‘Diablo IV’ developers work long hours, bracing for impending release
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Replace evolving scope with increasing scope and you've got the most common recipe for development failure being pitched as a good thing.
Using it as an excuse for crunch is insane, because an iterative process with increasing scope needs to also have a flexible deadline.
Sure people cost money, so why hire them when you can exploit the ones you have already? The only way to stop that are unions/worker rights.
Not exactly a holiday release.
I mean, especially in this era of DLC, why the need to increase the scope, anyways? Punt the extra ideas for later release.
If you develop a feature and it turns out the feature is not great, you can choose to ship a game that's not great, or fix it.
Once you have committed to a ship date and moving the date is no longer an option, fixing it means working over time.
These crunches often come from the team themselves who are identifying that things aren't as good as they could be, want to fix it, but don't have the power to push dates back.
Update: One problem is that creative teams are rarely satisfied, and would love to polish things forever. The production team needs to be constantly pushing back on the creative team to leave things alone and call it done.
Working out what is "good enough" is really really hard.
Update: Also, I wrote this comment before reading the article, and I don't mean to defend 6 months of crunch. That clearly _is_ bad management and exploitative. When you have a few bad features you can take a few weeks or a month to fix them. When you are 6 months out and only now just announcing a release date, there is lots you can do. You can cut the bad bits, you can hire more staff, you can move the date.
It's not an unusual tack to take even for regular software developers. Not all feature work. Smart folks will cut bait and focus on something that does.
- Write the code - Test the code - Documentation changes - Deploy the code
If it's a big enough change (or a new app), I might create a few sets of those tickets. E.g. one "write/test/document/deploy" set for the database schema to do Y, another one for the business logic to do Y, another for the HTTP endpoints for Y, etc.
The tickets are specific to the implementation, not to the feature, so they can't be expanded. New work can only come through new tickets, which get prioritized. Manager is happy because tickets get cleared. I'm happy because I can fight scope creep by pointing to my sprint and asking which tickets they want to bump for their new scope creep.
Tickets like "implement X feature" with a 2 week estimate are a landmine for engineers because it's broad enough for the scope to expand infinitely, and it starts to look like nothing is getting done to management.
That's basically how it is supposed to work. If you need something to get fixed, create an item/bug for it and let it get prioritized.
Let's call it what it is: a series of waterfalls, all with unreasonable schedules
I don't think waiting another year for Diablo 4 will be the end of the world.
Though I'd like to see a WarCraft 4 someday too.
Exactly. As I see it such things are much more crucial for games that might look/feel dated if they come out too late. The magic within the Diablo games (especially the first two) comes from the world it places us into, the way it is presented, the music, the story.
All of these are things that shouldn't break with one year of delay. The worst thing that xould happen with a Diablo 4, would be that fans of the series get the impression it was rushed.
Though today I wouldn't manage a project to rely on crunch, nor expect anyone to crunch, it's still new to see a software development crunch described as something out of the ordinary and that needs incentives.
Starting with my first real software engineering job, crunches were something that just happened. And I didn't question it, because it wasn't that different than being a kid and coding into the night, or being in school with long "lab" hours.
My read of the tone of the WaPo is that the reader is supposed to see a crunch more like an hourly store clerk being expected to keep working after they've punched out on the time clock, rather than what used to just be the norm for software teams that wanted to ship.
Probably this is a good change, since we should be focusing on managing the project and greasing effectiveness in ways that mean hitting external deliverables, not assuming we can crunch.
My friends who've gone into 'normal' software development will work on things out-of-hours from time to time, especially if they're doing something interesting, and they're sometimes on call - but they're also making enough money that if they'd rather work a 4 day week, they can afford to.
My friends who've gone into game development report frequently working 10 hours a day Monday-Friday, and then going into work on both Saturday and Sunday. Or at least, they reported that the last time we saw them - you can imagine how hard it is to maintain friendships after a few years of such a work pattern.
There's a constant stream of developers who have a high degree of interest in games so not only is crunch incredibly common but also compensation is significantly less(was about 1/2-1/3 standard SWE rates when I was in the industry). Combine that with publishers who pull recording industry contract style shenanigans and it's just a brutal industry. Tons of really interesting technical problems but even as someone who knew what they we going into at the time I advise people to think very carefully if it's a career option they want to pursue.
I'm about 15 years out. But I did the math on my hourly rate in the industry and it was about $25/hr. Some of the smartest, most fun people I've ever had the pleasure of working with, for sure. But while I was working the rest of my life was thrown by the wayside.
I quit after we shipped and rode my mountain bike for a year. It sucked because I didn't want to write code, a thing I'd previously loved. But it came back after a year of not working and a year of contracting part time.
There were opportunities to get back into games, but I turned them all down. I just don't want to get back into that environment.
Even $50k for a senior employee for years of working hard overtime is a joke compared to any other industry.
I've aware of royalties in some really, really rare cases(think north of 10M sales, in the < 1% of game sales category), but even in that case from what I heard the publisher had a cap on the upper limit per year in the contract.
I've got the "oh you're leaving" when I get up at 5pm and leave, but never pulled aside by management for it. I don't really understand why others partake.
They'd have to incentivise the hell out of me to get me to do that.
In all the places I worked there was an informal crunch period and then a very explicit one. Even during one of the formal crunch period I would catch shit for leaving at 10pm even though I was in at 8am. There was definitely a visibility aspect that if you were staying till 1-2am and rolling in at noon that was considered that you were contributing "more". There's a couple shops that do a decent job but large swaths of the industry are completely dysfunctional.
There's also a confirmation bias where if a successful game ships with crunch it is perceived as one of the contributing factor to their success and then further drives crunch across the industry.
Especially with games where they apparently MUST be out by Christmas.
Ask Blizzard. Ask EA. Ask CDPR. Ask Ubisoft. Ask any AAA developer.
All have released absolute dogshit that sold based on their reputations alone. And that doesn't even account for the reports of everything from absurd quantities of mandatory crunch to rape and suicide.
All have eagerly awaited sequels and new IP. All are more profitable than ever before.
Some folks care, but a vast majority do not.
In my experience crunch time increases productivity for a couple of weeks and is a net negative from then on. Tired, stressed, and sick/absent developers just aren't as effective. Producing poorer code, even at a faster rate, is usually a loss as well.
Any software development organization that practices it would seem to be sabotaging themselves.
The Diablo franchise is, due to franchise reputation, basically above any scare of competition reducing sales. People waited 11 years from Diablo 2 to 3.
Some finance guy would have to take an extra long time explaining to me why crunching towards an arbitrary marketing launch date (and trampling all of the personal lives and well-being of the personnel) is going to somehow be better for our company's reputation than releasing some of the most volatile pay-to-win/monetization mechanisms in all of gaming. [0]
tl;dr : if at the end of a corporate instigated launch crunch you feel accomplished, more power to you -- but from where i'm at it just looks like more employee abuse with little incentive other than a pat on the back.
[0]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-pl...
If I do bonus hours helping with recruiting or whatever, I get paid overtime and all the work has contract verbiage saying I can't work more than 40 hours a week without super high up approval.
IME, people usually don't burn very long hours at work unless they feel they need to.
(I've also seen places where it was nigh-impossible to get much work done, due to organizational dysfunction. But I don't think that can translate to long hours for very long, since people are already exploding at 40 hrs/wk of sitting through their work sabotaged, minute to minute. They'll tend to fill the hours with a combination of heroic sisyphean efforts, decompressing/timewasting, and bitter gossiping.)
(I recently watched a hilarious deadpan video of a day in the life of influencer intern/junior developer at Facebook, where it seemed only little time was spent on work. But that's not normal.)
This reminds me of a story about bombers in the second world war. Bombers that come back full of bullet holes still come back. You need to strengthen the parts where there are never any bullet holes (implying the bombers dropped out of the sky, and couldn’t make it back).
In the same line, saying all your remaining developers are happy is not entirely surprising. All the ones that couldn’t stand you have already left.
By this logic any dev team that shows a positive trend in employee wellbeing is simply because the unhappy ones left. Which clearly is not true.
Is it clear? Given the incredibly high turnover rate at any point of time in the games industry it does not sound like the worst assumption to make, true or not.
(And having worked in the industry myself not that long ago, none of my friends and colleagues from that time still work in it. But that is just anecdotal)
Emphasis mine. It doesn’t say anything about the trend. For all we know a whole batch of people giving a 0 star rating just left, and therefore this year is positive.
Anyway, I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but you need more information to make a judgement.
That is quite literally the entire point I was making, fwiw.
“Recent surveys show people are happier” “oh it must be because all the unhappy people left”. You can’t jump to that conclusion, or use the airplane analogy to get there, without a whole lot more info.
> Our results clearly demonstrate that crunch doesn't lead to extraordinary results. In fact, on the whole, crunch makes games LESS successful wherever it is used, and when projects try to dig themselves out of a hole by crunching, it only digs the hole deeper.
The survey results showed project crunch was negatively correlated with both a game’s financial return on investment and MetaCritic score.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-pro...
On an unrelated note, didn't the FTC seek to block the acquisition? https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/... The WP article says that it's "set to close" rather ambiguously. Sounds like it won't actually close?
The FTC has to file suit in court to attempt to block the acquisition. Until that's done and the court actually sides with the FTC, everything regarding the acquisition is likely to basically proceed as scheduled. The FTC doesn't just get to say no the acquisition and be done with it.
"Today I'm implementing the soul sucking demon mechanics, and improved realism in the dismemberment physics engine"
But even then you still shouldn't go crazy with overtime, you'll still end up with diminishing returns, burnout, and eventually poor quality work. It's just a bad idea outside of emergency scenarios (eg, a serious crash bug in production that you can't just revert).
This is a blurred line in the industry. Rarely does your superior walk up to you and tell you that you have to stay long hours or else.
Instead crunching in the games industry is much more passive aggressive. "Sure you can go home, but look at all the colleagues you are abandoning, I thought you were a team player, are we not a family? Do you not want this game to be the best it can be?"
And millions of small variations of that, praising only ever those that do crunch, building an atmosphere of immense peer pressure.
Your boss won't tell you to stay, he will actively build and nourish an environment in which you and your colleagues do that job for him. And that doesn't even include the whole topic of benefits, raises, and promotions.
Ultimately it is the same as "you have to", but still. Many have a false image of the way crunch is forced upon a team.
I've heard similar stories from former EA folks, and others. It's just a shitty, crappy industry, that takes advantage of the perceived glamour to exploit people and burn them out without any conscience.
It seems some amount of crunch is unavoidable in large projects, but if you’re talking months of crunch time good management will either delay the release or cut features.
That said the games industry is notorious for shitty treatment of ICs, so perhaps 6 month crunch is just the norm?
Wow, what a generous perk!
Diminishing returns is not zero though. There's another period after that threshold where you can still build working stuff, either slower or more carefully or choosing simpler things.
Then the third stage where everything you do makes things worse.
Whether that middle block is better spent working or doing something else comes down to opportunity cost and time. It's easy to write it off as "getting a bit sloppy now, time to stop", but that does mean lower total output.
Funny. Of course this is just my experience over the years, but I've rarely seen people "tell how it really is", no matter how garbage the project is. I admit I belong to that group as well, it's hard challenge the power that feeds you.
Which makes me sad. It's a mediocre game built around hawking microtransactions at every turn. And it works, because those microtransactions make the payers more powerful than their non-paying peers.
The end game is PVP. And you can not be competitive without paying gobs of money.
Now, imagine what they'll bring into D4, a PC/console focused game...
Lied every gaming company ever. Blizzard has already lied about this with Overwatch. Why would anyone believe them when it comes to D4?
A lot of press got their hands on it recently and the response was rather positive.
you think you do, but you don't
I _want_ to believe the indie group would win that but it seems unlikely. Maybe one of a large number of small studios comes out ahead while most fail, but that doesn't help the failing ones much.
Do you have a mechanism in mind?