Crunch. Not the sound you make when munching on some crispy chips late at night wondering if the noise you’re making is going to wake up the whole neighborhood, but the act in which a developer or creator enters a state of intense working hours and sleep deprivation, while coincidentally also munching on chips late at night in a poorly lit office.

Many companies have had their fair share of crunch culture problems or similar, but in the game dev world it seems to be sort of an industry standard sadly. While not all game studios suffer constant crunch as recent light has shown studios like EA, Blizzard or Ubisoft having a sort of constant expected crunch, still, most studios face crunch seasons every once in a while. Hell even when I worked in a small indie studio I saw my fair share of crunch, and we were most definitely not working on the next Overwatch.

For those of you  among the 5 people reading that don’t know what crunch is, you do know what it is, you maybe just haven’t heard the term. So let me explain. Crunch – at least in the gaming industry – is when a developer or artist has longer work days than they should, sometimes 10 to 14 hours work days, for an extended period of time. Sometimes it’s for a couple of weeks, sometimes it can be for several months. All of this exhausting and demanding kind of unpaid long hours with the whole purpose of pushing the project forward to reach a deadline or polish the game before launch.

Even though the crunch in the gaming industry has seen the headlines of some news lately, crunch will always exist as long as there is an authority figure screaming they want something complicated done immediately. And we all know how much college teachers and wall street people alike love to scream to stressed people about how they are a waste of human life if they can’t turn in an excel sheet that no one actually needs.

Ah, what a beautiful place it is the adult world of capitalism.

Sometimes (most times honestly) crunch is not okay. It usually comes when a business man asks the creative game developer “Hey, when can we have this done”, to which the developer answers “We’re going to need around 10 months to finish it.” and so the business, with a grimm smile and darkness in his heart answers “Oh no, that won’t work with our marketing schedule. We’re going to need the project done in 6 months”. 

In face of this the developer has no other option but saying “Well, I guess we can discuss a timeline and changes to the project in order to finish in 6 months”, but in his heart, he knows that he should go to the 7 Eleven and get some instant ramen to work late hours for the next 6 months.

And today, we are here to talk about that villainous business man with his marketing team and world ending agenda, and how your favorite game being stuck in dev hell is all thanks to him. And also you know, thanks to developers getting too excited and wanting to add a thousand things to the game when they know they don’t have the time. But that’s another topic, we are not here to talk about the dumb brains of creators, we’re here to talk about capitalism.

YOU JUST GOT SCOPED SON

Some of you reading this – again, among the 5 people that will probably read this – might’ve heard the term “dev hell” before. And if you’ve watched any sort of video game centric documentary, you may also have heard the term “scope creep”. So let’s begin this segment by trying to explain a bit what these terms actually mean inside a game studio, and why thanks to these little fun words games like Metroid Prime 4 are nowhere to be seen almost 6 years after Nintendo revealed it in E3 2017.

I still hold a place for you in my heart Metroid Prime 4. Someday… Someday.

So first let’s talk “dev hell” since it’s the easier one, mainly because well, it’s pretty much what it sounds like, a lot of games get stuck in development hell because of any thousand reasons, but usually it always comes down to 2 factors, there’s either not enough money or not enough time. Or you can get the fun meal where you don’t have either and now you have a 2 year project with no funding and no time left. Now THAT is a fun meal.

Game developers having dumb ADHD lizard brains is sometimes the main culprit here – this is where the “not enough time” aspect comes in – dev hell is usually brought on because the developers and artist can’t stop coming up with ideas and mechanics for the game, which should be all fun and games (pun intended), but usually just ends up being a mess of ideas with no solid plan of where to actually start the work.

It’s pretty common to have a game start on a single very simple concept, and then as the team starts working on the project a lot of ideas start coming up of what the game could have to make it cooler. So a meeting is done and all these ideas are brainstormed out and the game as a general starts to take form. But the trick here is that some of these ideas might be pretty impossible to achieve in the future, and by the time the team realizes that, it will already be too late.

And so, development starts on the game, everyone is having fun, more neat little ideas start popping up, things like “oh it would look cool if we add this” or “we could make it so that this thing reacts when you do this”. And don’t get me wrong, having those moments of starting to see the project as a whole and cool ways to make it more polished is nice, but there needs to be a limit to those sorts of ideas. And when that limit doesn’t come in time… well, you get yourself a one way ticket to dev hell, and the only way of getting out of dev hell is walking back constantly wondering how far is it really, or paying an uber that will be super expensive in retrospect.

So, you’ve made your way to dev hell and now you don’t know what to do. Don’t worry, none of us do, but still, we try to create a role inside the team to “avoid” dev hell and we call them “Creative Director”. 

Yeah, that has a nice ring to it. I can already see it, you know? Coming into a meeting or his desk and being like “hey so um, the new game mechanic we were implementing just deleted half of the code for the game and we won’t make the deadline… So what should we do, Creative Director?”

Creative directors, lead designers and all of those fun gamey business names are usually attached to actual people, and the work of those people (sadly for them) is to try and save the game from reaching dev hell. But that’s a harder task to achieve in practice. And when these big ideas and proposals to add things to the game start popping up and making a huge monster that no one wants to feed, it is the job of the leads and directors to slash up that idea mutation and bury it deep deep within an excel sheet. 

Because if left unchecked, it will seek revenge and it will devour all of the pop tarts and Doritos that you left in the open by mistake and then Gary will say that he thought they were for everyone, but how would they be for everyone if they were clearly on your desk. Fuck Gary. I will never forgive you for eating my pop tarts… 

Back to the topic.

When this mutant idea baby isn’t put down for good and kept in check, that’s when the “scope creep” starts. And in an effort to not write another 4 pages of a dumb story to explain a simple concept, I’ll let gamedeveloper.com explain it for me in this simple quote:

“Scope creep, whereby a game’s development overextends its planned schedule…”

Simple as that. Remember that time when you couldn’t finish your college project in time because you left it all for the last minute, so you went to your teacher to ask for an extra week to finish it? Well scope creep is very similar, its game studio directors underestimating the amount of time and work that it will actually take to finish a game. Only thing is that while you asked your college professor for a week, game directors ask for either 6 months or 6 years.

I JUST WANNA FINISH THIS GAME MAN…

A lot of game studios, if not all of them, experience this during the development of any project. Maybe it won’t be as tragic and bad as Cyberpunk taking nearly 6 years to get out of dev hell with an outrageous amount of crunch given to their devs. Hopefully that doesn’t happen again. But artists and designers having too many ideas is not the only cause of dev hell or scope creep. Going back 16 and a half paragraphs, it can also be the fault of capitalist villains.

A lot of times dev hell or scope creeps are brought on by people outside the developer team, and most times that is actually the source of the problem. I want to write a more in depth entry with a bit more actual research about how capitalism is ruining games, but the short end of it is that business people are creating a lot of the problems that studios have during development. And even more so now that everyone wants to make the next Fortnite and become a millionaire with “Battle Passes” and special skins.

Most of the time a game being stuck in dev hell is thanks to a business person coming in and shaking the main idea of a game in order to fit their money making dreams. A lot of games in the last few years have been victims of this. A very recent example is a game that has been the butt of some of my jokes… Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. 

This game had a loooot of hype behind it, and honestly, it wasn’t misplaced. Until you know… they showed the game, which isn’t a great thing to say. But it had all the right reasons to be an exciting upcoming game. A superhero game based on a series that is loved by many and was poorly represented in Hollywood, but now it’s being worked on by the same people that made Batman games good. The developers behind the games that made superhero games what they are today , and now they have all the experience and economic support to make this amazing project that actually brings the things that people love about Suicide Squ… oh it’s just Fortnite with superheroes? Well shit.

And right now some of you may be thinking “but it didn’t look like Fortnite!” And there is where you are wrong dear reader. It is a 100% like Fortnite, only thing is, that it’s not the good or known part of Fortnite. 

The Suicide Squad game is mimicing the part of Fortnite that no one played, to the point that some people don’t even know it existed. Fortnite was mainly a co-op shooter game where players had to save the world from being sucked into space or something, and to do that they had to run around shooting aliens in specific places and completing missions. Just like Suicide Squad’s gameplay of “shoot the bad guy in the glowing thing”.

Or well, that was until it was received so poorly that now… they’re changing it.

It is a gameplay type so boring and unsurprising that it didn’t even work for Fortnite. The battle royale part was made just to get attention for the game as a free part of it. In the end that’s the part that ended up being the main attraction. And for some reason, the devs of Suicide Squad decided to take that gameplay loop that proved to be boring before. 

But it’s not their fault, because I think this decision wasn’t theirs. The decision to make the game soulless and boring, filled with microtransactions and awful mobile game tropes didn’t come from the developers. It came from the capitalist villain paying them.

I don’t know a single developer, artist or designer that wants to work on a project that they themselves don’t like and that is filled with little money grabbing tricks. All game devs want to work on fun projects, and I think what is happening to the Suicide Squad game is a great example of all of these things. Dev hell, scope creep, corporate meddling and most probably crunch culture.

After having a big ass showcase of what the game looked like a month or so before it’s release (it’s third release date that is), and people seeing the boring soulless gameplay it offered, the reception was so bad that the game got delayed (again) until 2024. They delayed the release of a game that was a month away from being out in the wild, that was probably already shipping physical copies to stores around the world, and they delayed it for a year.

I think SS: Kill the Justice League is a great example of what’s happening in the gaming industry… and I hate it. Not the game, but what it means.

This is a huge ass game created by a big studio, with the support of VERY big companies like Sony behind it. And everything that has happened since that showcase has been a glimpse of the story behind it in my opinion.

This stinks of corporate people sticking their noses into game development to try and get into a “trend” or “piggyback” off another game’s success. When they showed the gameplay for Kill the Justice League it was filled with practices hated by gamers meant to milk money out of them. Most of these practices are used by mobile games, which by this point it’s okay because well, mobile games are free, so even though we hate it, we understand what they are doing. But for a console game that is charging 60 bucks to pull the same thing is not acceptable.

They didn’t want a fun or revolutionary game, they wanted a game that would give them a lot of money. A game where they could charge for a Battle Pass and special currencies to buy skins in-game. And when they showed off the game and people saw the huge McDonalds sticker in the front of it all, we got mad about it. 

After that, seeing that no one seemed to be excited about the game anymore, the corporate people came running to the developers and asked them if they could change the game in a year. Probably creating a feeling in the developers of “Look man, I just want to be done with this game” and that’s never a good thing.

And so, the game got delayed. After being in development for almost 10 years I shall mention, it got delayed… Again. I know I’m just repeating myself, but this to me is just a clear example of terrible actions taken by corporate people trying to treat games as business investment instead of what it should be, making a cool game that is fun for the people who play it.

It’s no surprise that the video game industry is misunderstood and abused by people in suits, but I think it’s starting to get a little out of hand… Marty O’Donnell said it best. Game developers are like a goose, if you had a goose that gave you golden eggs, you wouldn’t just punch, kick and mistreat the goose, you need to be nice to the goose if you want it to give you a golden egg. So just be nice to the goose.

LITTLE EXTRAS FOR THE INTERESTED

Thanks for bearing through that long ass post. I hope you kind of enjoyed it and if you want to know more about this kind of thing, or you are interested in seeing a bit more into the dev process of a game I’ve got some extras for you.

Double Fine made an amazing documentary series of their 7 year journey making Psychonauts 2. I didn’t know about or play the original Psychonauts, but watching the documentary was amazing and shows a lot of the issues that come up in development without any sugar coating. So if you’re interested check it out it’s free: 

Also there’s an amazing couple of videos made by Noodle over on Youtube. He interviewed Marty O’Donnel about crunch culture and other things and made a video about it. This is way more lightweight than the documentary, so if you just want something quick and kinda funny, check that one out, he’s a huge inspiration for the sort of content I want to create.

Crunch video: https://youtu.be/aS3-iSEwNhs 

Talk with Marty O’Donnell: https://youtu.be/FIQihLUW2Co