Eurogamer

The boss of Homefront developer Kaos Studios has defended crunch – the act of working 10-hour days seven days a week to get a game ready for launch.

An insider working at the New York studio told Develop that crunch has been underway at Kaos for around half-a-year.

"Over the holiday many of us were on call and unable to leave to see our family," said the anonymous source.

Responding to the accusations, Kaos general manager David Votypka said 10-hour shifts were common among many industries, and denied staff were forced to work over the holiday break.

"If this seems unique or abhorrent, I would have to suggest that any assessment regarding a 10-hour work day would need to consider a much larger segment of the American workforce," he said.

"Digital media companies, marketers, PR, even accountants in various industries throughout the nation, work 10-hour days regularly, 52 weeks per year."

Last week THQ's outspoken core games boss Danny Bilson visited the studio and tweeted, "At Kaos studios in NY sitting with a team that's finaling on 7 day weeks for a couple of months. Talk about that 'thousand yard stare'."

Votypka said Bilson's tweet was incorrect. "Unfortunately, it was misstated that this [seven-day crunch] has been going on for two months. That's simply not the case. For the record: no Kaos developer has worked 60 days without a break. That will never happen here."

Homefront, due out on 8th March, has been in development for three years. THQ hopes it will prove a critical and commercial success – and lay the groundwork for sequels that will eventually challenge the likes of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-01-17-homefront-dev-defends-10-hour-days

im buying this game

feel sorry for the devs unless they enjoy which should be the case hopefully this can challenge call of duty though the chances are pretty slim 

Not going to be as big as COD, I just don't see the game being as "innovative" as COD4 was at the time. I personally thought MoH was shocking, if this game is anything like that, I will weep for the gaming industry. Although I kind of like the plot, despite being dramatically overused, X invades Y, Y have to fight X. People die, shit is miserable, then happy little rays of hope etc and all that crap, but looking at the gameplay wise I see this game leaning strongly towards MoH mechanics, which is not good, to me anyway.

How much marketing muscle has THQ got to throw down?

I really don't understand publishers that expect their games to sell tons despite nearly complete lack of marketing and usually publishers seem to be unable to recognize which games have sales potential and which do not. And finally, no matter what the dev time, publishers often end up rushing the final product to even if everything else was in place, bugs will mess up things.

Anyway, don't know much about this case here. Unless the game has some interesting features I'm not interested. I don't have much interest in CoD and I don't need a CoD clone either.

thats common in the games industry because they have to meet deadlines and they have to make it prefect or it will fail and only the good studios get extra time.

Wah wah wah.

In many circles, such things are called Hell week. These guys make it sound like they have been performing consecutive surgeries during these time spans.

Stop bitchin and do your jobs like the rest of the world.

While I agree that crunch is common place and it happens (though 6 months is pretty excessive), the way he's defending and being so defensive about it is the wrong attitude to have.