It’s not like the bosses have no experience, do they just suck at creating realistic deadlines? Everything I hear about the industry is people overworked af
I think it must be really tricky to be a games company that has some attention on it. If you don’t announce a game, people think you’re not doing anything and get angry/pester you about it (EG: Bethesda with Fallout currently). If you announce a game but don’t give a release date, people assume it’ll be out in 1-2 years and get angry when that turns out to not be true (EG: Bethesda with Elder Scrolls currently). If you announce the game and a realistic release date (EG: “We’re working on Last of Us 3 but it won’t be out for 8-10 years probably”) then people get angry about it taking so long. If you announce a game and the deadline that people expect to hear, you’ll either miss it and people get angry (EG: GTA6 recently) or you have to do crazy crunch (EG: this game.)
Or you can take the Cyberpunk route of announcing the game, taking forever, missing all the eventual deadlines regardless, still crunching anyway, and also releasing it unfinished and virtually unplayable on some systems, but then it all somehow works out really well lol.
It’s 100% cultural, a combination of generational trauma (“I did it so you have to”) and pressure from upper management leading to performative effort. We now know from productivity research that overtime periods in game dev get diminishing–and even negative–returns pretty quickly.
It’s not like the bosses have no experience, do they just suck at creating realistic deadlines? Everything I hear about the industry is people overworked af
I think it must be really tricky to be a games company that has some attention on it. If you don’t announce a game, people think you’re not doing anything and get angry/pester you about it (EG: Bethesda with Fallout currently). If you announce a game but don’t give a release date, people assume it’ll be out in 1-2 years and get angry when that turns out to not be true (EG: Bethesda with Elder Scrolls currently). If you announce the game and a realistic release date (EG: “We’re working on Last of Us 3 but it won’t be out for 8-10 years probably”) then people get angry about it taking so long. If you announce a game and the deadline that people expect to hear, you’ll either miss it and people get angry (EG: GTA6 recently) or you have to do crazy crunch (EG: this game.)
Or you can take the Cyberpunk route of announcing the game, taking forever, missing all the eventual deadlines regardless, still crunching anyway, and also releasing it unfinished and virtually unplayable on some systems, but then it all somehow works out really well lol.
I suggest you look into the history of naughty dog.
Like this?
It’s 100% cultural, a combination of generational trauma (“I did it so you have to”) and pressure from upper management leading to performative effort. We now know from productivity research that overtime periods in game dev get diminishing–and even negative–returns pretty quickly.
“Well you see Geoff, mon neey”