This year, game players have learned many uncomfortable truths about video game crunch. If what happened on the Warframe subreddit in the runup to the increasingly MMO-ish co-op shooter’s latest expansion is any indication, we’re starting to see players push developers to take better care of themselves, even if that…
Today on Kotaku Splitscreen we’re talking about crunch, a complicated issue that affects us all in a lot of ways. Work-life balance can be a tricky thing for many people working in all sorts of fields, including video games.
When you’ve been reporting on a subject for a long time, you can feel when the winds are beginning to shift, and in 2018 it’s started to feel like game studios are actually having serious conversations about crunch. This week alone we have significant examples from two of the biggest publishers around.
In the final year of development on Red Dead Redemption 2, the upcoming Western game, the top directors decided to add black bars to the top and bottom of every non-interactive cutscene in hopes of making those scenes feel more cinematic, like an old-school cowboy film. Everyone agreed it was the right creative move,…
It’s long been an open secret in the video game industry that the prestigious developer Rockstar embraces overtime, and a new quote from company co-founder Dan Houser about Red Dead Redemption 2 caused controversy this morning by suggesting that it took 100-hour weeks to make. In a new elaboration to Kotaku, however,…
Telltale Games employees were surprised when CEO Pete Hawley announced the closure of the company at a staff-wide meeting. One employee, a source told Kotaku, had been working until 3 AM the night before with no inkling that the studio was about to let them and over 200 other employees go, leaving behind a skeleton…
Indie publisher Devolver Digital is releasing a new Super Nintendo game that looks to raise awareness of video game development crunch, with all its profits going to a mental health charity.
Game developer Shane Neville is no stranger to crunch. He claims that while he was at Electronic Arts in the late ‘90s, he once worked nearly four months without a day off, averaging 90 to 110 hours per week making Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed. Eventually, after seeing the toll it took on him, he swore off…
Crunch is one of the gaming industry’s biggest issues. Devs work countless extra hours to get games out the door, wringing themselves dry of blood, sweat, and tears for weeks or months at a time. It destroys people. Development studio Neocore was reminded of this when it announced earlier this week what it planned to…
There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about fairness and transparency in the video game industry. On Kotaku Splitscreen, we speak with a studio head who takes things to the extreme, paying every employee the same exact wage.
Reports in three separate French outlets depict a pattern of inappropriate behavior, sexist and homophobic jokes, and an overall toxic environment at Quantic Dream, something the video game studio’s executives strongly deny.
There’s an article in the New York Times today about crunch in the video game industry and how it destroys people’s lives. The writer seems like a real jerk, but the op-ed is worth reading.
In February of 2011, fresh off nine months of 80-hour work weeks, Jessica Chavez took a pair of scissors to her hair. She’d been working so hard on a video game—14 hours a day, six days a week—that she hadn’t even had a spare hour to go to the barber.
Is mandatory overtime an integral part of game development or a systemic issue that should be completely eliminated? Where would you even start?
This weekend on Venturebeat, game industry veteran Alex St. John published a hot new contender for worst article of the decade, arguing that today’s game developers should stop whining about nonsensical ideas like, oh, “fair wages.”
It’s hard to understand what really goes into game development until you’ve heard the stories firsthand.
After a couple of weeks of silence, we're finally hearing from people who worked at Crytek, the game development studio where more than 11,500 dinners were proudly served to "crunching" developers. Two people on the game are saying that Crytek is a pretty good place to work, despite a recent controversial Tweet about…
Obvious sentence of the day: It takes atomic tons of effort and man (or woman)-hours to build a game. The game industry may have a bit of a checkered history with the "QoL" or "Quality of Life" issue, but since the infamous ea_spouse dished on her husband's seemingly-endless eighty-five hour work weeks in 2004, the…
