Red Dead Redemption 2 is set to be a behemoth of a release and one of the best games of 2018. The open-world adventure game has a main campaign that lasts 60 hours – trimmed down from an initial 65 – and is filled with over half a million lines of dialogue and 300,000 animations.
Its little surprise that Rockstar, the studio behind RDR2, is feeling the pressure to make the game feel huge. Its predecessor, Red Dead Redemption, released in May 2010, sold 15m copies and received a near-universal outpouring of critical praise, including multiple game of the year awards. Eight years (and two long delays) later, expectations are high that Rockstar will repeat the trick with the follow-up.
But crafting such a vast game seems to come at a cost. In an interview with Vulture, Rockstar co-founder and lead writer Dan Houser hinted at the studio’s intense work schedule in the run-up to release. “We were working 100-hour weeks,” Houser told the website, adding the long weeks have happened several times this year.
The response, in the gaming press, and from people within the industry, was immediate. On Twitter, many developers shared their own stories of overwork. “In my career, I have worked 36 consecutive hours over a weekend in the midst of working 80+ 7 day weeks for several months straight,” wrote Andrew Weldon, a senior multiplayer designer at Bungie. Others commented with their own tales of all-nighters or 12-hour days sustained for weeks at a time.
In the gaming industry, sustained and unpaid periods overwork are not uncommon. They’re such an accepted part of work culture that the phenomenon has its own name: crunch.
“The issue is that in the industry [overtime] has become normalised,” says Johanna Weststar, an associate professor at the Western University in London, Canada. Weststar specialises in the work experience of video game developers and has lead multiple studies into the working hours and conditions in the game industry.
The problem, Weststar says, is that crunch is deeply tied up into the work culture at game studios. “If a studio never talks about overtime, if nobody logs hours, if the idea of working hard is always linked to passion for the game,” Weststar says, then these extreme hours become a familiar part of the work culture. Then they end up in a situation where “crunch is normal, crunch is not overtime, it’s just crunch.”
Sometimes, the expectation of punishing hours are set right from the time that someone joins a company. “The problem is that rhetoric starts on day one,” says Weststar. Crunch – or being in a kind of ‘crisis mode’ – isn’t just endured, it’s expected. For some in the gaming industry, crunch is actually a badge of honour. “If you really love the job than extra hours are nothing bad. I am always the last to leave and work as much as possible,” one developer said in response to Weldon’s tweets.
But the impact of crunch can still be significant. In 2004 Erin Hoffman, blogging anonymously at the time under the name EA Spouse, wrote a LiveJournal post detailing the crunch culture at the firm behind FIFA, The Sims and Need for Speed. “The current mandatory hours are 9AM to 10PM – seven days a week – with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behaviour (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an 85 hour work week,” Hoffman wrote at the time.
“The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend – bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.”
The EA Spouse blog was a watershed moment for crunch in the gaming industry. A class action lawsuit accusing EA of failing to pay its employees overtime followed and was eventually settled for $15.6m (£10m). Another suit was later settled for $14.9m, but the industry’s crunch culture hasn’t gone away. In 2010, an anonymous post on gaming blog Gamasutra written by the spouses of Rockstar employees accused the studio of maintaining an unhealthy crunch culture. Eight years later, Rockstar is once again finding itself having to deal with the fallout from crunch. On October 17, Rockstar sent an email to employees waiving policies that prevented staff from speaking about their work experience on social media. “I've spent nearly 5 years at Rockstar North. Number of 100 hour weeks done? Zero,” wrote one developer. “Number of times i've been given any pressure for that? Zero.”
Dan Houser – the lead writer whose comments initially sparked the new backlash – also released a statement responding the criticisms of the studio. “The point I was trying to make in the article was related to how the narrative and dialogue in the game was crafted, which was mostly what we talked about, not about the different processes of the wider team,” houser said in a statement to The Verge. “More importantly, we obviously don’t expect anyone else to work this way.”
Ricky Haggett, a game developer and co-founder of the independent studio Hollow Ponds, says that the impact of crunch is still widely felt throughout the industry. “It's staggering how many of these people ship a couple of these mega-games and then just leave and go and do something else,” he says. Weststar also notes that the average age is the industry isn’t going up at the rate you’d expect – perhaps as a result of people leaving due to burnout, or being forced to choose between work or having a family. Two thirds of people in the gaming industry are below the age of 35 and 75 per cent are male, according to data from the International Game Developers Association.
But in pockets of the gaming industry, the fightback against crunch is already underway. Declan Peach, a mobile game designer and head of the UK arm of Game Workers Unite is just a few weeks away from launching the first union for game workers in the UK. He’s planning on putting pressure on game studios to make overtime voluntary and pay those employees that do choose to do overtime. Studios that meet those requirements, he says, should be recognised with some kind of endorsement that flags to people that they’re a crunch-free employer.
Even though the unionisation movement is only just getting off the ground, it does seem that people in the industry are already spending less time crunching. According to Weststar, the proportion of people who find themselves in crunch mode is going down and the number of hours they work is decreasing too. There is still an extreme group – around 15 per cent of those who say they crunch – that still work 80 hours or more a week during crunch time, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Despite the diehard crunchers out there, Weststar is optimistic that the industry is heading in the right direction. “I think there’s an incredible amount of momentum right now,” she says. “It’s almost every week that something new is coming out around working conditions in the games industry. That’s a huge, huge shift from 15 years ago when union was really a dirty word.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
