics who can’t comprehend that healthy people usually burn out when crunching away 12h a day.
I wonder why companies do this? does it actually make it get done faster? Last I knew most workers were only efficient at their job for like the first 5 or 6 hours if that, spending an extra 8 ontop of it sounds like a waste of salary.
Yes, it does.
Naughty Dog made its name by working ludicrous hours. One of the founders worked 16 hour days for a year, only taking off for Christmas, in order to make Crash Bandicoot.
Ex Activision QA employee here - It does not get anything done faster, and it burns out the devs and QA alike so more mistakes are made. It’s always about hitting dates on time for shareholder profits, the C-suite people in charge do not give a shit about releasing a quality game.
Because most CEOs are wholely incompetent and don’t know how to run a successful business.
Fuck Neil Druckman, Naughty Dog, and Sony, in that order. Amy Hennig carried the whole PlayStation brand identity and got couped over some good ol industry sexism so that N.D. could opine about how hard it is to be a white man
Amy Hennig is great, but what? Are you saying Uncharted 1-3 is the whole PlayStation brand identity?
Do they hand out adderall or something? How do you even produce quality work like that…
You don’t. Mandatory crunch produces a mediocre result and drives away your hired talent.
Was the Last of Us mediocre?
It had mandatory crunch.
What’s the matter? I thought they were super confident this was going to do really well. Are they getting cold feet and deciding to make changes for fear of bad reception when they don’t quite have enough time, leading to forced overtime?
EDIT: Wait. All of this was for a DEMO? How bad was the game that they needed to work 60 hours a week mandatory overtime just to finish a demo of the game??
Demo in this context isn’t a consumer-playable ‘demo’ in the sense that most people understand; it means a playable internal build with specific targets for what must be included. Internal demo milestones are often linked to project funding and approval to move forwards, so there is a tangible risk if they fail to deliver.
Presumably the current state of the game is behind where it needed to be to deliver that demo, so they’re now crunching to finish it on time.
IMO, any time a game repeatedly fails to meet deadlines, especially so early on in its development, that usually indicates the game isn’t likely to launch in a healthy state. Either the scope is way too big, or the narrative is receiving major changes and reworks, or the people working on the game just wish they weren’t working on that project and taking longer as a result. This kind of situation is rarely good, and even more rarely ends up with a good launched product.
Cyberpunk 2077, Anthem, Mass Effect Andromeda, Halo Infinite, Duke Nukem Forever, John Romero’s Daikatana (although I personally am a bit charmed by this one despite it being undoubtedly bad), and other games are examples of this. Repeated failure to meet production deadlines, lots of crunch forced on the developers, and all for what? The launch product for all of these games was horrendously bad. Some for technical reasons, some for narrative reasons, and some for both.
When I first saw the trailer for Intergalactic, I had mixed feelings. I liked the intended graphics/art style and retro styled tech, the Porsche was a little weird product placement but fine I guess, but the characters and dialogue I personally found both unappealing. The obvious Snake Plissken rip-off woman the main character talked to (blonde with an eyepatch, I can only assume she is some sort of merc job handler) seemed maybe interesting but then she spoke and the writing lost my interest. Upon learning the game is likely to follow some sort of religious theming, I lost all interest in the game. Its not what I want from a video game. So this was pretty disappointing to learn. But now seeing the game is in such a state doesn’t give me great confidence that the final product will be even decent when it launches.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad take, but it’s worth pointing out that lots of games miss internal deadlines and waste time ‘spinning their wheels’ but still turn out good or even great. The difference is that you don’t usually hear about it, whereas here some of the team are obviously pissed enough about the crunch that they went to the press.
Crunch is always bad and is an indication of poor project management and/or unrealistic expectations, but issues with scope or major reworks aren’t always a death knell either. I’ve seen plenty of games go through that and come out the other side better than before.
Of course there are always exceptions, but I don’t count on news like this to mean that this project will be the exception.
Metroid Prime and Halo 2 both had excessive crunch and both turned out great, obviously. In Metroid Prime’s case, a management change seemed to fix it in the long term. In Halo’s case, Bungie just embraced the suck I guess, since they still wanted to make Halo 3.
Regardless, these were exceptions to the rule, and I would never expect a project to be an exception, personally.
