Because crunch sucks ass.
And, as others have pointed out, the actual content they release doesn’t demand that kind of schedule.
Not to the owners/management that is getting more work for less money.
There is a difference between working hard and being worked hard. It is a difference sometimes that both the management or the worker can fail to recognize.
Any corporate culture that allows its employees to burn out is a culture that will eventually implode. I support HR at various clients and it is interesting to watch the shift in corporate thinking. The future holds less employees after the baby boomers disappear and now the shift is to holding onto older, experienced, and talented employees. I am not certain that the gaming industry will follow this trend but that is the direction in strategy that is arising among HR departments. They are all investing huge amounts of resources in obtaining talent/succession software. I suspect the idea of using up employees because there are others that can be hired when the current crop of employees have wasted away is not going to be ABLE to last forever when there are not a lot of people in the pot to choose in the future.
My company will make you take off if they see you are not using your vacation. M position requires a lot of travel and the managers in my department will give us periodic breaks from the road if we request it or they think we need a break.
It depends, some game companies are pretty good at the quality of life thing. Though several game companies with very popular games seem to be able to get away with being shittier to their employees. It’s sort of ironic, but the popularity of the games seems to ensure that they have plenty of new hires to draw from, giving them the sense that their insane schedules aren’t a problem, and they just need to find, ‘the right people’.
Is your crunch unpaid overtime???
I get sick at the mere thought if that.
Traditionally all crunch in the videogame industry is unpaid overtime. Even if it lasts for years.
Well, no. You’re incorrect. It depends on your pay type. I know plenty of people who have made tons of OT and even Double OT in California (which is quite easy to do) in the gaming industry.
— Alan
I dunno. Maybe they are porting the game to a new engine, or some other unanounced++ project, and they have a strict schedule with firm milestones that if they fail milestones the profitability become dubious. Blizzard is going to release his own DOTA clone soon, and it looks very good, companies usually announce a something the same days a competitor relase a competing game to steal part of the shine from the that game.
How a company treats its employees is a factor in whether I want to buy from that company. At the very least, it would make me give a company a second chance. This is largely due to my politics, but also due to my belief that better-treated employees= better product.
The company I work for supplies a daily deliverable service which has to be met, now we could do heavy overtime at times of heavy work load but we don’t.
I run the business and we staff for 125% of work load, sure it costs us extra in wages but it has so many benefits that far out weigh the savings that while we have discussed it it just doesnt make sense to have crunch sessions or too much additional pressure on our staff, they already work hard and produce excellent results and the crunch would affect that negatively.
That sounds far more wise, if you are doing too much unpaid OT you are in effect being swindled or worse, you can try to divide your salary on hours every month, if it closes in on burger flippers you are doing it wrong.
Whoa, seems like I need to live in California. Are there local labor laws that extend legal protections to professional/exempt job classifications? I know pretty much anyone in development or IT is considered exempt from OT at a federal level.
I personally consider myself very blessed at current to be doing consulting where I’m on a billable hours basis with my clients and paid at an hourly rate. I don’t qualify for OT pay rates but if I work 60 hours a week (and lately I have been) then at least I get paid for hourly rate x 60 instead of 40. In previous jobs when I was salaried the crunch time was just a free donation to my employers.
It is local labor laws in California.
Are most people working in the gaming industry hourly or salaried? Obviously, salaried people don’t typically get overtime unless it is exceptional circumstances.
It depends on the company you work and how they view labor at various levels of management and human resources. I’ve worked at companies where producers and even lower tiers of engineers work on an hourly basis and get OT.
FYI, in California, you earn OT as an hourly worker when you work more than 8 hours in a single day, or when you accumulate more than 40 regular hours in the work week (each hour afterwards is OT) or when you work for 7 continuous days a week (your work on the 7th day is automatically OT). Accumulate more than 12 hours in a work day and you get double OT. Should you not take an appropriate off-the-clock 30+ minute break or breaks (I forgot the exact timing), the company also gets penalized an extra regular hour (which is added to your paycheck) for a lunch penalty.
I hadn’t seen hourly outside of entry-level positions much outside of California, but have seen it quite a bit more here. Among other things, it works as a multi-faceted retention measure for companies.
— Alan
James Surowiecki wrote about the Cult of Overwork in the New Yorker a few weeks back:
Cry me a river, you might say. But what happened on Wall Street is just an extreme version of what’s happened to so-called knowledge workers in general. Thirty years ago, the best-paid workers in the U.S. were much less likely to work long days than low-paid workers were. By 2006, the best paid were twice as likely to work long hours as the poorly paid, and the trend seems to be accelerating. A 2008 Harvard Business School survey of a thousand professionals found that ninety-four per cent worked fifty hours or more a week, and almost half worked in excess of sixty-five hours a week. Overwork has become a credential of prosperity.
He’s mostly talking about Wall Street analysts (and to a lesser extent Medical Residents), but I think it’s relevant here, especially to the question of how you can end up working so much without anyone explicitly asking you to.