For those of you who don't know about the front page:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-08-04-bungies-13-year-battle-to-kill-crunch-culture

I know that Bungie has been trying to figure this out for a while, and it pleases me to no end that they have.

That's weird, Jason Schreier said that the Dark Below was a nine week crunch… Yet in the article Luke says the DLC was crunch free.

In the gamesindustry.biz article, Luke Timmins gave his definition of crunch:

whenever you're working at least 50 hours a week.

The Kotaku article says:

One person familiar with development says Bungie sequestered a team and had them crunch out Dark Below in just nine weeks, which may explain how insubstantial it was.

Nine weeks after Destiny’s troubled development may not have been enough time to make a good expansion, but if they released TDB without having to work too far past standard business hours then it wasn’t a crunch.

Or, Luke Timmins is just a liar... I guess?

Nice to read comments that come from experience.

I believe Bungie's original crunch culture came about because they were all so young and inexperienced at the beginning. Youthful excitement and vigour pushed everything they did. They were perhaps all pushing each other to do more.

That wouldn't be as true today. Bungie's employees probably range in age from 20 to +40.

Time catches up with you.

After your first game, you know how long it takes to make a game. Your experienced coders can say how many man hours of work you're looking at.

As a coder, i want to point out that this is frequently not the case. In fact estimating time it takes is one of the harder things many coders do. Particularly with new systems. Yes we can give a good guess, but usually im off. You can even see that same issue with the original destiny game engine and the problems they had bringing it online. You cant account for critical bugs, architecture design that didnt pan out or you hit a wall with.

The rest of your points are thought provoking though. Just wanted to point out that as a coder, correct time estimation is difficult with new systems.

A lot of the intent you infer in the statements from the article I didn't infer at all. Having been a manager myself for years I pretty much guarantee that this quote was not about a desire to skip 1-on-1s:

"You should take this seriously, but it's not free," Timmins said. "If I'm a manager, every report I have is about 10% of my time... It's really hard, and you're constantly going to have that pressure: 'Can't we just skip one on ones? Can't we just skip your goals for this period?'

With the amount of stuff that you have to do it's easy to say "this employee is doing fine, it won't be a big deal if we skip our 1-on-1 this week because I have x and y to do". That is a constant battle any manager has. Timmins is saying to be a good manager you basically make it mandatory that you have a 1-on-1 no matter what is happening or however busy you both are.

And the other point you made across two different quotes was about cutting features because there won't be time to finish it, which I think you're taking from the point of view of a engineer or a artist, and I think Timmins is coming from the point of view of a manager or even from the point of view of a company:

"The majority of it is always having enough awesome ideas and things you want to build, so you always need to have that rigour. 'No, we can't do that, and that's okay.' The second you don't, the whole thing falls apart."

You're right that an engineer shouldn't say "no we can't" unqualified to his boss (unless they really are asking for the impossible, but that's a whole different discussion), but a manager SHOULD decide when we can't based on the feedback from his employees and have enough sway with his employees to convince them to not kill themselves trying to get an extra feature in if it's going to have a negative effect on them. That's the way I took it from the article since it's mostly about managing employees. He discusses his experience when he was a tech and the next paragraph is saying that as a unit or a company it should be okay to say we can't do that before launch.

And then the last bit doesn't make sense to me. There's no such thing as "no we can't." You either need more people, more time, or more money, or some combination thereof, and anything is possible. You can't tell your boss "no" unless it's literally impossible (and I don't mean impossible for you, but completely, physically impossible). instead, you tell your boss you can do that in X amount of time, or with Y more people, or at a cost of Z. Maybe he's implying the "no we can't [do that with the number of people we have in the amount of time remaining]" but this article is not giving me total confidence in Bungie's understanding of the golden triangle of labor.

I think the major problem here is that when your ship dates are determined by third parties (an owner,in the case of Microsoft, or contractual obligations to a publisher, in the case of Activision) you then set your staffing levels according to what you can afford.

After that's done, you've basically got only two sliders to adjust to fit the items in your design into the schedule: you either work people longer, or reduce scope.

I would guess that the existence of crunch in creative industries is resistance against deliberately reducing scope.

Bungie was in a state of crunch for virtually that entire period - based on Timmins' definition of crunch as, "whenever you're working at least 50 hours a week."

This is a joke, right? 50 hours? I never worked less than 60 hours a week in the 13 years I tested video games, except for the six months I worked 30 hours a week while being full-time enrolled in college. "Crunch" meant 80-100 hour weeks. Listen, I get that we shouldn't normalize more than 40 hour work weeks, but there's overtime and then there's crunch, and crunch in the gaming industry is fucking brutal. 50 hour weeks ain't it. The existence of this line makes much of the rest of the article feel like whining about nothing rather than solving a difficult and chronic problem. The writer undermined the whole thing, right here. Maybe Timmins does define anything over 50 as "crunch" but don't write the article in such a way that it draws a false equivalency between 50 hour work weeks and breaking a company's morale. Especially in this industry.

50 Hours a week is actually the commonly used benchmark in studies, that's probably why he's using that number.

"The Halo 2 crunch almost killed Bungie as a company," he said. "It is the most I've ever seen humans work in a year and a half. It was brutal.

50 hour work weeks didn't do that. UGH. This article makes Timmins sound like a whiny brat. I bet most of that year and a half was spent around 80 hour work weeks, not 50. 50 doesn't break a man the way 80 does. Last I'm going to say about the hours thing.

Halo 2 was far more than 50, as per his later comment ;)

"When your company is used to crunching, not relying on crunch to ship is now hard," he said. "Un-ringing that bell is very difficult. It requires changes to planning and culture, which takes a long time to do. It took us years and multiple games to move away from crunch philosophy."

I disagree here. If it took a long time to un-ring that bell, then the problem was the leadership. After your first game, you know how long it takes to make a game. Your experienced coders can say how many man hours of work you're looking at. You have a line producer whose entire job is to know how many hours things take and assign budgets to match. So at that point, you can set a schedule with no crunch, or set one with crunch, but you can't pretend that the crunch time is magically sneaking up on you and taking you by surprise. Back when I was testing, I could tell you that it took in the neighborhood of 300 man hours to properly test every possible combination of clothing and skate deck in a tony hawk game. We could assign 10 guys 30 hours of work and get it done in 3 days or we could assign 30 guys 10 hours of work and finish in a day. Or we could be giant dick bags and decide one guy was gonna do it all and work 100 hour weeks and finish in 3 weeks because hey, fuck that guy, right? But we NEVER got surprised by how long it took. Not once. Occasionally we'd roll the check into a new build because we didn't finish between releases, but - again - we were never surprised when that happened and, in fact, told the coders in advance what checks wouldn't be done in time for their planned pushes.

1st: That's not totally true. Games are hard! You realize something sucks and have to totally redo a section of the game (EG destiny 1's story). or some tech doesn't work. I think that's a pretty normal story, especially if you are working with new ideas or a new engine.

I think if this was as easy as your positing, we wouldn't see nearly so much Crunch.

Here's my take: When your company doesn't really give a shit about its employees, relying on crunch time to ship is easy. When you treat your employees as assets to be invested in instead of expenses to be minimized or resources to be exploited, planning to ship without using crunch is easy.

I think that's what he's saying, when your company accepts crunch as normal, you have to work really hard to break away from "WE CAN ask for crunch to get these things done. That's a cultural issue that takes time to change.

"You should take this seriously, but it's not free," Timmins said. "If I'm a manager, every report I have is about 10% of my time... It's really hard, and you're constantly going to have that pressure: 'Can't we just skip one on ones? Can't we just skip your goals for this period?'

Right here... He knows how much time things take. And then he immediately says he wants to cut corners. DUDE. The whole point of a crunch-free philosophy is that you plan ahead and consider how much time things take. So if you know how long these 1 on 1s take, then you schedule them such that you don't feel the time pressure to get them done by either working crunch hours on them or skipping the quality work altogether, and if you don't have enough man hours in the week to do all of your weekly tasks, you hire help. He's preaching no crunch while exactly providing an example of how management forces crunch on employees. I can see why it took so long to shift... they're bad at it, even if they want to be better. If the 1 on 1s take too much of his time, he needs to divide his management groups into smaller sets of people and hire more managers so everyone gets the attention they deserve.

"The answer is no. People management is more important than that one extra feature."

Or you could hire another manager and divide your workload, getting both done. Rule of thumb: You will be assigned more and more work until you ask for help or break. It's your responsibility to admit when you have been given too much to do. Yes, even if you're a manager.

Instead you have to tell upper management to chill the fuck out if mike wants some time off, and to guarantee everyone that they'll be able to come right back if they do need time. You go to bat for your team, you encourage them to take the time off, but man... Forcing someone to leave the office can easily be seen as not wanting them there. That's a dangerous game.

I've seen the opposite of this. Large amounts of easily consumable vacation often leave to very few people taking vacation. People get passionate about what they do, and they don't take their time.

it's over by four months and it's not going to fit. On Halo 2 I was that person, and before you know it I'm there every day until 4am and I never see my wife.

This right here is exactly why I quit my job in video games. My boss saw his wife once a month. I had turned off the gas and electricity at my apartment because I was home so rarely. I slept on a cot in the break room and showered at the gym next door. So yeah, crunch is bad. It's really, really bad.

UGH yup, I was doing a kids game and I was working 9:30-7:00, I'd get home at 7:45, put my kid to bed, maybe nap for 20 min, and start working again at 11, and finish up at 3-4AM to check in with the German team. After 6 weeks of doing this, AND being yelled at about the state of the project (mostly because the owner kept changing product direction and refused to change deadlines, and the place was just toxic), and expecting 24 hour email availability. I've moved to a casual mobile shop and I'm much happier.

"The majority of it is always having enough awesome ideas and things you want to build, so you always need to have that rigour. 'No, we can't do that, and that's okay.' The second you don't, the whole thing falls apart."

And then the last bit doesn't make sense to me. There's no such thing as "no we can't." You either need more people, more time, or more money, or some combination thereof, and anything is possible. You can't tell your boss "no" unless it's literally impossible (and I don't mean impossible for you, but completely, physically impossible). instead, you tell your boss you can do that in X amount of time, or with Y more people, or at a cost of Z. Maybe he's implying the "no we can't [do that with the number of people we have in the amount of time remaining]" but this article is not giving me total confidence in Bungie's understanding of the golden triangle of labor.

His implication there that saying no in the time allotted was pretty clear to me?

I agree with most of what you've said. Some good sage wise words there.

Bungie was in a state of crunch for virtually that entire period - based on Timmins' definition of crunch as, "whenever you're working at least 50 hours a week."

This is a joke, right? 50 hours? I never worked less than 60 hours a week in the 13 years I tested video games, except for the six months I worked 30 hours a week while being full-time enrolled in college. "Crunch" meant 80-100 hour weeks. Listen, I get that we shouldn't normalize more than 40 hour work weeks, but there's overtime and then there's crunch, and crunch in the gaming industry is fucking brutal. 50 hour weeks ain't it. The existence of this line makes much of the rest of the article feel like whining about nothing rather than solving a difficult and chronic problem. The writer undermined the whole thing, right here. Maybe Timmins does define anything over 50 as "crunch" but don't write the article in such a way that it draws a false equivalency between 50 hour work weeks and breaking a company's morale. Especially in this industry.

"The Halo 2 crunch almost killed Bungie as a company," he said. "It is the most I've ever seen humans work in a year and a half. It was brutal.

50 hour work weeks didn't do that. UGH. This article makes Timmins sound like a whiny brat. I bet most of that year and a half was spent around 80 hour work weeks, not 50. 50 doesn't break a man the way 80 does. Last I'm going to say about the hours thing.

I'd say at 45 hours you may be fine, above that it starts to add strain to home-life, especially if it's "normal". 45-50 hours may not put MUCH stress on the family @ home, but it does start to affect them. At over 50 hours the strain is notable. I don't think short stints of 50 hour weeks will break moral, but it does have a negative effect. So, I guess I'm saying I agree with Timmins at wanting to keep things below 50 hours a week. There's a cost paid for weeks over 50, and it's not just paid by the company or the employee.

50 hours/week, assuming 5 days a week that's 10 hour days, + an hour lunch + an hour (or more) commute + 8 hours sleep & you're at 4 hours "free" time, take an hour from that if your employees are taking time for their physical health (workout), another 30 minutes to get ready for the day and you're under 2 & 1/2 hours for "home life": help with dinner (1+ hour to prep, eat, & cleanup), help with homework (30-60 minutes), keep up your house & yard (30-90 min), and put the kids to bed (30+ minutes 45+ if you're reading to them), oh, wait I ran out of time a while ago, I still need to volunteer in my community, go to kids soccer games, and find time to spend with my wife so she doesn't go insane from lack of adult interaction or forget that she loves me.

Now when do I get to relax & watch netflix or play a video game? There's the weekend, but it's often filled up with things that I didn't have time to get to during the week. I guess I'll just sacrifice more of my sleep.

Keep that up for very long & you'll have unhappy burned out employees and families.

Destiny brought the final stage of the process: enforced vacation, a measure directly related to, "the crunch you want to do." Bungie gives its engineers 40 days off each year, but whether through paranoia or passion, a lot of employees simply weren't taking the opportunity for a break.

What? I used to force my team to take 15 minute breaks and they fucking hated me for it. I can't imagine forcing them to take 40 days off. Maybe if the entire company shuts down for 40 pre-selected days so that everyone can plan ahead, but you can't just tell mike in backend design that it's his 40 days and don't worry because joey the intern can totally handle his work while he's out. You can't hold a gun to someone's head and tell them to "relax."

I would agree with your team hating the forced 15 minute breaks. When I'm in the flow a break is the worst thing ever, but a meeting is worse than a 15 minute break. I'd prefer a manager protect my flow and also help me to be able to arrange my day so that I don't burn my eyes/brain out staring at a monitor for 5-10 hours straight.

That there hasn't been a studio-wide mandatory crunch? I'm not seeing how that's a hard claim to believe, especially with the sheer number of employees Bungie has now (at least 750 employees as of last year). I'd actually be more surprised at this point if they DID have mandatory studio-wide crunch for almost EIGHT HUNDRED employees. The rest of the "claims" in the article are about philosophies, something that's always a little bit bullshit anyway.

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(Rhetorical) What does it mean when the young are old, and the old are young?

Honestly, when I read most of these types of articles (which seem to be coming out more frequently recently) about leadership style changes and management changes within Bungie... it just seems like a no brainer to me.

All of that is well and good, but that's not going to help when Jason Jones wants to change the story when you've already done your mo-cap and voice recording. When he changes his mind and wants an overhaul and you have to ship… well people are going to crunch.

Just ask Joe.

Honestly, when I read most of these types of articles (which seem to be coming out more frequently recently) about leadership style changes and management changes within Bungie... it just seems like a no brainer to me.

The most important thing I took from my 7 years in the Army was how to be a leader and how to manage your employees. It's something that the Army has excelled at for decades now, and not merely in a military manner.

When I see articles like this, it just makes me thing like... maybe more video game companies need to invest money into sending managers and leaders to corporate leadership classes, or something similar. It's a necessity to have good leaders and managers in such a stressful environment such as video game development.

YES! Holy god, YES. There were, as far as I could tell, zero management courses when I worked EA, Fox, Mindscape, and Activision. None at all. You know how you got to be a team lead? Be being reliable. That's it. Heck, at Activision they would promote terrible employees simply because they'd been there a long time. One guy, within actual seconds of being promoted to team lead, started giving the only girl on his team a backrub and said to her, "So... I hear you're attracted to men with power." He was fired so quickly the rest of the people there didn't even have time to gasp. And being production team lead just was "Hey, who wants to be the team lead?" and whoever volunteered was it. At the time I volunteered, the team was two people. At the end of the cycle, it was 300. I don't know how they expected me to be a good manager, because I definitely was not one. I had to go out, on my own, and read loads of management handbooks in order to become better at it (years later and in a different industry).

Anyway, yes, they need to provide management training BADLY, but they won't because (a) corporate views testers as swine (b) they're 90% right, only about 10% of the testers they hire are any good, mostly because they hire literally anyone so they can make the shareholders happy with how many testers they hired, (c) spending more money on management training would not directly result in more money for the company, and would thus make the shareholders unhappy... It's a bad, bad environment that would benefit greatly from training.

PS: The military guys I've worked with have all been terrific, both in the game industry and out. Always reliable!

I can't even begin to guess the number of people the industry's lost to 100-hour weeks months on end. You could get years of happy and increasingly skilled productivity out of an artist or designer, but you wring them dry in eighteen months to hit the ship date and they never work on games again.

No crunch at Bungie would be cool. The happiest people I knew there just left at six every day and went back to their lives.

e: i would call crunch worse than being in a phd program and that's something else

Agree on all counts.