Developers react: The #RyseFacts hashtag, and the war on crunch

The #RyseFacts hashtag on Twitter was definitely one to watch last night. What started as a "fact" about late night office dinners for the team behind upcoming Xbox One game Ryse: Son of Rome soon snowballed into dozens of developers sounding off about development crunch. The Crytek team is currently putting numerous extra hours of work into development of the Xbox One launch title, in the run-up to release next month. In an ill-advised tweet, the official Ryse account explained that "we will have served the crunching team more than 11,500 dinners throughout development." The hashtag #RyseFacts was plopped on the end for good measure. What followed was a torrent of game developers displaying their dismay at not simply the fact that the Crytek team is crunching on its latest game, but that the tweet appears to suggest a level of pride in this fact. Below, we've collected together many of the thoughts of game developers following the tweets. Reactions range from thoughts on how crunch can affect the lives of developers, to more tongue-in-cheek criticisms of the original tweet. For more information on how crunch affects video game developers, check out the Game Developer Quality-of-Life survey from earlier this year.