IS DEVELOPMENT CRUNCH INEVITABLE?

It’s hard to argue against crunch being inevitable, most games in the industry are adjudged to have some sort of crunch section in their development. Certainly if you ask their employees many work up to 70 hours a week and a reported 37% stated they received no compensation! (Takahashi, 2016).

It could be a result of many different development factors, such as being behind schedule or fixing bugs before the launch, to even just to add further polish in a short amount of time.

So how can we say that it is NOT inevitable? Well, let’s look at some of the reasons as to why it happens. Delving deeper into the fact of development being behind schedule, it could be argued that if the project managers kept on top of the development then crunch would not be needed to effectively ‘catch up’. Maybe the publisher’s goals for the project are too ambitious to hit deadlines. The directors of the game themselves could be asking too much from their employees. One common occurrence is that the publisher financing the game changes their minds on a large design aspect (could be based on testing feedback) and level design, art, or more could have to be fully revamped. The options would be asking the publisher for more staff, tell them you need to cut features or even tell them you cannot do this change (Schreler, 2016). This most of the time leads to crunch due to not wanting to upset the financial backer of the development.

How can this be avoided? Well as we have transgressed past the reasons for it happening, we could flip each one on its head and argue that with more staff in the development cycle that crunch would not be needed. Having more staff although increases various costs such as recruitment, staff pay, travel expenses and more, thus leading many (especially smaller companies) to ignore this as a way around crunch. Next would be having a publisher on board from the project start, giving them a fully fleshed concept document with working prototypes of game-play and concept art. This should help avoid the publisher changing the development, not to mention the contract between developer and publisher could be written to ensure that vast changes to development cannot happen, albeit at risk of pushing away potential publishers.

Picture Credit: http://www.totalhealth.co.uk/blog/ideal-prescription-burnout

References:

Schreler, J. (2016, September 26). The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch. Retrieved from Kotaku: http://kotaku.com/crunch-time-why-game-developers-work-such-insane-hours-1704744577

Takahashi, D. (2016, March 16). Game Dev Group Targets ‘Crunch Time’ Practices At Blockbuster Game Publishers. Retrieved from Venturebeat: http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/16/game-dev-group-measures-crunch-time-practices-at-major-game-companies/

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