A large controversy span up earlier this week after Dan Houser said that he had been working 100 hour weeks on several occasions this year in order to get the game finished. From that, many people read that the company as a whole was pulling this kind of excessive overtime, and the company quickly had to clarify that this pertained to Houser and his writing team alone.
Of course, it’s easy to say that working long overtime is optional, but games industry culture leans toward so-called “crunch” in the run up to release with teams pulling long hours to meet deadlines. Not only that, but people fearful for their jobs are going to want to show their “passion” in taking extra work, and if the leadership is working overtime, that tends to filter down.
Rockstar have historically had a rough time, with the “Wives of Rockstar” posting an open letter after the release of the first Red Dead Redemption, and it’s likely because of this that the notoriously closed off company are trying to dispel this notion as quickly as possible. They’ve lifted the ban on employees talking about work on social media, and that’s led to a number of people explaining refuting the 100 hour mark.
I have never worked more than maybe 50 hours a week (and that's a rare occurrence), but I generally work about 2-6 hours of paid overtime per week.
— Vivi Langdon ?️? (@viiviicat) October 18, 2018
Just to add a concrete example of what I'm talking about. During the dev. of RDR I sometimes worked 50 hours during the week. This was on and off for a few months. And by on and off I really do mean off. Some weeks I just worked a flat 40 and there was zero issues with this.
— Wesley Mackinder (@WesleyMackinder) October 18, 2018
I haven’t worked a 100 hour work week in my life. I’m thanked for any overtime I am asked to do, and it feels like in those circumstances it truly was an unfortunate situation.
— Zoë Sams ?️? (@zoegsams) October 18, 2018
I am asked, encouraged and expected to work overtime (both nights and weekends) when coming up to a big deadline. The most I've ever worked in a single week during my nearly-five years here has been 79 hours, but that was not recently.
— Tom Goodwin (@tfgoodle) October 18, 2018
When I was in QA I, like others, was asked to work a fair bit of overtime, usually 3 nights a week and a weekend day. I never really felt any pressure to do this, never felt bullied or coerced into it. It just was what it was.
— James Moorehead ?️? (@ProgdorEva) October 18, 2018
From all of the accounts, we can take the 100 hour week off the table entirely. 50 hour weeks are not too far out of the ordinary, but some do, anecdotally, seem to take it too far beyond that. Rockstar have also continued to explain that, with this being the first game that’s developed using the entire global network of studios, they’ve been able to distribute the work around the globe and more evenly.
We’ll have to wait and see if there is some kind of fallout from overworked employees after the game’s launch, but from those that have spoken out so far, it seems that the company has genuinely tried to put those times behind them.
ron_mcphatty
Hmm yeah it doesn’t seem so bad, the tweets come across as genuine enough and 50 hours is reasonable for crunch time and you’d hope that was only the last month. It still seems like the games industry is one where unionisation could help though, if only to formally track the demands on employees and make sure they’re looked after when they’re flogged. Most importantly a good union will help with legal action in cases like Naughty Dog (can’t remember if that was all true or not) and especially Telltale where the pain of a good screwing absolutely must be shared more morally between employees, board members and shareholders.
aerobes
I work in shipping and I truly can’t remember the last time I worked as little as 50 hours. Keyboard warriors need to get a grip.
Nate
I think a balance needs to be struck. People have a limit and exceeding that is bad for both mental and physical health.
When I was working in the hospital I would regularly work >50 hour weeks and that was justified as helping people in need. Even then there is a limit, I was often sleep deprived and worn out as a lot of doctors are, and this would absolutely make me more prone to mistakes.
Working people up to and beyond their limit through a “Man up” culture is ineffective and irresponsible.
MrYd
I’ve always wondered why a much bigger deal isn’t made of the fact people in hospitals are working silly hours.
There are laws about how many hours you can work on average, and even stricter rules for certain jobs. You can’t have someone driving a huge lorry full of stuff for 24 hours, because it’s potentially incredibly dangerous. So how are people in hospitals allowed to work that long when a single mistake could easily kill someone?
Working long hours when the only danger is you make a mistake and something’s not ready in time isn’t such a big deal compared to that. But while it’s not ideal, it’s probably unavoidable. If it needs to be finished by a certain date so all the testing and legal requirements can be finished by the date the discs need to start being made so they can get to the shops on release date. What can you do to avoid that? Give the developers more time to finish with a later release date? And then the same last minute problems will crop up every time. Hire more people? Up to a point, after that it’s “if it takes 1 man an hour to dig a hole, 3600 men can dig the same whole in 1 second. It’s obvious. Simple maths!”
The alternative is it takes so long to develop, you suddenly find you’re releasing the game a couple of months before the next generation of hardware is released and you only sell loads of copies and have to go and release it on the new console a year later to sell a more acceptable fuckloads of copies. And that would never happen, would it?