Games are also one of those things where there is a big reward for being first and best, and little or no reward for being competent. Even though, as an audience you may not see it that way.
Crunch does have some advantages to the company, but it's also high risk.
We're not talking about a extra week of hard work here and there, it's months of sustained 80-100hr work weeks. You're so exhausted after just a few weeks that you make a ton of stupid fucking mistakes, which compounds the whole situation.
If crunch worked you'd see it more widely across our industry, however it has the benefit of both burning out people and putting them in a state where their output is lower than it could be at sustained reasonable hours.
Any asshole who thinks otherwise needs to be called out on it.
Source: Ex-gamedev, where I watched crunch crater two different studios.
I've been lucky in that in the crunches I've been involved in, although I've worked nights and weekends, we had a good division of responsibilities and guards against overworking. So while the team was through a multi-week crunch, I personally would be working only for a week and half stretch. But perhaps that is not what you mean by crunch.
I guess my point is that occasionally it isn't bad to have a tight deadline and give it your everything to get it to work. If you do get it done, it feels mighty good. But I agree that it wouldn't be something I would like to do on a regular cadence.
Working a strong week is totally fine if followed by some recovery time. As long as it doesn't go longer than 2 weeks that's possible to do without destroying productivity, although you still run the risk of burning out your employees.
The difference is Google/software as a service, does not have the same kind of hard deadlines. But, when you start talking about major launches and boxed software or startups you really do see crunch.
PS: By crunch I mean unsustainable pace leading up to a hard deadline.
Not only are you doing worse work than you normally would at a sustainable rate but you're also putting tons of pressure on people's home life. I saw 3 divorces at my second studio from people working hours along those lines.
If you really think that's sustainable then you have no place in this or any other tech industry. We aren't in emergency service or work in an environment where lives are on the line. Those hours have no place here.
Obviously these jobs have occasional acute long work times but I'd say that jobs where lives are on the line is precisely where society doesn't want chronically sleep deprived workers.
Not something I want to be part of, but 30+k bonus for six months of hell is a choice many people would happily take. Hell look at fishing boats they do 15 hour days of hard and dangerous manual labor. But, again they tend to pay people for that effort.
30,000 / (35 * 2 * 4 * 6) = ~$17/hr = ~34k/yr
That seems like a poor deal for putting your family through 6 months of hell.
> Not something I want to be part of
Then don't fucking endorse it!
30,000 / (22.5 * 4 * 6) = ~$55/hr = ~$110k/yr
So, it's closer to 46$ / hour: 30,000 / (52 weeks * 1/2 year * 25 hours)
Anyway, if you consider doing this 1 out of 4 years that's 60k extra for a 'hell' year not bad for a 22 year old. And again 30k is for entry level people it can go up quite a bit.
Alternatively, many Animators only work crunch they end up working 6 months a year and taking 6 months off.
Yes they do and they catch a ton of shit for doing it. I got tore into one day because I dared to leave at the early hour of 11:00pm having got to the office at 8am that morning.
Look, it's obvious that you haven't been on one of these death marches and so you don't really understand what type of a toll that it puts on a team. My example of hourly rate was to point out that it's an awful trade on one side for putting your family through 6 months of hell.
If money was really the important factor here then people wouldn't be working for entertainment companies because compensation is worse across the board(from engineers to animators/artists and designers). I work with a ton of ex-gamedev people who've made the transition out and there's literally no comparison.
Your $46/hr rate for instance doesn't even crack based Google SWE pay, not including their bonuses.
I get that there's a prestige and a sense of accomplishment of working at Disney/your dream studio. That still doesn't excuse them from grinding people into the ground with these insane hours.
Look I have done the whole you work sleep or eat and nothing else for peanuts. That does not mean everyone who works 50+ hour weeks is getting shafted.
As to family obligations, not everyone is in that boat. Sure, working insane hours may not seem like a great way to spend your early 20's, but it's also not required that everyone do this. You can make a solid living without pulling crunch time, but it's reasonable for the option to exist.
Really, step outside your bubble. Some people working 80 hour weeks pull in a few million per year, they have options and still chose that lifestyle.
PS: And nobody is forced to do this, if nothing else quitting is an option.
I leave my comments as is, anyone advocating for crunch has no place it any part of the tech industry, full stop.
But, again I am not saying it's a good idea as general practice. Just that it's not nessisarily irrational behavior.
That said, you seem to be ignoring what I have actually said in favor of your own personal rage. I suspect you would be happier setting that aside.
I do know 3 people who did by working insane hours in their early 20's. Less time to spend money + more money makes saving 50+k per year after taxes viable. None of them kept working those hours for that long but compound interest works much faster with a larger nest egg.
Now, they used a second job to get there, but having your boss pay you for extra time also works.
How is this not an issue to you? It would be one thing of software developers were this highly specialized group of people where you have a pool of a few hundred in every state. Developers aren't scarce though. For every mediocre developer, there are 5 more than replace that person.
Scarcity aside, why would you want to subjugate yourself to that lifestyle? Most people aren't even productive for a full 8 hours/day, so how does adding 4 more hours in a day make business sense?
I don't care for our industry to unionize, because I don't want to be beholden to some organization fighting for basic human decency. But when people brazenly say, "Yeah 60 hours is fine! You have months before you burnout!" Good for you, but I have interests and people that don't involve work.
It's drama, it's danger, it's excitement, and it's probably fuelled by a coke habit.
If you enjoy that kind of power you'll happily kill a company to experience it.
Games dev isn't unique in this kind of toxicity, but it's more pressing because projects are often huge group efforts with massive resources and long time scales where most of the work is done by young and relatively inexperienced employees who are motivated as much by the games scene as by a pay check.
In the same way that #MeToo called out sexual harassment and abuse, we really need a corporate equivalent that calls out toxic working conditions created by insane management.
I downvoted you because this is untrue. Research has shown that crunching for more than a few weeks is detrimental to work output.
People lose effectiveness within a week at that volume of work. Consistently. They become forgetful, need things re-explained to them, act irritably, produce work that needs additional levels of revision, etc.
If the work is largely rote, that might be acceptable; perform an extra 10% work to quality control the 50-75% surplus in gross work product. If the work is strategic or synthetic, it is often not.
Over time, however, small performance degradations turn into health complications and morale problems. This is intentional. In high churn industries, individuals who are at the top of the ladder prefer that those they're leveraging lower down perform more work, leave before their positions are threatened, and use the corrosion of their health as a shield against the ambition of entry-level staff.
I think the game industry can get away with this because some people really, really want to work on games, and there aren't many companies in the industry with more reasonable hours that one could switch to. But the rest of us eventually figure out that we can demand to be treated well or we can find another job.
A week or two of crunch time can happen every once in a while at most jobs. But 6+ months of "crunch time" is really a permanent company culture of working long hours.
Setting a deadline is one way of aligning incentives (ship by this date or else...) and can work well so long as there is a good conversation around requirements, appropriate milestones are set, and developers are trusted to make good faith estimates. However, it is not the only way.