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burninmylight on 08 September 2021
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javi741 said:

This is good that Nintendo stepped in to prevent this. Crunch overall is just not a good thing for the industry. It's not only that is it completely wrong to strip away the lives and sanity of employees in your company, but crunch, in general, does not lead to better games. One former employee of Nintendo Giles Goddard used to say under Yamauchi Nintendo employees would constantly work overtime and crunch since Yamauchi believed that this lead to better games releasing at a faster rate. However, once Iwata took over he put an end to crunching as he knew as a game programmer/developer that constant crunching does not lead to better games or a much more productive company ecosystem overall.

I think the proof of this alone is comparing the quality of Nintendo games to those of American publishers such as EA & Activision. Despite EA and other American publishers constantly crunching, the quality of their games doesn't come close to Nintendo games despite Nintendo employees only working an average of 7 hours a weekday, which is EVEN fewer hours than the typical 8-hour workdays you'd see. Also, Nintendo still manages to have a good & steady flow of software that's clearly still more than satisfactory enough for the consumer since 100 Million+ are still willing to purchase the Switch thanks in part to the steady & good stream of quality Nintendo games.

I'm not saying that crunching can't lead to good games or speed up the process of things, as Metroid Prime is proof that you could make a great game within 9 months of crunching. However, typically the results show that it isn't even worth doing any sort of crunch.

There are mountains of research that shows that human productivity and concentration falls off a cliff after about five straight hours of work.

I'd also point to a publisher like Ubisoft, that has thousands of employees across many worldwide studios, yet many of their games feel so "production line". When you're constantly being pressured to work nonstop on the same project for years with few breaks, you're not thinking of fresh and creative new ideas, you're trying to find ways to cut corners and get things over with so you can just go home and maybe be able to chill for once.