By: Luke Plunkett

2005. Insomniac Studios. Ratchet Deadlock was having its final touches applied, and Resistance was nearing the end of pre-production. Chris Pfeiffer, Gameplay Director at Insomniac and Max Garber, System Lead, were all busted up. Exhausted. Pfeiffer remembers it, none too fondly, as an "endless sea of work". Deciding a break was in order, the two decided on a trip to China.

"It was one of the best vacations I ever had" enthuses Pfeiffer. "Everything was actually different, interesting and new...the Chinese people were exceptionally nice to us". Traveling to Beijing, Shanghai and X'ian, the trip was "an absolute blast", and was just what was needed to help get over the hassles of work.

They drank a lot, they danced a lot, they drank some more. Good times. Nineteen days later, however, the pair were home. Back to the grind.

But for Pfeiffer, what had begun as a simple holiday was quickly turning into something more...substantial. "After getting back to the US, I started to dream about visiting China again", he says. Working around the clock, for six and sometimes even seven days a week on the final year of Resistance, it was his only real escape from the pressures of work.

Finding himself trapped in a seemingly infinite cycle of long days and working nights, Pfeiffer began to question the sanity of an industry that relies on work conditions rarely seen elsewhere in the Western world.

"There's something fundamentally wrong with an industry when making games is so expensive that the pressure to push your staff to their individual breaking points is completely understandable, if regrettable", he says.

Pfeiffer believes the games industry, as a business, needs to grow up. "It isn't the days when Atari programmers were going catatonic at their desks, but people haven't been able to wrap their minds around the fact that individuals are internally self-throttled" he says.

"When people work 16 hour days weeks on end, you may get 12 hours of work done on the first day, 10 on the second...but eventually the effective work completed per day drops below a standard eight hour day".

To be fair to Insomniac it's an industry-wide concern (recent EA and Activision lawsuits only serving to highlight this), but when nearly every major studio is forced into these conditions by the external pressures of the business, what you gonna do?

At the time...not much. So Pfeiffer continued to work around the clock, breaking himself just to get a title shipped out the door. And all the while, every day, morning and night, he kept thinking about China.

Except now, he was reading up on it as well - both as a result of his trip, and his girlfriend being Chinese, he began to learn the language and study the culture and politics of China.

He soon learned that China has laws in place that make such work conditions as he was enduring at home illegal. Work days there can be no longer than 11 hours, and employees are only legally allowed to work 36 hours of overtime a month.

"There are places in the US games industry where the base work week is 50 hours and that doesn't even start to account for the extended periods of 'crunch time", he says. "In China, you couldn't legally run a shop that way. And heck, who wants to live their lives that way?"

Not Pfeiffer, and not his friend Max Garber either. So in 2006, with Resistance finished and the two fed up with the conditions they'd suffered getting it there, they decided to pack their bags, depart Insomniac and form their own studio.

Where? Where else? China.

Pfeiffer is at pains to stress that it's not Insomniac themselves that caused the move.

"Ted [Price] is an exceptional person and phenomenal CEO...we have learned a lot from working there"

But at the same time is insistent that "there's a better way to work, and live, than the way western studios currently operate".

"I am simply a guy that has been in the industry approaching 13 years and knows that something has to give. If we as an industry are going to keep raising the bar, the attriton rate of top people has to decline" he continues.

"Ten-year veterans cannot be leaving an industry they loved due to fatigue or because they're having families". So the two set out to do something about it. Landing in China, they got cracking on getting their studio up and running. It's name? Balanced Worlds. It's goal? Balancing worlds.

"Balanced Worlds is going to be a place people will strive to work at", Pfeiffer says. "And after they arrive, we want them to stay with us a long time". The name Balanced Worlds is as literal as they come - they want their employees to pay as much attention to their social and personal lives as they do their time at work, something that was obviously lacking in Pfeiffer's life back home.

"We will have an onsite chef for breakfast, lunch and dinner", he boasts. Massages, dry cleaning, company supplied drivers, language and cultural tutoring (English or Chinese), haircuts, fitness memberships, car washing and maid and grocery services are just some of the other perks Balanced Worlds have in store for their development staff.

Sound outrageous? It would be - in the US. In China, both the cushy services and manual labour (maids, etc) are relatively inexpensive, something he believes will help entice talented developers who are fed up with conditions in the West.

"The industry is full of explorers, adventurers", he says. "We haven't had to 'sell' the idea of moving to China. People are drawn to it. It's been surprising how many industry veterans have offered to join us so far".

With the ink not yet dry on these signings, he's reluctant to name names, but says the staff consists of Western veterans and passionate, "highly-talented" Chinese graduates. "Our management staff will mostly be Westerners at first", he says, "[but] the goal is to eventually have people of all nationalities at all levels".

It's clear that Pfeiffer believes Balanced Worlds is, in theory at least, aiming at being more than your everyday studio. He sees it as more of an experiment: in work conditions, in staff management, in location and in it's overall outlook on the industry.

They've yet to take the final step and commit to a publisher/platform ("We are considering all consoles, and might even go portable", Pfeiffer says), but a decision on that is only a few months away.

Whichever path they do decide to go down, the studio won't be dealing in just their own titles - Pfeiffer believes that the workload required to complete a console title is fast becoming too much for Western studios to deal with, crunch time or not, and that his studio will stand to benefit from this. He predicts that very soon, outsourcing jobs to studios in places like China and India won't be an option. It will be a necessity.

"US game companies will be increasingly focused on 'iteration time'. The lower the time it takes to test, modify, improve, test...the less expensive games will be to create", he predicts. "And there is no doubt in my mind that successful US/Japanese game companies will have to heavily rely on outsourcing large portions of their games to companies like us".

But won't that heavy reliance be at odds with their "balanced worlds" outlook? If it came down to it, which is more important to the studio? Their own titles, big outsourcing gigs or happy staff?

The answer comes quickly from Pfeiffer: "We want to make great games while living a good life".

Balanced Worlds are due to open their doors in June 2007.