The Topic of ‘Crunch Culture’ in Game Development Is Becoming More & More Relevant
The absolutely massive action-RPG Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has one of the biggest game worlds of the year and, according to Ubisoft Quebec’s managing director, the game was developed without a development period of “massive crunch”.
“While we can always do better, I can tell you hand on heart that [Assassin’s Creed Odyssey] hasn’t required a massive crunch, like maybe some of the triple-As from five or ten years ago,” the managing director, Patrick Klaus, told Gamasutra recently. “We can still always do better, but we have managed pretty well to succeed in delivering a game of huge magnitude which is hitting a good quality [level], while making sure that our teams are not burnt out and disgusted with working in games.”
However, later in the interview (which involved two other Ubisoft developers), Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s senior producer, Marc-Alexis Côté, acknowledged that sometimes their developers will “push for a couple of weeks” in order to implement a feature or “idea” that they think will improve a game.
The topic of crunch culture in game development studios has been thrust back into the spotlight recently after Dan Houser, the co-founder of Red Dead Redemption 2 developer Rockstar Games, claimed during an interview that the developers had to work “100-hour weeks” several times in 2018. Houser later clarified this remark in a lengthy statement.
Houser’s claim resulted in a lot of criticism, several Rockstar employees (both former & current) publicly speaking about their experiences with the company, Rockstar Lincoln reportedly changing their overtime rules, and a Kotaku investigative news article that delved into the workplace culture of several Rockstar studios.