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Part 4 in a 5-part series analyzing the results of the Game Outcomes Project survey, which polled hundreds of game developers to determine how teamwork, culture, leadership, production, and project management contribute to game project success or failure.
This article is the fourth in a 5-part series.
Part 1: The Best and the Rest is available here: (Gamasutra) (BlogSpot) (in Chinese)
Part 2: Building Effective Teams is available here: (Gamasutra) (BlogSpot) (in Chinese)
Part 3: Game Development Factors is available here: (Gamasutra) (BlogSpot) (in Chinese)
This article is Part 4, and is available here: (Gamasutra) (BlogSpot) (in Chinese).
Part 5: What Great Teams Do is available here: (Gamasutra) (in Chinese)
For extended notes on our survey methodology, see our Methodology blog page.
Our raw survey data (minus confidential info) is now available here if you'd like to verify our results or perform your own analysis.
The Game Outcomes Project team includes Paul Tozour, David Wegbreit, Lucien Parsons, Zhenghua “Z” Yang, NDark Teng, Eric Byron, Julianna Pillemer, Ben Weber, and Karen Buro.
[Editor's Note: The results of the Game Outcomes Project will be addressed at length during GDC 2016 as part of Paul Tozour's talk on "The Game Outcomes Project: How Teamwork, Leadership, and Culture Drive Results."]
The Game Outcomes Project, Part 4: Crunch Makes Games Worse
Extended overtime (“crunch”) is a deeply controversial topic in our industry. Countless studios have undertaken crunch, sometimes extending to mandatory 80-100 hour work weeks for years at a time. If you ask anyone in the industry about crunch, you’re likely to hear opinions stated very strongly and matter-of-factly based on that person’s individual experience.
And yet such opinions are almost invariably put forth with zero reference to any actual data.
If we truly want to analyze the impact of extended overtime in any scientific and objective way, we should start by recognizing that any individual game project must be considered meaningless by itself – it is a single data point, or anecdotal evidence. We can learn absolutely nothing from whether a single successful or unsuccessful game involved crunch or not, because we cannot know how the project might have turned out if the opposite path had been chosen – that is, if a project that crunched had not done so, or if a project that did not employ crunch had decided to use it.
As the saying goes, you can’t prove (or disprove) a counterfactual – you’d need a time machine to actually know how things would have turned out if you’d chosen differently.
Furthermore, there have undeniably been many successful and unsuccessful games created both with and without crunch. So we can’t give crunch the exclusive credit or blame for a particular outcome on a single project when much of the credit or blame is clearly owed to other aspects of the game’s development. To truly measure the effect of crunch, we would need to look at a large sample, ideally involving hundreds of game projects.
Thankfully, the Game Outcomes Project survey has given us exactly that. In previous articles, we discussed the origin of the Game Outcomes Project and our preliminary findings, and our findings related to team effectiveness and many additional factors we looked at specific to game development. We also wrote up a separate blog post describing the technical details of our methodology.
In this article, we present our findings on extended overtime based directly on our survey data.
Attitudes Toward Crunch
Developers have surprisingly divergent attitudes toward the practice of crunch. An interview on gamesindustry.biz quoted well-known industry figures Warren Spector and Jason Rubin:
“Crunch sucks, but if it is seen by the team members as a fair cost of participating in an otherwise fantastic employment experience, if they value ownership of the resulting creative success more than the hardship, if the team feels like long hours of collaboration with close friends is ultimately rewarding, and if they feel fairly compensated, then who are we to tell them otherwise?" asked Rubin.
[…] "Look, I'm sure there have been games made without crunch. I've never worked on one or led one, but I'm sure examples exist. That tells me something about myself and a lot about the business I'm in," said Spector.
[…] "What I'm saying is that games - I'm talking about non-sequels, non-imitative games - are inherently unknowable, unpredictable, unmanageable things. A game development process with no crunch? I'm not sure that's possible unless you're working on a rip-off of another game or a low-ambition sequel.
“[…] Crunch is the result of working with a host of unknown factors in creative mediums. Since game development is always full of unknowns, crunch will always exist in studios that strive for quality […] After 30 years of making games I'm still waiting to find the wizard who can avoid crunch entirely without compromising at a level I'm unwilling to accept.”
On the other side of the fence is Derek Paxton of Stardock, who said in an interview with Gameranx: