Bungie, Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica and Blizzard discuss crunch
- Transfer
Officials from four of the world's largest software companies - Bungie, Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica and Blizzard - discussed their studios' approach to crunching.
If you don’t know, then extracurricular work of studios striving to catch a serious deadline, usually to release a game, is called crunch. Such periods of crunching can be extreme, the combination of long work and lack of rest inevitably exhausts employees mentally and physically until they begin to break.
This problem has become a disease of the gaming industry.
Luke Timmins of Bungie recently said that the crunch of Halo 2 nearly destroyed the company, but since then major changes have been made and Destiny 2 has done without forced crunches.
Bungie artistic director Jason Sassman, speaking at the 2018 Digital Dragons art conference, also announced this. “We have a zero crunch policy, so crunch is not allowed,” he said, and the audience began to applaud. “It was very important to us.”
“As a leader, if I see that my guys work late, then I begin to ask them questions. It happens that people are addicted, and if they answer something like “I just can’t go home until I get this thought out of my head”, then this is normal. But if I see that this happens for too long, I tell them: “guys, I don’t want you to burn out.” This simply leads to a decrease in productivity, and I do not think that people are able to maintain the desired level of creativity by killing in this way. We have healthy manifestations of such situations, but they rarely occur. ”
From left to right: Andrew Maximov (Naughty Dog), Thiago Klafke (Blizzard), Daniel Birchinski (Sony Santa Monica) and Jason Sassman (Bungie). The guy on the left is the CD Projekt Red artist who hosted the conference.
Next came the microphone, Andrew Maximov, the former technical art director of Uncharted, Naughty Dog, a studio often accused of having a crunch culture. (A couple of months ago, Maximov left Naughty Dog and founded his own company.)
“It's complicated,” said Maximov. “I can confidently say that we did not find the balance that the guys from Bungie have. We are lucky to work with people whose passion we are difficult to control because we do not have producers, there is no separate leadership, everyone is absolutely free in everything, but this greatly increases the level of responsibility. For us, crunch turned out to be the price we have to pay. ”
“At Naughty Dog, no one is forcing crunches,” he adds. “This absolutely never happens. No one will ever order you to stay at work. But people remain because they are sure that they want this and must finish the work. ”
The next was the lead sound engineer of God of War, Daniel Birchinski, who recently talked about how many layers there were in the dragon's roar from God of War. He suggested that Sony Santa Monica has yet to work on this issue.
“We still have crunches,” Birchinski said. “But I want to say that I see how top management begins to understand what effect this has on people's lives, so the company is evolving and changing. I saw badly burned people, and it's not worth it. It depends on the studio and its culture, but I see signs of progress in my working environment. ”
The last one was Thiago Klafke, Blizzard's leading Overwatch ambience artist, who expressed a more personal opinion and reminded everyone to monitor their mental health.
“Sometimes I have mini-burnouts when I work on something for too long,” he says. “I look at my part of the work for two months and think“ I hate it, I can’t see it already ”. Then I begin to take walks on weekends and forget that I work on games, doing all kinds of things that are in no way connected with games, meditations.
We need to take care of our mental health, because we put great pressure on ourselves. We want to do everything better, work as quickly as possible, and this is what burns us out from the inside. You need to be careful with this. We need to learn how to enjoy the process, and in the process of work try not to be too critical, do not think: “I am so slow and can’t handle it ...” This is difficult, but if you succeed, you will burn out much less often. ”
Crunches often become synonymous with video game development. This is nothing new - in 2010 the infamous “rebellion of the Rockstar wives” happened - the spouses of developers who worked at Rockstar began to collectively protest against the harsh schedule in which their husbands were forced to work, and THQ caused the appearance of a “look at a thousand yards” on faces of devastated Homefront developers - but today more and more attention is being paid to crunch.
Kotaku journalist Jason Schreyer once wrote a long article about crunches and recently released a great book called Blood, Sweat, and Pixels(“Blood, Sweat, and Pixels”), which emphasizes the complexity of development periods in different studios, including Bungie (when creating Destiny), Naughty Dog (when creating Uncharted 4) and Blizzard (in the process of creating Diablo 3). I mention these companies because I talk about their employees in the article, but these are not the only studios described in the book and criticized for the existence of crunches.
The Polish CD Projekt Red studio is also mentioned in the book and is increasingly criticized for crunching when creating The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. CD Projekt Red even recently released a statement in response to allegations of low morale and crunch, which says "This approach to creating games is not for everyone." Telltale Games episodic storytellers have also recently been blamedin the existence of a crunch culture.
And this applies not only to large companies. Small studios and solo developers also work to the point of exhaustion, only out of exactingness for themselves, and not because of the pressure of a huge corporation. Eric Baron openly talked about the four-year-old crunch, which he went on his own in the process of creating Stardew Valley.
We hope that attention to crunch will have a positive effect on companies, as happened with Bungie and with Sony Santa Monica. Crunch discussions also help us - video game players - take a closer look at the companies we support and better understand the human sacrifices they make when developing projects.
If you don’t know, then extracurricular work of studios striving to catch a serious deadline, usually to release a game, is called crunch. Such periods of crunching can be extreme, the combination of long work and lack of rest inevitably exhausts employees mentally and physically until they begin to break.
This problem has become a disease of the gaming industry.
Luke Timmins of Bungie recently said that the crunch of Halo 2 nearly destroyed the company, but since then major changes have been made and Destiny 2 has done without forced crunches.
Bungie artistic director Jason Sassman, speaking at the 2018 Digital Dragons art conference, also announced this. “We have a zero crunch policy, so crunch is not allowed,” he said, and the audience began to applaud. “It was very important to us.”
“As a leader, if I see that my guys work late, then I begin to ask them questions. It happens that people are addicted, and if they answer something like “I just can’t go home until I get this thought out of my head”, then this is normal. But if I see that this happens for too long, I tell them: “guys, I don’t want you to burn out.” This simply leads to a decrease in productivity, and I do not think that people are able to maintain the desired level of creativity by killing in this way. We have healthy manifestations of such situations, but they rarely occur. ”
From left to right: Andrew Maximov (Naughty Dog), Thiago Klafke (Blizzard), Daniel Birchinski (Sony Santa Monica) and Jason Sassman (Bungie). The guy on the left is the CD Projekt Red artist who hosted the conference.
Next came the microphone, Andrew Maximov, the former technical art director of Uncharted, Naughty Dog, a studio often accused of having a crunch culture. (A couple of months ago, Maximov left Naughty Dog and founded his own company.)
“It's complicated,” said Maximov. “I can confidently say that we did not find the balance that the guys from Bungie have. We are lucky to work with people whose passion we are difficult to control because we do not have producers, there is no separate leadership, everyone is absolutely free in everything, but this greatly increases the level of responsibility. For us, crunch turned out to be the price we have to pay. ”
“At Naughty Dog, no one is forcing crunches,” he adds. “This absolutely never happens. No one will ever order you to stay at work. But people remain because they are sure that they want this and must finish the work. ”
The next was the lead sound engineer of God of War, Daniel Birchinski, who recently talked about how many layers there were in the dragon's roar from God of War. He suggested that Sony Santa Monica has yet to work on this issue.
“We still have crunches,” Birchinski said. “But I want to say that I see how top management begins to understand what effect this has on people's lives, so the company is evolving and changing. I saw badly burned people, and it's not worth it. It depends on the studio and its culture, but I see signs of progress in my working environment. ”
The last one was Thiago Klafke, Blizzard's leading Overwatch ambience artist, who expressed a more personal opinion and reminded everyone to monitor their mental health.
“Sometimes I have mini-burnouts when I work on something for too long,” he says. “I look at my part of the work for two months and think“ I hate it, I can’t see it already ”. Then I begin to take walks on weekends and forget that I work on games, doing all kinds of things that are in no way connected with games, meditations.
We need to take care of our mental health, because we put great pressure on ourselves. We want to do everything better, work as quickly as possible, and this is what burns us out from the inside. You need to be careful with this. We need to learn how to enjoy the process, and in the process of work try not to be too critical, do not think: “I am so slow and can’t handle it ...” This is difficult, but if you succeed, you will burn out much less often. ”
Crunches often become synonymous with video game development. This is nothing new - in 2010 the infamous “rebellion of the Rockstar wives” happened - the spouses of developers who worked at Rockstar began to collectively protest against the harsh schedule in which their husbands were forced to work, and THQ caused the appearance of a “look at a thousand yards” on faces of devastated Homefront developers - but today more and more attention is being paid to crunch.
Kotaku journalist Jason Schreyer once wrote a long article about crunches and recently released a great book called Blood, Sweat, and Pixels(“Blood, Sweat, and Pixels”), which emphasizes the complexity of development periods in different studios, including Bungie (when creating Destiny), Naughty Dog (when creating Uncharted 4) and Blizzard (in the process of creating Diablo 3). I mention these companies because I talk about their employees in the article, but these are not the only studios described in the book and criticized for the existence of crunches.
The Polish CD Projekt Red studio is also mentioned in the book and is increasingly criticized for crunching when creating The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. CD Projekt Red even recently released a statement in response to allegations of low morale and crunch, which says "This approach to creating games is not for everyone." Telltale Games episodic storytellers have also recently been blamedin the existence of a crunch culture.
And this applies not only to large companies. Small studios and solo developers also work to the point of exhaustion, only out of exactingness for themselves, and not because of the pressure of a huge corporation. Eric Baron openly talked about the four-year-old crunch, which he went on his own in the process of creating Stardew Valley.
We hope that attention to crunch will have a positive effect on companies, as happened with Bungie and with Sony Santa Monica. Crunch discussions also help us - video game players - take a closer look at the companies we support and better understand the human sacrifices they make when developing projects.
