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twesterm on 26 July 2011
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Ail said:
twesterm said:
Pachter's right in that every studio crunches and if you can't handle that you should get out, but he's wrong in thinking that devs can't be overworked. Crunch is a common thing but if you're crunching more than two weeks in a row you start losing productivity and at about a month you're getting less done than you would be in a non-crunch day.

And, yeah, there really wasn't any excuse for the Team Bondi stuff. I don't expect to get paid overtime but if I'm working until 3:00 AM it's alright to get in 9:15AM. Crunch is just something that has to be accepted but you have to treat your employess well and with respect. That's what the whole Team Bondi thing is about.


Ahem.

I work in software development, been doing so for 13 years.

I make a lot more than any game developer.

We don't crunch, period, we haven't in the last 8 years.

Maybe game developers should actually listen to Patcher and move to other development jobs ( because software developers not in gaming are still hiring massively, Google added 2500 employees last quarter) to teach game studios a lesson.........

 

I did manage a team of 50 developers spread accross 3 countries for 6 years, crunch is just the result of bad planning and management imo. Accepting from the start that there will be crunch is already failing......


You're 100%, most everyone working in the games industry could easily make more in any other job, but anyone working in the games indoustry and is working there for the money is doing it wrong.

I agree that crunch sucks and in a perfect world we could plan things better and plan as well as any competent software development company but it's far from a perfect world.  Anyone here knows that the smallest bug in a demo gets blown out of proportion, the smallest quirk can mean the different from an 8.0 game and a game that is below an 8.0, and how important it is for a game to look as good as possible.

If people expect those things, publishers are going to have to pay more or just expect their developers to crunch.  I can easily tell you who will win that argument, or at least who will win in the long run.  It's just one of those sad facts.

Games are 2+ year long projects involving hundreds of people across varied disciplines in an every changing market.  Most software development doesn't have to deal with that (and my wife is a project manager and works solely at software and web development companies, she knows what goes on there and cringes at the stories I tell her, I get the differences).  I'm not trying to make excuses for why we crunch or trying to say it's good, it's just the way things are.