Sure, we've heard of bad crunch before, but, as bad as it was, the crunch on Witcher 3 or those other games is over now. At some point a lot of those people who were asked to crunch completed their work and got the chance to breath and really think about their future. It sounds like developing under crunch is, in some way, as addictive as playing something like Destiny of Fortenite. And if the development never ends the workers are always pushing themselves to take another one for the team.

It makes me sick to think of people stuck working on something like Fortnite on an endless basis. We've got to be getting close to the point where the game has been receiving rapid updates on a constant schedule for longer than most games standalone games were in development, period. That's just insane.

It makes me wish for the good old days. Remember when the Master Chief said he was going to finish the fight? Some people threw their controllers at their screens, but I was elated. It meant there would be another Halo. That it would take three years before the story was wrapped up didn't bother me.

It's also interesting, because back then I was a Halo player who played other games too. For a while I was a Destiny player that played other games to. Now though, I'm a gamer who rotates between new games and old, familiar games, and them back to Destiny for a while before starting the cycle again. It feels so much nicer to cycle to whatever I feel like playing instead of wishing and demanding than any one game be updated right now.

Look at my gaming in the last few weeks:
- Some Destiny for Season of the Drifter and about three days of The Revelry.
- About a week and a half to replay and finally beat the main and DLC story of Horizon: Zero Dawn.
- About two days to beat Surtr and Valraven and to cross the bridge in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.
- A couple of hours in Gravity Rush 2. Just long enough to dock with Jirga Para Lhao. (I want to play it more but I can only can't yet, because...)
- Yesterday I started what I intend to be a full play through of Dad of War, because even though I beat it once, I did not beat all the Valkyries. I intend to do so this time...

That feels so much better than running a bunch of heroic Strikes in an effort to push my Destiny power level up the final 10ish points to reach 700...

The business surrounding making games is absolutely fucked. It's just depressing.

Unionize. Charge more.

Steps to solving the problem.

Article goes over Epic paying substantially over bottom market price, as well as having trouble hiring people even though they are trying. So I don’t think that is the case here.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that management... simply aren't to be trusted blindly on such statements.

I'm sure that those people believe what they are saying, but they are also not examining their assumptions at all.

What we're suggesting here is that Epic Games-- the company that developed, licenses, and supports the Unreal Engine, which powers quite a few successful games in the market-- is unable to recruit enough qualified developers to work on what has (rather unexpectedly) become their flagship game, despite (they claim) paying "over bottom market price" which if you think about it, probably means below average market value, but not the *bottom*.

So my questions would be:

What is their median dev salary-- and what are they broken down by discipline, and how do they compare to industry medians?

How much experience are they looking for? How much training and professional development are they willing to do?

I would not be surprised if what this comes down to is that they want people who are experienced, already know all of Epic's preferred tools, are willing to work long hours for less than median pay, and are unable to keep enough of these around to fill the content pipeline without crunching. But as long as it continues to be more profitable to do that than to raise salaries, provide training, or increase head count, they will do so.

Absent labor organization, this is nearly always what happens-- the pressures that would normally cause head counts and salaries to rise get pushed back, and the result is crunch.

I’m not saying it’s executives and upper management, but I’m saying it’s executives and upper management.

So why people don't make games at a normal pace, release them, let players enjoy them for however long they enjoy them, and then move on is beyond me. Like, there's a bazillion games out there. We can stay occupied until your next one comes out.

The only possible explanation is that those games are making more money despite the worse experience all around. Someone is looking at the books and seeing bigger numbers coming from those games. That won't mean that only those games get made, but sometimes there'll be a choice in front of someone, and they'll choose the one that's likely to generate bigger numbers.

I can only think of two scenarios where that business model suddenly makes less profit. One is players just abandoning them en masse, which is possible but not likely, for reasons explained here:

Just kidding. Mostly I've just been on an Archer quips kick.

The other, maybe, is that games employees finally manage to unionize. The games-as-a-service model might get more expensive to produce, either through higher wages or through unions simply refusing to put up with the hours. I can't actually say that'll make the model unsustainable - that's impossible to know without specific numbers. But it would necessarily make production more expensive by SOME degree.