#im glad everyones angry about Crunch again but y'all gotta realise this isnt going to be fixed any time soon

[gikairan]

I just dont have the Energy to read That Article or even all the Discourse surrounding it but let me just say Getting rid of Crunch Culture in game development is going to be a long and slow process, because its so ingrained in the culture of game development.  I was literally told in university that I should get a good sleeping bag, because sleeping at a desk not “something that might happen” but something that will happen. That was around 6 years ago, when no one was talking about this. 

Since then, the scale, scope and budget of games has exploded, and so have our expectations as gamers. These two are feeding into each other in a never ending cycle of Awfulness. Gamers are expecting huge 50+ hour games, with a massive variety of things to do, a massively populated world with THE most cutting edge realistic graphics on top of 0 bugs. The vocal minority are also very anti DLC and microtransactions.  But, contrary to popular opinion, its actually difficult for a game to make a profit. Any delay to a game in order to fix bugs will mean its less likely to make a profit. And game development is primarily a business, even if its staffed by people passionate about it (because all those programmers could get less stressful and better paid jobs outside of the games industry after all).  Developers make a better profit off of DLC, because development costs are lower (you just have to re-use most of your existing work after all). But fewer people buy the DLC. And if you stop playing a game before its DLC comes out, you’re less likely to buy that DLC (Likely because youve moved onto a new game). So developers have to focus on getting you to play their game for as long as possible to make as much money off you as possible.  This is not something that is going to be fixed by a single potentially sensationalised article. Its not something thats going to be fixed this year, or even this console generation. Maybe not even the next.  Its not something a developer boycott will change, because this is something that happens across most studios. Not even unionisation is going to change things quickly, because the unions need to actually have power first (theres a big problem in the US where Unions are demonised significantly) Its something that has to be slowly worked on and improved, and it requires publishers, developers and gamers to change.  Publishers need to be more flexible with deadlines, and try and avoid situations where their studios are crunching. They also need to pull back on the scale of games they fund, so its not so much of a big deal if a deadline slips. Studios need to help the change, and do the best for their developers mental wellbeing.  And us as gamers? We need to accept some games may be buggy upon release, because there just wasn’t the time or money to QA as thoroughly as we may like (Something I’ve been talking about for 6 years). We need to be willing to buy DLC, and less hostile to microtransactions. We also need to be willing to accept smaller games with lower budgets again.

There just isn’t a short term solution to this problem. Its going to be a long and painful struggle to find the right balance to finally kill Crunch once and for all.