You say you are not but you are pretty much blaming the developers for enabling crunch. By saying it is on them to quit or rise up and say no you are putting all the impetus on them and excusing management for poor project management and exploitation. It's an extreme example but are people working in sweatshops to blame for the conditions they work in?
You make it sound really easy for a developer to just up and quit and go work somewhere else be these things are rarely if ever that easy. Quitting also doesn't solve the fact that there are people coming out of university every year desperate to work on games and willing to put up with these conditions for a chance. It is on the management to make conditions better and yes developers can push for that as well but as long as people just put the onus on them to do all the work things are not going to improve.
I can chip in on this. I'm a Senior QA in a non game development business.
I have the joy of working Brexit related legislative changes - these need to be done by 01/01/2021. The project is in Red due to the minimal time and non fixed scope and we've been told that Overtime is unlimited from now until deploy - it's absolutely not mandatory. If I chose to work overtime am I enabling crunch? (I want some dollar dollar bill y'all).
The key difference here is that the deadline isn't under our control, we're desperately trying to cut scope to hit it and I'd argue that legslative complinace is actually more important than "a game" (broad brushstrokes here).
The problem is those at the top who think that right to left planning ever works. As a PM for the last 20 years, I am well used to this practice. "Here you go Ian, have £X now go and give us this ambitious and challenging piece of development by [Date]". Everyone knows that software development is not an exact science, that unforseen challenges are not just likely but almost guaranteed, but building a realistic contingency period into the budget and delivery plans just doesn't happen. Execs look at the happiest of happy paths and fixate on the shortest option, then get annoyed with the delivery teams when unrealistic timelines can't be met for valid reasons.
The biggest problem is when you are delivering something to an external customer base, as you have teams of marketeers desperate to start fluffing the product with no concept of the realities of making the thing - which I suspect is exactly the behaviour which sets release dates when there is still months/years of development required on games and thus totally spurious and does nothing except churn the hype machine.
And breathe...
RCHD wrote:Snowy is my favourite. He's a metal God.
The problem is those at the top who think that right to left planning ever works. As a PM for the last 20 years, I am well used to this practice. "Here you go Ian, have £X now go and give us this ambitious and challenging piece of development by [Date]". Everyone knows that software development is not an exact science, that unforseen challenges are not just likely but almost guaranteed, but building a realistic contingency period into the budget and delivery plans just doesn't happen. Execs look at the happiest of happy paths and fixate on the shortest option, then get annoyed with the delivery teams when unrealistic timelines can't be met for valid reasons.
The biggest problem is when you are delivering something to an external customer base, as you have teams of marketeers desperate to start fluffing the product with no concept of the realities of making the thing - which I suspect is exactly the behaviour which sets release dates when there is still months/years of development required on games and thus totally spurious and does nothing except churn the hype machine.
Is that the right timestamp? I didn't see anything at 2:30 that we hadn't seen before.
I hope so mate, got it from a reddit post, I deliberately haven't watched it myself for that reason.
EDIT - Just watched it myself and you're right, original post edited.
So they've released a new raytraced trailer, and I think it explains why I thought the console footage released a few days ago looked somewhat lackluster. I reckon this game won't look half as good without RTX, as there's *so* much coloured lighting and reflection detail.
Urgh, I think I'm going to have to leave this until I've got my new GPU. I actually had a 3090 in my cart on CCL for ten minutes while I mulled over buying a £1400 graphics card. Obviously I didn't hit buy because I'm not a psychopath, but it's the first time I'd seen any of the 3000 series cards actually in stock somewhere. You never know, there're still three weeks...
