"Missing a game's release date is a management fuckup, not the artists, programmers, and others working on the game."
Yup, among others, such in-depth texts, undoubtedly resulting from many years of experience (reading Kotaku, I think), fall in connection with the crunch scandal in CDPR.
Meanwhile, the truth is so banal that crunch is a complicated phenomenon and not black and white at all. I can't give a better example than the fact that I know people from CDPR who crunch, quit, and tell about the company things that make hair stand on their heads, but also those who crunch longer, but still work in it highly satisfied and will not move on.
Where does the crunch come from?
Home-grown activists and bleeding hearts have a simple answer: capitalist vampires under economic coercion squeeze the spirit out of hard-working workers, treating them as easily interchangeable gears.
And somehow no one wonders how it can pay off in a time when ten other companies are fighting for every reasonable programmer or graphic and when every scratch on the company's image causes problems that are translatable to the cash register.
So where is the crunch REALLY coming from?
In my opinion, for four reasons.
The first is obvious, human errors. Widely understood incompetence applies to every person and every profession, so there is no reason to believe that it does not apply to management or project managers.
What is not obvious, and it should be, is that workers are also incompetent. For some reason, we assume that menagos and bossos will screw up as much as possible, but all employees don't take cigarette breaks, browse Reddit or Facebook, don't gossip for half an hour about Marynia's ass, and always stick to their own deadlines.
Someone conscious will say at this point that it's okay, but it is the job of project managers to take into account all of the above and plan accordingly, but for me it is hypocrisy. "Everyone can be incompetent and others suffer, Note: Not applicable to PMs."
The second reason is that game development is a creative area. Hence the curse of ignorance of the iteration numbers.
Simple example: Game Awards are approaching, which is one of the best opportunities to advertise (which helps sales, which helps profit, which helps bonuses). We want a trailer. What is the guarantee that the soundtrack proposed by the musician will be "this" right away? None. And maybe this will be the first version, or maybe it will be the twentieth approach.
And so with everything that is an act of creation. How many times have you corrected your own Facebook post, your own tweet or email? Sometimes not at all, and sometimes probably red since editing.
The third reason is that we work in the innovation business. Despite the fact that the industry has existed for several decades, we are constantly introducing something new. Even when we release a sequel to the game, players will not forgive if it is the same but in a different skin (though apparently not for FIFY, lol). New designs, new worlds, new technologies that either have to be invented or handled, equipment that is constantly changing, etc. etc.
As innovation is a derivative of creativity, and here also it is not known "how long it will take".
Reason number four is that players want more and more for less and less. Reviews like "I give a minus, because after the first 200 hours there is nothing to do" is not a meme, but reality. Good luck to anyone who releases a single-use, 8-hour single player game for $ 60 - and it was the salt of the earth 10-15 years ago.
The average completion time (and at the same time the median) of the first, legendary God of War is 9 hours. Anyone seriously imagines that this would pass in the present day?
And meanwhile, not only are these types of games longer, but also prettier and more playful. In Painkiller we were able to make a character and its animations in a few days, in Witchfire there is a firecracker as we do in two months.
And now, all these four things - human error, the terra incognita of creativity and innovation, and the pressure of the market - bring you into a collision with the SHIT HAPPENS deadline.
Okay, where are these deadlines from?
Well, the game is not a lonely island. There are not many opportunities for more effective than usual advertising in the year, it is even worse with the release date of the game so as not to hit the oxygen-sucking competition. Budgets and financial stocks are also not made of rubber, and they can undermine even the most careful plans and projects.
Crunch, with the exception of rare, short, several-day cufflinks is evil. Well, as you know, it's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.
However, if someone has the illusion that something will change dramatically here, let it immediately get out of the head. It has not changed in film and television, and these are much simpler, linear, much older and experienced businesses. It won't change in games either, as long as the project is ambitious enough. The presentation of Unreal Engine 5 may have made the players excited, but believe me, the studios are now doing what they will have to equal ...
So if someone cannot live with it, or gamedev is not for him, or maybe he or she does not work in a company known for crunchy and working on a relatively innovative, mega-ambitious project. "It is what it is" and no spells or dreams will change anything here, because there will always be someone nearby who will not heed the calls to march when he wants to run, and the eyes of the world are only on him.
Of course, not being able to achieve an ideal does not mean that we should not pursue it. I try to run, with lesser or better success, a crunch-free studio, in which a cigarette and chats about Marynia's ass are a natural, desirable element of the landscape. Well, and that's why we've been rocking the game for our fifth year ...
This long argument, which barely "caresses the epidermis of phenomena" anyway, was meant to serve only one thing. Contrary to armchair activists, crunch is rarely cynical, Badowski has no night cream made of the blood of employees, and he is a little more "guilty" than the heartless kulaks. "It's complicated" - just that, and so much.