Mike McShaffry » I <3 Crunch

IGDA Whitepaper: Quality of Life (in the games industry)

Highlighted conclusions: “The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours (13%). Overtime is often uncompensated (46.8%).” ” during [crunch], [staff] [...more...]

It’s cheaper to cancel a launch … than to crunch to meet it
“we gotta meet the deadline, or the company will lose lots of $$$” is one of the most powerful emotional [...more...]
In praise of the 40-hour work week (via salon.com)
A great – detailed – article looking at the 100-year-history of the working week, and trying to understand why and [...more...]
Thoughts on Crunch: Causes of Mandatory Crunch
This post, in it’s entirety, can also be found on my blog: Jeff On Games The post is part of [...more...]
Thoughts on Crunch: Types of Crunch
This post, in it’s entirety, can also be found on my blog: Jeff On Games Because crunch has been in [...more...]
Crunch in AAA games: Kameo and Viva Pinata
Guest Post: Andy Patrick Recently I was asked the question, “is crunch necessary to produce a AAA game?” My response [...more...]
IGDA Quality of Life team starts a Twitter Account
Hopefully, they will do good with this. In the first 6 weeks, they’ve managed four links about QoL, and 8 [...more...]
Team Bondi staff owed £830,000, unlikely to get paid
Crunch. You know, often … it just doesn’t pay: http://www.develop-online.net/news/38822/830000-goes-unpaid-to-Team-Bondi-staff Tweet This Post
What causes Crunch? People vs. Economics?
Some commentary here from Keith Fuller, responding to Jurie Horneman’s rebuttal of the “Crunch is caused by bad build systems” [...more...]
What is Crunch? (it’s not a build-system)
In this month’s Develop magazine, the current CTO at Criterion wrote a slightly foolish article. He wrote a good, full [...more...]
Nolan Bushnell (Atari founder): all-nighters good?
Nolan Bushnell wrote an IMHO ill-conceived tweet last month, which I just noticed re-produced in print (this month’s Develop) – [...more...]
CryTek: 3 months crunch on Crysis 2
From the CEO, Avni Yerli: “like any game Crysis has phases of crunch. But we had not enforced weekend work [...more...]
From Crunch … to bankruptcy. Team Bondi goes out of business
Team Bondi – the studio that built LA Noire – has just gone into administration. This is being reported as [...more...]
The Pixel Bullies: “develop games differently … no crunch”
“Personally, I didn’t want to jump from large AAA crunch style development, only to then crunch myself but without all [...more...]
Old Acclaim story: 14 hrs / day, 7 days / week, 6 months / year
Trawling through the long list of comments on the Rockstar San Diego Wives story (not covered on this site yet [...more...]
IGDA Whitepaper: Quality of Life (in the games industry)
Highlighted conclusions: “The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours (13%). Overtime is often uncompensated (46.8%).” ” during [crunch], [staff] [...more...]
Kaos Studios places “a high premium” on employee QoL, unless the publisher wants more…
[originally occurred early 2011 - we're still adding historical content] As pointed out by Keith Fuller, there was an interesting [...more...]
6 studies on Crunch and how it materially affects people
“Industrial-organizational psychologists have extensively studied the concept of work overload and the burnout that comes it, and I thought it [...more...]
“EA Spouse” and the Crisis of Video Game Labour: Enjoyment, Exclusion, Exploitation, Exodus
An academic paper from Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario) and Greig de Peuter (Simon Fraser University), covering briefly four [...more...]
Opinion: scalable vs non-scalable pay; what’s your life worth?
A stake that scales This is a crucial detail that is often completely overlooked by journalists (who fail to think-through [...more...]
Splash Damage: 6 months of Crunch is acceptable?
Ed Stern, Lead Writer at Splash Damage (and apparently one of the longest-serving employees), seems to say that until you [...more...]

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