Push It to the Limits
“Crunch time” in the video game industry has become a controversial topic over the last years or so. The business practice known as “crunch time” is when development teams are forced to work grueling hours in order to meet a very strict deadline. This tends to happen in the later stages of development only a few months before the games scheduled release. However, the team that worked on the highly anticipated Doom Eternal has said that they had to go through “crunch time” for most of 2019.
These sorts of working conditions have sparked a movement within the video game industry calling for workers to form a union. While nothing has materialized yet, it has gained traction. Unionization has been endorsed by a handful of American politicians, most notably Bernie Sanders has reached out and championed their cause.
Executive producer Marty Stratton said in an interview that Doom Eternal was essentially finished last year, but they chose to spend much more time polishing the game and making sure everything was up to standard. “We really truly do try and be very respectful of peoples’ time and lives. We have very dedicated people that just choose to work a lot in many cases. It was nice because we want the game to be perfect. We want it to live up to our expectations and consumer expectations,” said Stratton.
Regardless of what you might think of the idea of crunch time, it has most certainly paid off with Doom Eternal. Everything we have seen from the game so far in trailers and teasers has looked phenomenal. The revival of Doom has been a resounding success and it looks like that is going to continue with Doom Eternal.
Doom Eternal is scheduled to release on March 20th, 2020.