• Rockstar has staff "working 100-hour weeks" on Red Dead Redemption 2
    94 replies, posted
Dude, you don't have to be an expert to think realize that crushing your employees physically and mentally isn't the only way you can make a big vidya gaem nor is it optimal.
and it'll still have a half baked single player in exchange for a p2w multiplayer
They did it on GTA5. The co host of dad and sons podcast is a former GTA5 dev. He mentionned how they they had to work on DLC immediatly after release crunch. Everytime he talks about that period of time you can hear how it scared him. Yeah 100h for everyone on an extended period of time is probably not what happened. But its not unheard of at all. A lot of devs from various AAA studis said they had that kind of hours in crunch on twitter when the news came out. Its too common, for the reasons last or first said. Nobody is irreplacable, and dozens of people with the same skillset can have your job. Especialy on giant productions where a ton of freelancers are hired.
I don't understand the approach of "well obviously it's right so you don't need to demonstrate that it's right" if it's obviously right then surely there's at least one example of a better structure to point to like really I just need something to go off of, I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation
Let me reformulate the other way around. How could crushing your employees physically and mentally possibly be the only way to make a AAA game when research shows it's basically a waste of time to work more than 40 hours a week?
This isnt limited to the games industry. VFX/film industry can be just as bad. Not to say its acceptable in either cases, it isnt.
Literally how the film industry operates, as well as many other careers. I don't think it's ideal, but there is literally no alternative in the wild. Personally, I know 100 hour work weeks don't work for myself, i've had them. I'm not defending the practice, I'm attacking the poor reporting that doesn't seem to do much but speculate at who actually went through this.
What the hell lol, those aren't opposite arguments. The opposite argument of "people are unhappy so it's bad" is "people are happy so it's good". The opposite argument of "the studio is successful so it's good" is "the studio is unsuccessful so it's bad". My fucking argument is "despite the fact that the studio is successful, people are unhappy so it's bad".
I've had work weeks of 100 hours in the film industry. I really don't know how to put this to you, but you couldn't make a movie if people didn't do that. You know why? You'd have no one to work them. We worked 18 hour days, as I've said, because a certain number of things needed to happen in a day. If you wanted to not have people working those hours, you quadruple the number of people working. When you do that, the show cannot afford to be one second late on a single thing. That means if the director gets a good idea, he can't change the schedule to fit it in, because that's lost money. It's hard enough to do that as it is, but you'd never have that happen in the scenario where no one ever works more than 40 hours. From a creative side, I had some of the best ideas I've had happen in that delirious state of overworked. And maybe that's wrong, but that's what I've personally experienced.
like, dude, I agree with you. everything I know about media production intuitively leads me to believe that you're right and these working conditions aren't necessary but when I present my position to someone on a subject, I can't communicate to them the sum total of my experience with media so that they'll have my same exact intuitive understanding what I need is a compelling argument, an argument that I know I could make in other contexts, and which I would like to have the information necessary to make in this one.
100-hour weeks because they have to add stupid shit like dynamic horse nuts.
I mean yeah, that's exactly why "There seems to be some confusion arising from my interview with Harold Goldberg. The point I was trying to make in the article was related to how the narrative and dialogue in the game was crafted, which was mostly what we talked about, not about the different processes of the wider team. After working on the game for seven years, the senior writing team, which consists of four people, Mike Unsworth, Rupert Humphries, Lazlow and myself, had, as we always do, three weeks of intense work when we wrapped everything up. Three weeks, not years. We have all worked together for at least 12 years now, and feel we need this to get everything finished. After so many years of getting things organized and ready on this project, we needed this to check and finalize everything."
Filming is planned out far in advance and lasts for a specific period of time. Software development lasts "until it's done", which can stretch out for years beyond the initial estimate. With filming, every day spent on the set costs a set amount of money. There are location and equipment costs that make long days necessary. I don't think game development is directly comparable. And yes, while it's true that for a lot of people, that kind of diving into work helps them creatively, most of those people will alternate between obsessive work and relaxation. Nobody can work under that kind of stress indefinitely. Everyone snaps at some point, even the most obsessive and hard working people in media.
Sure you could imo, they'd just take longer to make.
I don’t know about that. I was an electric. I started my day running cablesz I ended my day once EVERYONE else left by cleaning up cables. Someone else could take over half way through, but they’d have to know the exact wattages used on every line. That would take a minimum of an hour to properly explain or communicate in my experience on large shows
100 hour weeks? That's 14 hours minimum if you're working all 7 days straight, 16 if you work 6 days. I don't believe that shit for a second.
Not really related to the article, but as long as consumers demand more and more technically demanding games to come out faster and more often, crunch in the AAA scene will sadly be a way of life. Some studios luckily aren't afraid or wary of allowing delays if necessary, but nothing kills hype, interest, and potential profits in a game like delaying it, so sadly some publishers take no compromises. Basically, if you want to get in the game industry, either find a studio that allows for unions, or just stay the fuck away from AAA and go indie.
Do you have anything to back that up?
I think that since the article I presented contained several professional sources that pretty much indicated working 40 hours a week will accomplish more work than working 100 hours we can infer that Rockstar could produce Red Dead Redeption 2 just as fast (if not even faster) if crunch time was eliminated. It's not rocket science. You say you're not convinced because the lack of AAA studios not using crunch time. A lack of evidence (no big studios does this) isn't evidence in an of itself (that no crunch time can't work). There's a more solid argument in favor of it (research proves no crunch time is better) than against it (it hasn't been proven that it can't work for big studios). I don't know if I can break it down in simpler terms than this.
dude you got a real shitty deal working 100 hour weeks and thats not ok. Your quest to rectify the poor reporting by giving context doesn't change the fact that 100hr weeks are not on and you seem weirdly hung up on it.
"I'm saying I just need any example. If no company anywhere, regardless of scale" While yes, generally what I've read lines up with the conclusion that lower hours result in higher productivity, and I'm willing to believe that principle extends to creative fields as well, it's still important to recognize that making media isn't like making other kinds of products. There is no objective means of measuring the quality of work put out by employees because there is no objective standard. It's entirely plausible that there exists a world where the only way to get the result you need out of your employees is to make them tackle something over and over until they get it 'right'. It's also plausible, and I would argue more likely, that creating healthy and comfortable conditions for your employees results in them producing better work overall. The thing is, no one who disagrees would ever care about what I think is more probable or not. So it'd be nice to have some sort of evidence that I'm right.
As someone who's worked on games for a few years now, and experienced crunch, it's not something that has an easy answer to. Crunch exists due to two things: -Games need milestones and deadlines in order to release. -People aren't working at peak efficiency all of the time. Deadlines need to exist because of money. Keeping a game studio running costs lots and lots of money. Publishers will calculate how much money a studio spends over time, and give the studio X dollars that will last them Y months. If you don't make your game in Y months, then you're costing the publishers more money than they anticipated. This is why delaying a game isn't so much a hype or marketing problem, it's a money problem. Every month a game is delayed is literally millions of dollars more piling onto the project. So lots of planning goes into when things should be done, however no plan is perfect. Things change over the course of a game's development. New features may be added, design might change, bugs and issues might slow down feature implementation. Not to mention that people aren't always working at max efficiency. Employees take long lunches, browse the internet, get distracted in conversation, etc etc. So toward the end of a project, you'll have a lot of work that didn't get done when it was supposed to, or new work that wasn't initially accounted for. Delaying would cost the publisher millions of additional dollars. Thus, you've got crunch time.
Nothing hard evidence wise, just anecdotes and consumer tendencies. It's not a leap in logic though to assume that the longer someone has to wait for something, the less interested they become in it. Notable examples of this include games that were delayed to hell like Duke Nukem Forever. The hyped that remained for that game was more with the hardcore fans, not so much your average consumer who just knows about the Duke Nukem IP in question. Of course there were other factors surrounding the game that killed hype and interest though. I'm not saying this always applies, but I'm sure it's something on the minds of most publishers when they have to delay a game. Profits wise though is easy to backup. Games cost money to make, so the longer you have to spend making a game, the more you have to spend on it, and the less you'll make back from sales of it than if you released it earlier and just patched it to hell and back. I can try to do some research on the former if you really want me to, but finding something concrete may not prove to be easy.
yeah, I mean of course increased production time increases costs, I'm just really curious to know if consumers actually care about the final fate something comes out. KH3 is coming out soon, and that game's years of production hell hasn't seemed to impact interest from what I can tell. Historically I can think of plenty of examples of huge games that were delayed and still hugely successful. And just thinking about it, it seems really weird to not be interested in a game you otherwise would have been just because it came out later than you initially thought it would(unless it's something absurd like DN:F).
I don't think delays hurt hype if the final product is still good. The thing about Duke Nukem was that it looked like garbage in spite of its incredibly long development time.
It was a unionized job. People keep acting like that’s a solution, it might not be. Im aware that these hours aren’t healthy and im not advocating for them but I don’t really see a solution that anyone’s got. Also they say 12 senior writers didn’t this for a 3 week period. Who knows if that’s correct but it’s hard to ignore that if the story was being read by everyone more thoroughly that detail might have not been missed.
And I guarantee you that when it comes time for employee review, Dan Houser with his 100-hour work weeks is not going to be evaluated the same as a writer who put in his 40 per week. In many industries, union regs specifically prevent employees from volunteering in this manner, specifically because it devalues labor. Why hire a guy who only works what is required when you can hire a guy who will voluntarily do the work of two people? Why promote the bare-minimum employee, and when it's time to downsize, why not fire him first? It's the same shtick that we see with 'unlimited vacation'. In theory, you can take as much vacation as you want and the company won't hold it against you. In practice, you'd be a fool to think the corporates aren't paying attention to how much time you take off. And they're certainly paying attention to who's putting in more hours. I recognize that gaming is a creative industry and people really are passionate about it, but this is a race to the bottom, and developers willingly being exploited is a major part of why the games industry is such a poorly-paying, unpleasant environment to work in.
I feel like it’s a weird thing to be a part of. Being a game artist, I know how invested people working on games yet: There are plenty of times where I’ve gotten absolutely obsessed with a project that I can’t stop working.
I've worked in games a bit and I don't have an issue with end of project crunch but Rockstar will do it for months at a time. I've heard them say to staff they'll be doing it for the next 5 months and so forth
Well they own their share of the company so no probably not. id accept delays and games taking longer in general but this game was in development for almost 8 years. I could wait longer at that point but at that point you can also be endangering the project and in the case of video games that can mean the company and many people’s jobs. 100 hour work weeks are unsustainable and I don’t think we need them but I also don’t see a way around crunch. We had our versions of it, I don’t like deadlines not being in line with a work week but how do you reasonably avoid that all the time and not create cost over runs elsewhere?
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