Anti-Crunch: Patterns and Practices

In this 2022 Production Essentials Summit talk, Pragma Platform, Inc.’s Chris Cobb dives into several strategies he and his team use to battle crunch culture. He'll describe how they practice their values of "Customer Triumph," "Quality at Speed," and "Unlocked Teams," to build healthy strategies for development.
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[@realityos]

I think it's mainly because the business exploits the obvious passion of people in game creation to squeeze out more work for no money.

[@WingsofDestiny123]

The business is exploiting not only the passion but the overall youngness and lack of maturity of game developers. Game developers-and computer programmers in general-tend to be young. It takes years of work-or one good mentor-to know how to say no to business. Many times because business is poor at comunicating with younger people or just don't care.

[@rosly_yt]

I think that people say, "it's bad for the workers but it makes great games" and they're basically always wrong. Rockstar crunches a lot, and if you look at GTAV, it's a maze of disjointed decision-making. What cutscenes can and can't be skipped, how sections of the main story, and even what buttons are mapped to change seemingly at random, and players often switch between keyboard/mouse and controller to play the game because neither single method is comfortable and feature-complete. CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 also has deep scars from its sloppy management, featuring a mix of stunning, maybe industry-best visuals and deeply broken basic mechanics. Not to mention the bridges they burned trying to launch the game, the lost sales of the game due to confusing launch date, I could go on. Crunch isn't a necessary evil, it's a stupid, self-destructive thing to do, and no one wins with it in play, not the studio, who's sacrificing quality and employees to meet an arbitrary deadline, not the employees, who have to choose between their jobs and their health, and not the gamers, who are let down by games overshadowed by their own potential.

[@paragakluj]

Same scenario in Visual effects industry. Not all studios but majority studios have this crunch deadlines beyond their control .

[@Icebreaker070890]

The 7 habits of highly effective people, should be implemented by every HR department out there !

[@StephenOwen]

My product is going GA in six weeks. I think I might get some good info out of this.

[@duckyduckyduckyquack]

really nice but a lot of these are really just agile best practices

[@rosly_yt]

I agree, but most "agile" doesn't really do these things, and a lot of people throw around the word without internalizing or understanding it. Agile, as I understand it, is a philosophy designed to save time and frustration by working at a sustainable pace and doing it right the first time. Because the founding ideals describe a kind of work environment and leave creating it to the reader, I think there's a lot of value in seeing how someone actually uses it.

[@nkanyisoinnocentkhwane3752]

This is great 😁🙌🏾

[@whumpuswu9190]

[@minicraft9158]

Is there any discord link?

[@KekoahJones]

For what?

[@yungtube7848]

Easy. Unionize.