'Devs are getting ground up as collateral damage': Fallout: New Vegas lead says burnout has replaced crunch as 'the primary hazard of the game industry'

Gaming Industry’Devs are getting ground up as collateral damage': Fallout: New Vegas lead says burnout has replaced crunch as ‘the primary hazard of the game industry’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

Gaming Industry’Devs are getting ground up as collateral damage’: Fallout: New Vegas lead says burnout has replaced crunch as ‘the primary hazard of the game industry’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Fallout: New Vegas wallpaper

Crunch (imposing long periods of major overtime to meet a deadline) has been a major spectre in the games’ industry since its inception, though particularly in the past few years, with developers at several studios includingRockstar,CD Projekt,Telltaleand more reporting absurd expectations from their higher-ups.

That’s not to say short periods of crunch are inherently a sign that something’s gone wrong—racing to beat a deadline is common in a lot of creative industries, and sometimes it’s self-imposed out of passion for the project. It is, however, a thing to be avoided—and several of those aforementioned studios havesworn off relying oncrunch to solve their problems.

But it’s far from the only issue developers are facing, especially in an industry that’s beenincredibly brutal as of late. Industry vet Josh Sawyer, studio design director at Obsidian (Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity) commented on the issue via atweetresponding to aGameDeveloper articleon the subject yesterday (thanks,GamesRadar):

“I believe burnout has already replaced crunch as the primary hazard of the game industry. Managers are setting teams up to fail and devs are getting ground up as collateral damage,” Sawyer writes. “I have suffered from burnout myself. It’s no joke.”

It’s important to remember here that ‘stress’ is a physical, chemical response your body has, which can have very real medical implications. Stress introduces measurable chemical changes to your body, which can dent your immune system, raise your blood pressure, cause you to gain or lose weight, and ruin your sleep schedule.

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“As with crunch,” Sawyer adds, “It’s likely that managers may acknowledge creating the circumstances leading to burnout but will not take the necessary steps to change them. It’s important that devs continue to talk to and support each other and to apply pressure until change is effected.”

Several other devschimed intothe discussion such as Jorge Murillo, a former senior designer at Blizzard who worked onOverwatch’s ill-fated PvE mode: “My team spent years trying to make PvE Overwatch content that people would’ve loved and ate up. Though we did not crunch, having a project you spend years on getting pulled from under you takes it out of you. Makes you feel like—what was the point of all that work?”

Nathaniel Chapman, a designer who has worked at both Blizzard and Obsidian,also added: “The slow grind on something you do not believe in is 10x as soul crushing as crunching for something you care about.”

(Image credit: Obsidian Entertainment)

Fallout New Vegas key art

Still, solving the issue of burnout may prove harder, since it’s a slow and insidious hazard. It’s easy to spot when your development team is crunching and to implement steps to avoid it—you just look at how much overtime is happening. If less overtime is happening, you’re solving your crunch, simple-as.

Burnout, as the GameDeveloper article Sawyer is quote-tweeting here outlines, is harder to solve. Alongside the more expected causes like overwork, the report states that burnout stems from more abstract concepts like “Insufficient Rewards”, “Lack of Control”, and “Absence of Fairness”.

As you might imagine, a layoff-happy industry hasn’t helped. Still, as Sawyernotes: “game dev largely has moved away from capital C Crunch”, so there may be some hope yet, even if the industry at-large is still putting out fires.

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