Homefront Studio Responds to Crunch Time Complaints

[TheRealGoochman]

I personally am dying to break into the gaming industry, I would sleep in the office if I had to and do it for free. ANYTHING to get my foot in the door.

Why the heck are they complaining?!?!?!?!?!

Maybe because they have a family to go home to. You know, like a wife or children.

As a person who is trying to get into the industry and is having a really tough time breaking in, I guess I lack the sympathy for them. I don't mean to come off as a jerk, I bet it sucks, BUT A:there are people worse off, B: Do what it takes to make a deadline C: it is a gaming company...they need to make sure their product is as good as it can be before being shipped off, there is a lot riding of the product (millions of dollars for any highly anticipated mainstream game.
Again it sucks.....but in the field that they are in, they should be putting in the extra hours to make sure their title is good (it's same with Production Companies.......it's a branch of the entertainment industry and you need to be willing to work your ass off if you're serious about it)

 

[dthree]

Didn't we already go through this with the ea_spouse controversy a few years ago? Putting aside work-life balance, putting aside the fact that devs are the ones that have to pay for management's poor planning, even putting aside health issues, extended crunch time is just poor business ? it's bad for productivity: http://archives.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php

 

[BoogieManFL]

Plan better in the beginning to avoid it all together.. Or give yourself a more realistic window of time to complete it.

BTW, my captcha to post was "What is the name of Toyota's Roadside assistance?" WTF. Some of these things are really dumb.

 

[zehydra]

While crunch time makes sense, being in crunch time for six straight months seems a little excessive. But, I've never done that kind of work, so I really don't know.

 

[Cogwheel]

10/7 isn't the worst. I had several weeks of translation where I would work 24 hours a day, only stopping to eat/take a nap every other day, and I didn't even get to keep the pay from that (100% of it was claimed by my parents). And even that isn't the worst.

That said? Continuing this for 6 months is ridiculous, as is not getting to see their family. And frankly, the "games are art" argument applies here, if in an unorthodox form. It's a creative work, whether you consider it art or not. Rushing it, much like telling a painter, musician or author to hurry up already, will harm the end product.

Not that I care in the least about Homefront in any case, but this seems a tad too harsh. It's common, certainly. It also shouldn't be.

 

[DTWolfwood]

guess not every development studio can adopt the Blizzard/Valve game release schedule. They need better project managers who can budget their time better, this is a failure in management if your worker have to work in crunch time often.

simple office arithmetic:
Smart Boss + Smart Worker = Profit
Smart Boss + Dumb Worker = Production
Dumb Boss + Smart Worker = Promotion
Dumb Boss + Dumb Worker = Overtime

What I find incredible is that over at Gamasutra where about 90% of the commenters actually work inside the industry, most of them agree that the usual practice of crunch time is very damaging to the game creation process.

Yet here, where 90% are not directly involved, tell developers to suck it up and do their job.

If that's the value most players give to the videogame creators (which sounds about like the managers seem to give them), it's no wonder more and more developers eventually choose other areas to work in.

So you'd think the ppl who work in the industry will admit that working long hours is good? Of course they'd say its bad. who wants to work extra hours for no extra pay?

I don't agree that their management is saying they are bitching about nothing because clearly they don't recognize who is at fault for creating these conditions.

But on that note, they arent the only ppl in whatever industry who have to work extra hours, so what this amounts to does seems to be a lot of whining. As if they consider their conditions unique.

If they don't want to work extra hours (w/o immediate compensation), either get better management, or Unionize. If they cant do either, they can leave the industry or stop complaining.

 

[Alandoril]

If it's that common then I think they need to rethink the way they structure their work loads.

LondonBeer, I couldn't agree with you more on your comment about the middle class. This seems to be a problem in nearly all the creative industries, and guess what kind of people dominate them...

 

[RabbiiFrystofsk]

your mom sounds like shes is in dire need of a union

No my mums in dire need of a reality check.

 

[(LK)]

...People mostly get Saturdays off? Oh yeah, I suppose that does happen. Weird. I had forgotten about that. And they get off during crunch time? Well, that's even more generous. Yeah, ten hour days are tough, but you get an hour lunch, and still 13 hours of doing other things. Call it 6-8 for sleep, Still leaves you a good few hours of downtime. That's not bad, all things considered. And you still have Sundays off during your crunch, so you have at least a day of downtime. Welcome to the working class, friend.

Depending on living conditions and distance from the office you may only have exactly enough waking hours not spent at the office to spend in transit between the home and the office, or showering and eating breakfast to head to the office. This kind of commute is fairly common for whitecollar workers in the U.S. given the absurd cost of housing in many urban areas.

Expecting someone to live for 6 months in which the only thing they live for is a job in which they're ultimately disposable (it isn't unheard of to just fire programmers because the game is done and they're taking up space and money) is unreasonable, and so is any other job that expects you to have no existence outside of your job performance.

Accounts given by people inside of the industry also attest that it is not uncommon for management to resort to crunch time not as a solution to a problem, but because when they created their schedule, they literally said right at the start of the project that "the last 6 months will be crunch time" because they wanted to promise the publisher a shorter development cycle than they were actually capable of delivering on without resorting to that trick. This is usually deliberately concealed from the employees when hiring them, too, and if they ask about it they may be lied to about it.

Given this, maybe people should be sympathetic and not villainize an employee because they're being disloyal to an employer who, being a corporate entity, is compelled by nature and by law to have no feelings of loyalty towards such employees if it is not to their shareholders' benefit.