10 Overlooked Ways ALL Video Game Studios Could Improve
8. Address Crunch
Crunch isn’t just a delicious chocolate bar created by Nestle that - admit it - you forgot about. It’s also a destructive practice which sees game developers working obscene hours as a result of poor planning and/or last-minute release changes.
Yet, it’s really become quite normal in this industry, accepted with a shrug and a nod, instead of outrage. Can you imagine in any other job, just expecting that your manager screws up now and again, and now you’ve got to work twelve days of ten-hour shifts in a row?
Worse still is the aptly-named “death march”, which is when a team has to crunch indefinitely, until the game is released. Though this is definitely not as common, it’s still accepted and even expected if you’ve ever worked in a AAA studio.
Needless to say, this is something I’m not a keen advocate of, having personally overworked myself the the point where I was near-fatally ill, and having spoken to many people who have had to crunch numerous times in their careers, I don’t think I’d have many people willing to defend the practice.