My significant other works for Electronic Arts and I’m what you might call a disgruntled spouse.
It was with these words 10 years ago that Erin Hoffman began an online journal detailing her husband’s gruelling experience working at an EA game development studio. For months on end he worked 12-hour days, six days a week, and when the game’s final deadline loomed, it got worse. “The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm – seven days a week,” she wrote, “with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm).”
For many gamers, the EA Spouse web post, as it was known at the time (Hoffman had to remain anonymous to protect her husband’s job) offered a first glimpse into the video game industry’s secret world of “crunch” – vast periods of mandatory, but often unpaid, overtime that would often kick in during the months leading to a release date.
The article went viral, spreading across forums and news sites, and provoking a wave of controversy and condemnation. Very quickly it became clear that the most shocking thing about the EA Spouse story was that, within the industry, it wasn’t shocking at all. It was just how things worked. Game development surveys conducted by the International Game Developers Association in 2004 showed that only 2.4% of respondents worked in no-crunch environments and 46.8% received no compensation for their overtime.
Thanks to EA Spouse, however, it looked like change was coming – and, as usual, it would begin with a court case. A class action suit, filed against EA for failure to pay overtime to its employees, was eventually settled for $15.6m (£10m). A second suit followed in 2006, this time settling for $14.9m. In both cases, EA relied on vagaries of American law that classify some IT professionals as exempt from overtime pay. The settlement in the second case featured a quid pro quo: employees would be reclassified in order to get overtime but would give up their stock options.
For industry insiders, the lid was supposed to be off; if one employee could speak openly about labour issues (Hoffman herself worked in the industry at the time), then surely everyone could? And if that happened, the problem would surely go away?
Endless crunch
But, a decade after EA Spouse, it’s questionable how much has actually changed. Statistically, things appear better. In 2004, the IGDA – the only large organisation advocating for labour rights in the US games industry – started a regular “quality of life” survey in response to the EA controversy, polling staff on working standards and practices. Its latest numbers from the 2014 report show a decline in intensity.
“Over the last decade, the average amount of crunch time worked has dropped, with 19% of 2014 respondents indicating they haven’t crunched in at least two years compared to 2.4% of 2004 respondents,” says Kate Edwards, the IGDA’s executive director. “Also, 38% of the 2014 respondents reported typical crunch times of 50-69 hours per week compared to 35% of 2004 respondents reporting crunch times of 65-80 hours per week.”
But the take from Edwards is of the glass-half-full variety. Despite the drop in intensity, the industry baseline is that only one-fifth of industry workers don’t crunch at all, and nearly two-fifths still crunch more than 50 hours a week. Furthermore, current and former industry workers interviewed for this feature revealed deep dissatisfaction with crunch and a sense that, even if it’s not as acute as it was a decade ago, it’s still worse than they can tolerate.
“This year is my first experience with long stretches of crunch, and my girlfriend, who I live with, feels like she hardly sees me,” relates one programmer at a leading games studio who, like almost everyone else we spoke to, asks to remain anonymous. “It’s a common source of tension. My generally much higher level of stress takes its toll on my mood outside work so it bleeds into everything. Work late, come home for a few hours of food and exhausted conversation, go to bed, sleep in between stressing about bugs and end up dreaming about code, get up feeling half dead then go back into work and repeat.”
Studio managers have realised that EA-Spouse-type situations mean bad PR, so soft pressure is widely taking the place of mandatory overtime. This may be as simple as encouraging a culture of peer pressure: quietly exploiting the natural desire to do well is a method that many of the staff we spoke to had encountered. However, we were also told of managers who noted which staff had put in the most hours when making a potential layoff list.
‘Teams become addicted to crunch’
“Most workers are in the industry because of a passion for games,” says one engineer formerly with Turbine Inc, a studio best known for fantasy adventures Lords of the Ring Online and Asheron’s Call. “Even if management sets unrealistic goals for a release, the workers usually want to try to meet those goals because it may very likely make a better game”.
“Sometimes it seems like managers and producers almost get addicted to crunch. If they’re able to get their team to go above and beyond to finish an important project on time or early, it can make the team and manager look better. That success leads to more responsibility, more projects and more political capital, which can require more crunch time to complete. I’ve had to fight pretty hard with managers and directors to reject work so that co-workers and I don’t burn out.”
The pressure comes from consumer expectations, as well. With development budgets ballooning, failure can be catastrophic, so the temptation can be to pack in more features – more cool stuff – to appease the demanding audience. This leads to the twin spectres of crunch and layoffs, as studios grow to accommodate ambitious ideas, then downsize or collapse when the resulting game fails to make a profit.
“Generally I feel crunch most often results from the conflict between manpower, consumer expectations and quality of the product,” says an engineer currently working at an EA studio. “It’s the classic two-out-of-three question: you can’t have good, fast and cheap; pick two. There are certain levels of consumer expectations and quality you can’t sacrifice, so manpower gets hit, both in temp workers and in overtime across the board.”
‘Crunch shows a lack of proper management’
Crunch has many causes. The most common theory is that the industry is simply too young and too fast-moving to integrate proper management techniques. “Our project was huge and our overall quality assurance process at the time was very basic and waterfall-esque,” recalls one quality assurance worker at EA. “We were testing in a really stupid way and just churning out bugs, but so much of the code was new, so it kinda made sense then. Looking back on it now, everyone agrees that it was laughably inefficient.”
Crunch in this sort of working environment becomes a self-perpetuating problem. In Fred Brooks’s book on software management, The Mythical Man-Month, he posits that the more people added to a software project, the less efficient the whole team works, which then extends the project further. Recent data collected by the Games Outcomes Project and shared on the website Gamasutra backs up the view that crunch compounds these problems rather than solving them. The multipart study examined how work practices affect game review scores. In conclusion? “Crunch does not in any way improve game project outcomes and cannot help a troubled game project work its way out of trouble.” And yet the industry still defaults to crunch when a deadline looms.
It’s easy enough to understand how small indies with their limited resources may recourse to crunch in this way. But why are the large companies the biggest offenders? If we’re to accept the young industry theory of crunch, big studios should have the resources – if not the management acumen – to address the problem.
The answer, as Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter point out in their book, Games of Empire, is that the big players don’t address it because it’s in their economic interests not to. “Normalised crunch time points to an elementary fact: it is a good deal – a steal, in fact – for game companies,” they write.
Crunch is the cheapest way to meet a deadline
Far from being the result of management failure, what EA Spouse demonstrated was that crunch is built into the schedule. It’s not a failure of the system – it is the system. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter go on to show how EA and other large companies lobbied the Canadian government to introduce software employee overtime exemptions similar to those in the US Fair Labor Standards Act. Crunch was the desired outcome – not because it would allow for better games, but because it was the cheapest way to meet the deadline.
This attitude hasn’t been banished to the management graveyard; it’s still very much part of industry thinking. “Hourly employees in California are required by law to get overtime if they work more than eight hours in a single day or 40 hours in a week,” explains a current employee of Carbine. “Salaried employees are exempt from such laws. What winds up happening at Carbine (and I believe other NCSoft subsidiaries) is when an hourly associate gets promoted to a staff-level salaried job, they retain their hourly wage and get a very slight pay bump. So no longer is the hourly associate working overtime and getting $72,000 a year for it. Instead, the newly promoted staff member is making $52,000 and still works the same amount of crunch hours as before.”
Crunch is the price of a job in the macho games industry
With the pressure to deliver so high and with long working hours ingrained into the development culture, there is a risk that the battle against crunch has essentially been lost. Younger workers view it as the industry’s price of admission.
A team of Canadian researchers including Marie-Josee Legault, Johanna Weststar and Pierson Browne are currently examining work experiences and quality of life in the industry. The team also helps the IGDA with their surveys. Their response to a question about whether younger workers and students are more accepting of crunch is striking.
“There is a survey question – in the DSS IGDA survey 2014 – that asks respondents to agree or disagree with the statement, ‘Crunch is a necessary part of game development’,” says Legault. “If we look at the responses to that question for people who identified as students and people who did not, we see a quite striking difference. The majority of non-students (55%) disagreed or strongly disagreed to the statement that crunch is necessary. Among student respondents, 26% agreed or strongly agreed that crunch is necessary. Only 38% disagreed or strongly disagreed and over a third (36%) could neither agree nor disagree. There is a higher level of initial acceptance to the notion of crunch.
“Arguably this is what the industry relies upon – the ability to continually take on young and willing new entrants, and to replace those who burn out or otherwise leave for something else. It is fair to say that students and young new entrants to the industry do see crunch and unpaid overtime as price of admission – as ‘the way it is in games’.”
The researchers also point out that, over the 10 years the IGDA has surveyed the industry, the mean age of workers has not changed. Essentially, the maturation of the industry is stunted. Often, pressure to revise labour policy is brought by those with families and health issues. With the industry remaining overwhelmingly young and single, pressure from that quarter never materialises. And, with new workers accepting crunch as a matter of course, there is a risk that it never will.
‘I worked 72 hours a week, doing night shifts’
“I’ve lost one relationship and currently spend a large amount of time dealing with balancing work requirements with my new wife,” says one ex-Rockstar worker. “It’s still a constant stress of ‘are you coming home on time tonight?’ We’re about to start a family, and I’m almost dreading having to deal with work’s crunch requirements and home life. It seriously makes you question why you do this when you foresee these things. You look around and think, I could get paid more to do a boring version of this job elsewhere and have a social life. Is it worth the stress?
“I was a quality assurance tester at Rockstar, and at its worst, we worked 72 hours a week. I was one of the unlucky ones to be working the night shifts. That’s 8pm-8am, six days a week, testing Grand Theft Auto. It was horrendous. I didn’t see daylight for months. This was perceived as a requirement and if you had issues with it, you were told ‘Well, you can go stack shelves at Tesco instead or answer phones at a call centre’. You were treated as disposable.”
The industry insidiously aligns crunch with passion. It’s a message that is readily apparent in any number of job postings or recruitment videos: if you love games you need to put in the hours. But this combination of passion and expectation can create intolerable pressure. “It’s absurd. It burns out our most passionate workers,” says Tanya Short, head of Kitfox Games. “It makes them believe in the martyr syndrome and pushes out all of those voices that literally cannot afford to give away their personal lives.”
So while statistics show improvements to the crunch culture, young fanatics keen to prove their passion can easily slip into destructive modes of working. As another ex-Turbine employee told us, crunch comes with its own macho myths: “There are seasoned veterans out there trying to make this a real career, not just that thing they did for a year when they were 20 and ate ramen, and ‘omg do you remember that gross couch at the office we used to pass out on’? But as game devs, I think we still sort of perversely like this maverick sensibility around our jobs that makes us sort of figures of martyrdom in the name of art. There’s this smug, holier-than-thou attitude sometimes.”
Labour institutions, cultural memory and slow action
The industry’s trade organisations don’t seem inclined to weigh in on crunch any time soon. Britain’s trade body for games, UKIE (United Kingdom Interactive Entertainment), declined to comment on crunch. Its North American equivalent, the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), would only provide a terse statement: “As a trade association and the voice of the entire industry, we can’t speak to individual publisher or developer issues.”
This seems to place the onus on publishers to solve what is clearly an industrywide, systemic issue. But if economic factors favour crunch, it’s unlikely that these companies will rush to get their own houses in order.
The IGDA’s Kate Edwards asserts that her organisation “maintains a positive relationship” with the ESA, but thinks more needs to be done. “The ESA could certainly help improve the situation by more actively partnering with the IGDA in addressing and communicating the concerns of individual developers around working conditions and quality of life issues,” she says.
The developers the Guardian spoke to were nearly unified in their frustration with the IGDA. Half wanted the organisation to be more forceful, the other half said they didn’t deal with the IGDA at all. Some responses were forcefully negative, dismissing the IGDA as a “sham organisation” and “a joke”. The problem is, while the body is trying to bridge the gap between workers and management through non-confrontational means, it occupies a space in which it is not as actively pro-labour as many in the trenches would like, while still being an annoyance to certain sectors of management.
The need to appease both parties can lead to blow-outs. In 2013, current bot programmer and former video game engineer, Darius Kazemi, resigned from the IGDA’s board of directors. The reasons he cited in his blog were numerous, but the primary motivation was his belief that the IGDA didn’t do enough to shake up the status quo.
The Canadian researchers were more sympathetic to the IGDA’s predicament than Kazemi or the workers spoken to for this feature. “In its current form, the IGDA is funded by studios and can’t in any way play the role of a union, and couldn’t be expected to do so,” says Legault. “Their primary focus is to promote the industry and support individual workers through training, networking and professional development initiatives. The IGDA relies on volunteers and the activity of its members to join Special Interest Groups on particular topics… The IGDA does not have the resources, or the independence from studio executives, to act like a union.”
For her part, Edwards sees the IGDA as a primarily educational body. “The IGDA’s role is to keep shedding light on industry practices from the individual developer’s perspective and continue to raise those concerns with company and other industry representatives,” she states. “There is always room for improvement in our advocacy efforts and we continue to work on ways to make our organisation more effective.”
The future of crunch
Software development is high pressure, susceptible to sudden market changes, and lacks an institutional memory of labour negotiations. Consequently, we see the same crunch patterns throughout the ICT sector. Amazon has been under fire in recent years for labour abuses, while the more strictly software-oriented Google has been facing periodic lawsuits over unpaid overtime.
It could be thatas the games industry matures it will simply evolve out of these destructive working practices. Traditionally, development studios have been male-dominated, leading to a macho culture in which extended working hours become a bragging currency. As the workforce becomes more diverse, this culture may be challenged.
Alternatively, veteran developers who stay within the industry could mitigate crunch by taking a proactive stance and integrating good practices from the top down. Several of the developers we spoke to have dedicated themselves to just that, forming small- and medium-sized studios where decisions are geared toward cutting crunch as much as possible.
‘The job is fun, but should never be more than 40 hours per week’
Veteran game designer Chris Avellone, now co-owner of Obsidian Entertainment, focuses on downscaling. He believes that, at many companies, there’s a tendency to create more content than teams can digest. “Developers and managers should never have to work more than 40 hours a week,” he says. “It’s a fun job, but it shouldn’t be an exploitative one. Everyone has a life. Let them live it, it’s short enough as it is.
“And for developers that do want to work more than 40 hours a week, be responsible with your passions. If you develop more content than the pipeline can support, you’re causing others to have to pick up the baton and devote additional hours for polish, testing, balance, VO and any number of tasks that your additional work has generated. Managers and developers both should be receptive to downscaling work; in many cases, that can help create a superior product that’s more fun and more focused.”
Another manager, who asked to remain anonymous, concurs with Avellone that managing scope is the No 1 management level issue. “[My current employer] has been a real breath of fresh air,” he says. “Everyone in management has ‘come up from the trenches’ and really views crunch as a problem. When it happens we usually have a meeting about why, and try to manage scope and schedule to keep it minimal. This gives me hope that the industry can do it better, but seeing my friends at other studios makes me keenly aware that its a rare thing that I have instead of the industry standard.”
Right now, this change in management approach is reliant on the entrepreneurial spirit of a few forward-thinking studio heads. To negotiate an industrywide change in labour conditions, workers are increasingly looking to collective organisation. The IGDA’s 2014 survey reveals 56% of respondents want unionisation: whether or not the organisation wishes to serve in that role, its constituency is clearly ready for more direct action.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Montreal, an important centre for game development with major Ubisoft, Square Enix and Warner Bros studios in residence. Here, there are now regular and very passionate meetings about the viability of unions and worker co-operatives – they could represent a vital first step in an industry without much history of labour organisation.
As for the studios mentioned in this article, we approached all of them via email offering a chance to answer the criticisms and observations of their staff members. Only one replied: Electronic Arts.
“New technologies and processes being implemented by our studio and QA teams are not only improving game quality but also reducing the time strains on game development,” wrote a spokesperson.
“As is the case with any type of software development, there are rare periods of time where an individual or team will put in additional time to reach an important milestone, such as launching a public beta or the final development stages of a game. EA does not enforce additional hours and employees are in control of what time they work. If extra hours are spent during one of these stages, we always look to give employees additional time off or other compensation. Our teams want to deliver the best possible experience to players, and we appreciate everyone’s commitment, especially during the busiest times.
“Over the past 18 months, EA has been making significant investments in new quality assurance tools and automation technology, implementing ongoing testing right from the beginning of game conceptualisation. These changes are ultimately improving game quality, as well as reducing the need for the crunch periods.”
Crunch is less of a problem than it was in 2004, but it remains an intrinsic part of development culture. Better management, increased worker organisation and a more diverse staff base may well be the way out; but this being the games industry, it won’t happen without a fight.
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