Crunch: The Reality Check

“Not sticking to deadlines is the management’s fuckup, and never the fault of the graphic artists, programmers and others working on the game”.

Yup, such deep thoughts, undoubtedly based on years of experience (of reading Kotaku et al, I guess) are expressed these days because of the CDPR’s crunch controversy.

Meanwhile, the truth is much less exciting: crunching is a complex issue, one that is not black and white at all. I can’t give you a better example than this: I know some ex-CDPR developers who crunched, left the studio and told me stories that sent chills down my spine, but I also know some who crunched even more, and yet are very happy at CDPR and do not intend to leave any time soon.

Where does the crunch come from?

Armchair activists and bleeding hearts have a simple answer: capitalist vampires abuse the economy and whip the hard working employees into overdrive, treating them like easily interchangeable cogs.

And somehow no one wonders how is that the actual strategy in times when any half-decent programmer or a graphic artist has ten good offers from eager competitors in their inbox.

So where does the crunch REALLY come from?

In my opinion, there are four reasons.

First, and this is obvious, human errors. A broadly defined incompetence can apply to any human being and any profession. There is no reason to believe that somehow that does not apply to the studio owners or project managers. So yes, they make mistakes. And believe me, I know the effect of these first-hand, having crunched for years under the managers of big publishers on two AAA projects…

What is not obvious, but should be, is that “incompetence” also applies to employees. For some reason people believe that the managers fuck up everything they can, but none of the employees ever spends an hour a day on cigarette breaks, never browses Reddit, never wastes time on gossip, and always sticks to deadlines they themselves set.

Someone paying attention might say, well, isn’t it the project managers’ job to account for all that and plan accordingly? To me, that’s hypocrisy: “Everyone can be incompetent, hard exception: project managers.”

Second, making games is all about creativity. With that comes the curse of not knowing the number of iterations.

An example. Game Awards are happening soon, and this is one of the best opportunities to advertise your game (which helps sales, which helps profit, which helps royalties and employee bonuses). You want to release a trailer. What is the guarantee that the trailer’s soundtrack proposed by the composer will be “it” right away? None. It can be. Or it can be the version number twenty.

And so it goes with anything that is an act of creation. Before clicking “Send”, how many times have you edited your own Facebook post, tweet or e-mail? Sometimes not at all, sometimes multiple times. Right?

Third, we — game developers — are in the business of innovation. Despite game engines and decades of experience, we still keep introducing new solutions, new ideas. Even if it’s a sequel, gamers do not forgive us if it is just like the original but with a different skin (although that apparently does not apply to FIFA, lmao). No, we need new. New designs, new worlds, new technologies that need to be invented or serviced, new hardware platforms, etc.

Because innovation is a branch of the creativity tree, we also never really know the answer to “how long will it take?”.

Fourth, gamers want more. Reviews like “I cannot recommend this game because after the first two hundred hours there’s not much to do” are not a meme but a reality. Good luck to anyone who releases one-playthrough-and-you-have-seen-it-all eight hour long Single Player game for $60 — something that was a standard 10–15 years ago!

The average playthrough time of the first, legendary God of War (2005) is nine hours. Anyone seriously believes that would fly today? Of course it wouldn’t, which is why the average completion time of the latest God of War (2018) is twenty one hours.

Think about it more for a second. It’s not just that the modern AAA game must be longer (literally longer or ready for exciting replays). It’s also needs to be up to today’s audio-visual standards, meaning it needs way more work than ever before. An in-game character that could be modelled, textured and animated in a week in 2004 by one person (I should know, this is how we made Painkiller), now takes at least two months of work of multiple devs.

More work to make a game longer, more work to make it look and sound AAA — and yet the price stays the same (actually it gets lower each year, if we consider inflation — and why shouldn’t we?)

And now, when all those four things put together — human errors, terra incognita of creativity and innovation, and the pressure of the market — clash with a deadline, SHIT HAPPENS.

Well, then why do we have deadlines at all?

A game is not an isolated island. There are only a few good slots in a year to advertise, and things are even worse with setting the release date so there’s still some oxygen left, not all sucked out by the competition. Also, budgets are still a thing.

Crunch, possibly with the exception of one that is rare and short, is a bad thing. Well, this is as shocking as the conclusion that it’s better to be rich and healthy rather than poor and sick.

Do not confuse this post explaining crunch with any sort of statement that it’s okay to bleed.

However, if anybody has an illusion that something will dramatically change here, they are out of touch with reality. A more severe crunch exists in movies and TV, and these art forms are simpler, linear, older, more experienced. I am actually amazed that gamedev rarely reaches their levels (I say “gamedev” because it’s hilarious that we’re talking CDPR when in reality every AAA studio crunches, although of course the severity of it varies from dev to dev).

Things won’t change in video games, as long as the project is ambitious enough. The Unreal Engine 5 might have excited gamers but think for a second what that level of visual fidelity means for the developers…

If you cannot live with that, then either ambitious AAA gamedev is not for you (which is totally fine) or maybe you should not look for a job at a studio known for marathon crunches and working on an innovative, hyper-ambitious project. “It is what it is” and nothing will change any time soon because there will always be someone who does not listen to calls for a march when all they want is to run.

And the world is way more interested in runners than walkers.

Of course, the impossibility of an ideal does not mean we should not strive to be better. And so I want to make it clear that this post, which barely scratches the surface anyway, has only one goal: to explain that crunch is a thing slightly more complicated than the spasms of soulless capitalist pigs, is not exclusively the fault of project managers, and, despite what the Twitter bubble believes, it rarely is the result of pure cynicism.