Crunch time
Crunch time is the point at which the team is thought to be failing to achieve milestones needed to launch a game on schedule. The complexity of workflow and the intangibles of artistic and aesthetic demands in video game creation create difficulty in predicting milestones.
Background
Most game development engineers and artists in the United States are considered salaried employees; as "exempt non-hourly-paid professionals", they are not subject to state laws governing overtime.
Some video game companies (such as Electronic Arts) have been accused of the excessive invocation of "crunch time".
Examples
- Rockstar Games: Made their employees work 100 hours a week during Red Dead Redemption 2's development.
- Electronic Arts: Made their employees crunch during the development of many games like Anthem. (See below)
- BioWare: Did a similar thing to their employees during the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda.
- CD Projekt Red: Made their employees crunch towards the end of Cyberpunk 2077's development despite promising they wouldn't.
- Naughty Dog: Neil Druckmann made his employees crunch during the development of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and The Last of Us Part II. This led to many of them being hospitalized.
- Atari: Forced their employees to crunch during the development of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man.
- Epic Games: Pressured their employees work 70-100 hours a week on Fortnite.
- Retro Studios: Made their employees work 80-100 hours a week on the development of Metroid Prime.
- The same thing also occurred for Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.
- Sega: Forced their employees to crunch during the development of some of the Sonic games, with the worst offenders being the 2006 reboot of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, Sonic Origins, and the long-cancelled Sonic X-Treme.
- Art Data Interactive: Pressured Rebecca "Burger Becky" Heineman to crunch during her work on the atrocious 3DO port of Doom.
Why This Practice Sucks
- For starters, crunch time has become a common and hated trend in the video game industry because it has led to the release of rushed, unfinished, and unpolished games. It has been compared heavily to the equally infamous Christmas rush.
- Employees are often forced to work 65-100 hours 24/7 without taking a break, which leads to a lot of stress due to too much pressure.
- The excessive amount of stress and overwork that developers go through during crunch time is bound to cause health problems and even hospitalization, with Sonic X-Treme and Anthem being the worst offenders of this problem.
- Related to the above, crunch culture can get so bad that employees can even DIE from overwork and health problems, which results in some projects being canceled (like in Sonic X-Treme's case).
- Sometimes, it can lead to some employees deliberately sleeping on the workplace floor as they're too tired to go home from being overworked. An example of this is the development of American McGee's Alice.
- It has also been criticized by video game developers and other staff because they're forced to work overtime without getting paid all the extra hours.
- Even worse, some companies have little to no care about their employees' crunch-related health problems and make excuses about how it's their "hard work", which just shows how blind they are to criticism.
Redeeming Qualities
- Not all games that went through crunch time are bad. These include:
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- The Sims 2
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Metroid Prime and its sequel, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
- American McGee's Alice
- Cyberpunk 2077 (it has been redeemed since 2022 and got even better with the Phantom Liberty expansion)
- Several companies are aware of the negative effects of crunch time to the point of avoiding it altogether by allowing their employees to take a break from work. This resulted in highly polished games that are commercial and critical successes, such as Hades, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Don't Starve, and Apex Legends.
Consequences
The protest against crunch time was posted by Erin Hoffman (fiancée of Electronic Arts developer Leander Hasty), who contended that her life was being indirectly destroyed by the company's work policy. This led to debate in the industry but no visible changes until March 2005, when Electronic Arts announced internally that it was planning to extend overtime pay to some employees not currently eligible.
One of the worst offenders of this problem had to be Sonic X-Treme, where the lead developer suffered from this so much that he was told by doctors that he had only 6 months left to live if he didn't quit the project immediately. A similar situation happened during the development of Anthem, where BioWare staff were often mandated to take weeks to months off due to excessive stress.
Recent reports have suggested that managements think very little about the health hazards of crunch time and dismiss it as "hard work". For example, when BioWare was confronted about the excessive crunch time that caused multiple stress casualties, they responded by claiming that the crunch time was "BioWare magic".