Video game developer 7

Video game developer
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Crunch time

Most video game developers are notorious for overworking their employees. "Crunch time" is the point at which management realizes that the team is experiencing "slippage": it is not going to achieve everything needed in order to complete the milestone on time, meaning the publisher will not pay the developer until the milestone is indeed completed; and since most development companies are such small operations, this presents a real risk that the company won't be able to pay its employees on time. Worse threats occur when it becomes apparent that the team won't be able to ship the game, as a whole, on time.

An extremely common management response to this is to invoke "crunch time", dictating a 60- to 80-hour work week with work over the weekends, in the hope that the team will be able to catch up. The complexity of the workflow in video game creation makes it very difficult to manage the team's schedules, meaning that it is an unusual project that does not surprise its managers with slippage at some point.

Controversially, employees in the United States are not paid overtime pay when crunching, as all developers maintain salaried employees. Salaried employees are classified as exempt, who are not paid by the hour, and are classified as "professionals". Therefore, most state laws on overtime pay do not apply. A notable exception is California where software developers are specifically protected by enforcing a minimum hourly wage (for every hour worked) to be considered exempt. As of 2006, this minimum salary works out to about USD$99K/yr, assumming a 40 hr week.

Attention to crunching came to something of a head in 2004 when a blog entry titled "ea_spouse", a manifesto of sorts, was published. Railing against the cruelty of crunch time, it was posted by Erin Hoffman, the then-fiancee of Electronic Arts developer Leander Hasty (Hasty and Hoffman have since wed, and have joined an independent development firm, 1st Playable Productions [2], as well as founding a website oriented towards the discussion of the game development environment industrywide, Gamewatch [3].) Hoffman said her life was being indirectly destroyed by the company's work policy. This led to a great deal of debate in the industry, but without any visible changes until March 2005, when Electronic Arts internally announced that it was planning to extend overtime pay to some of its employees not currently eligible.

The underlying problem of poor scheduling remains. Game developers, especially newer ones, have a reputation for allowing excess enthusiasm for a project to override good sense, with reality as to the immense amount of work that has been taken on setting in after the commercial schedule has already been decided. Effective and realistic project planning - and especially good milestoning, the process of breaking down a project into specific and manageable goals and predicting a realistic timeline for each one - by development companies can help prevent the worst of crunch-time situations.