Rockstar has staff "working 100-hour weeks" on Red Dead Redemption 2
94 replies, posted
Just pay overtime. Employees get fairly compensated for their work, employers are strongly disincentivized to rely upon crunch time as a standard practice (as Rockstar does), and employees who aren't voluntarily working overtime aren't made to look worse than their peers. This is a staple of unionized labor.
Uhhhhhhhhhhh HL3
Just because its the norm to always fuck someone over (either the devs, or the players), doesn't really make it ok. Why would anyone even try to defend something like that? Is it lack of empathy or is it just blind fanboyism?
Tangential, but I think part of the reason for the delays is that Rockstar is also working on Bully 2 at the same time, as well as piecemealing GTA Online content because it's really a self-funding cash cow for the game at this point
I'm not entirely sympathetic to that argument, but even having the most profitable game ever under your belt doesn't really excuse your future games from wasting money if they take too long to be made. Deadlines are still a valid thing in such a scenario for a company that exists to make money first and foremost.
If you can't make a game without exploiting your workers you don't deserve to make a game
Maybe not, but morality won't stop things like this. Like I said, they exist first and foremost to make money. Ultimately, what they're doing isn't illegal (yet), and people still work for them. One of those has to change before a shift in corporate's mentality is likely to happen.
Shouldn't they have taken their vast amount of money into account when coming up with those deadlines? IMO there really is no excuse for them to have come to using crunch dev time, especially when they still have money coming in from GTAV even when they're working on RDR2. At the very least they should have come up with more reasonable deadlines, or hired more people.
Hiring more people only does so much.
Again, the argument isn't that crunch is inherently a bad thing. As long as you compensate your employees for overtime and you're not in crunch for months at a time I don't have an issue.
The issue comes from Rockstar, and various other studios that create toxic environments that force their employees into staying late in fear of losing their jobs. The other is work being devalued from "passionate" people and the overall tone of you can be replaced with somebody who will do your work for less being a prevailing tone.
It should be straight up illegal for employees to work more than 40 hours a week.
"Crunch time" is a failure on the part of production managers and executives who promise too much too soon, and offload the consequences of their fuckup onto the lives of their employees rather than delaying release or releasing a sub-par product.
Even if you're passionate about your work, you deserve to have time for relationships, family, and some damn free time on a regular basis.
I can only see the legislation of "40 hour work weeks" as back firing as companies find ways to use the loopholes of well intentioned regulations against the workers
I don't want to come off as hostile, but I'm not sure how an upper limit on time spent at work could be used against the workers. Would you mind sharing your ideas?
Overtime seems like a way better solution. That way if you have some absolute madman they'll still able to continue with their crazy hours if they're productive during that time, while the added cost for employing them disincentivizes managers from pushing everyone to emulate their hours.
You can't stop someone from contributing to a project that they're truly passionate about, outside of literally imprisoning them. There are always going to be some people who're obsessed with creating the perfect work.
That's not necessarily true. Game development isn't an industry where everyone can plug away at a project for 40hrs a week from start to finish with a constant level of output. Often you've got guys who don't have much to do for literally months (so work on secondary tasks), and then once their prerequisites have been met suddenly have a ton of work that needs to get done in a short amount of time.
You have basically three options:
Delay release, and have everyone else sit around with nothing to do because your entire project is being held up by a small component of the development process.
Hire more workers for just this part of development, which never works, because you run headfirst into Brooks's law.
Do some limited crunch time with the guys you already have.
I don't intrinsically have a problem with #3, so long as employees are adequately compensated for it. When it isn't appropriately compensated, it exploits hard-working people and devalues their work.
Crunch time does become a failure on the part of management when it's planned for a large portion of the workforce and for a long period of time, like the conditions that triggered the infamous 'EA Spouse' letter, where it was revealed that an entire development team had been doing hardcore crunch time for months. In that case, the team needs to be larger from the outset, or release needs to be delayed.
There are lots of jobs out there where people work very long hours for short periods of time, followed by long stretches of low activity. Airline pilots are a common example, as well as high-stress jobs like deep-sea divers. The key is that they don't do that kind of high-intensity work for more than a few weeks at a time, and they're paid well in recognition of the difficulty of their work. Game developers tend to get forced into high-intensity work for long periods of time and with shit pay the whole time, and that practice is exploitative and needs to stop.
Tons of things that "I'm not sure how this could be used against them" have been used against people for the last few decades. Look at legislation. Look at the loopholes, and look at the reality that companies find a way to prevent people from making money that hurts the companies bottom line.
I don't know if you remember, but back when there was legislaiton passed aimed at Walmart, and curbing their relliance on part time employment, the law that went into affect only ended up giving walmart more teeth to pay people less with.
Legislation, regulation, they're good ideas, but often times in practice are implemented in ways that are far, far from optimal.
The company I work at practices a fourth option on a regular basis:
Have the first departments to run out of work on a production start work on the next production, and come back to the prior production as needed. Now granted I work in TV production, not games, but wouldn't a similar concept work for game development?
I understand some fields like airline pilots and deep-sea divers require more intense hours due to the nature of the task at hand, but when the task is sitting in a studio all day I just don't feel like it's as justifiable to have inconsistent hours.
I completely agree that Game developers, and a lot of professional artists in general, are exploited on a regular basis. I feel very lucky for being able to do what I do without facing that kind of abuse from my employer.
Overtime pay does seem like an option to balance it out, although even then overtime would have to be limited or else too many workers who are keen to make loadsamoney instead of having personal lives could have an adverse effect on the company.
If you work in TV/Film, then there are multiple people who work longer than 40 hours a week on your crew.
Rigging Gaffers and Rigging electricians often worked longer than 40 hour work weeks, best boys usually had some pretty long weeks too.
Crunch culture is disgusting. It's rampant in the industry. My last place of work, Overkill/Starbreeze, was very much also a part of this tradition. I would sometimes work 80 hours in a week, sometimes weekends, just to finish a project on time. I worked in marketing though, but nonetheless it happened.
The place I work at now (Toadman Interactive) is fucking amazing though. They vowed to avoid crunch at all costs by just planning effectively. I've worked there roughly 8 months and we've "crunched" for one week, and it was like 1-2 hours more per day that week. More companies need to take on this approach because holy fuck I feel so much healthier not having to dedicate 90% of my awake time for work.
Sorry, I should clarify that I work in TV animation, not live-action. I don't think anyone here goes by the description of "Gaffer" or "best boy"
I would mandate 40 hour work weeks, or overtime like an above post suggested, primarily so people can follow their passions and still have time for relationships, family, hobbies, personal projects, all that fulfilling life stuff that staves off crippling depression and other mental illness.
I'm sorry that you're put in a position where working late is required. I don't think that is a good thing or a necessary thing.
unionizing is almost harder now then when they could shoot union members. Most of the most effective tactics were made illegal and big businesses have been clawing back union and worker rights ever since. there hasn't been any meaningful expansion of worker rights in decades
Blame this on the game art/game aducation system as well. the best schools all hard wire "you only have a shot if you work 100% of the time" into students brain, and are only half wrong. add to this the pressure of tuition and how competitive the AAA industry is nowadays for the one job youre aiming for. and you get people passing out at 25 from working towards their passion. or driving their car into a tree from sleep depravation (he got out without a scratch, car was absolute rip though). I was doing a lot and constantly losing weight, but my former roomate was doing up to 90h of homework on top of our 36h of class, + commute etc. almost everyone ik who got through it are scarred from their school year but dont regret it at all. they signed up for it.
dont let anyone tell you art students dont work. industry focused art schools is the place ive seen the most people passed out on couches everywhere because theyre on their 2nd or 3rd all nighter. it's a different world.
Man, I'm already having fucking trouble working on art for 8 hours straight a day at home. I don't think I could do 12 hours with the lack of discipline I have.
Part of me is wondering if I should get a career change or just stick with doing shit like indie games or graphic novels just because of shit like this.
Dont listen to that. it's talk from insanely competitive people focused only on the best paid top jobs in the top studios. 8h of productive work always beats 16h of sleep deprived exhausted work. it's just the culture in many industry circles. pointing at a guy saying "look at him, he works asbolutely all of the time" as an example of what to do, etc.
Anyone with common sense will tell you it's bs. Keep working as hard as you can, but sleep and take care of yourself. It took me years to fix my sleep scheduele and get rid of my destructive crunch habits that lead to worst results than working less more productive hours.
Maybe that's part of why my perspective about this is so warped.
I went to art/film school. I worked myself to the bone by choice multiple times. That was what everyone worth their salt did, that's how good projects got made.
the quote they kept telling me was "Blade Runner wouldnt have happened if the prop making crew didnt work 18h a day every day for 6 months to make the spinner prop". That was the constant vibe, sacrifice yourself to be able to work on the greatest projects.
Honestly I get burning yourself on a passion project, I do that all the time, but this isn't the case with Rockstar or most triple A games studios. A lot of their mid-tier assets are made by outsourced studios or straight-up freelance contractors, a lot of whom live in third-world or
developing nations with generally lax labour laws. People sort of look at me like a conspiracy theorist when I say this but how the fuck do you think they turned Max Payne 3's development from a mismanaged traincrash to a straight-shot in under 18 months? Why do you think
Rockstar established Rockstar India, a country known for having a shitload of cheap artist labour, right around the time GTAV entered crunch development? Big game houses like this have taken the old days ideal of living under your desk to make your magnum opus and turned it
into the standard operating procedure, believing that if stalwarts like John Carmack and co did it back in the day, and talked publically about it, it must be acceptable. It's fucking despicable that they expect people to grind their fucking dicks off on some shitty fucking shooter that
they have no real personal attachment to beyond the job experience.
Not all too surprising honestly. We already know big time studios tend to neglect rank and file workers in various ways. Rockstar is not somehow immune to this.
NDA's are down for those working on the game, so they have since given their thoughts.
https://twitter.com/keiththorburn81/status/1052873836914446336
https://twitter.com/jobjstauffer/status/1052323687829884929
https://twitter.com/philcsf/status/1052881710092816385
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