"Crunch time" is the point at which the team is thought to be failing to achieve milestones needed to launch a game on schedule.
The complexity of work flow, reliance on third-party deliverables, and the intangibles of artistic and aesthetic demands in video-game creation create difficulty in predicting milestones.
[8] Some studios have made use of crunch hours over a period of months or years, rather than just in the run up to a deadline such as a game launch.
[12] Developers undergoing death march have described sleeping at their offices and not seeing their family for months, while others have reported significant loss in body weight from the process.
[15] This emphasizes constant updates to keep creating more content so players stay attached which leads to perpetual crunch.
[17][18][19] When games are created, strict contracts are signed between development studios and publishers that set budgets and deadlines for the project.
[20] Once a product is delivered, and the necessity for crunch no longer required, some companies allow their employees to take paid time-off in compensation for the overtime hours they had put in, or may offer salary raises and bonuses for successful completion of the delivery milestone.
Alexey Izotov argues that some game-makers promote this culture of hype by overpromising on features they can't deliver, as well as poor communication with gaming audiences in general.
[7] This can be pushed to extremes with some fans sending death threats to Cyberpunk 2077 developers over a delayed release date.
[27] id Software regularly underwent severe crunch hours during the 1990s, on a schedule John Romero described as "10 AM until we were done".
While the game was extraordinarily successful, the fraught process eventually resulted in the dissolution of the original id Software team.
"[12] While the franchise was initially successful, burnout began to set in among developers in 1997, and so Core Design switched to an entirely new team for Tomb Raider III (1998).
[17] A second lawsuit originated from a social media post by Erin Hoffman, posting anonymously under the name "EA Spouse", in 2004, describing the working hours her husband had faced at EA and how crunch time, initially proposed early in development as to get a heads-up on later stages, had been pushed as a long-term requirement throughout the development cycle for the employees.
[17][35][3][36] Following Hoffman's blog, a 2004 survey by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) found that less than 3% of respondents said that they did not work any overtime, and of those that did, nearly half did not receive compensation for it.
The labor laws also included a number of exacting provisions of what type of job functions were considered exempt, which covered most game development responsibilities.
[17] More visibility of the industry's crunch conditions occurred in January 2010, when a collective group of "Rockstar Spouses", the spouses of developers at Rockstar San Diego, posted an open letter criticizing the management of the studio for deteriorating working conditions for their significant others since March 2009, which included excessive crunch time.
[22] Since the early 2010s, some companies in the industry have taken steps to eliminate crunch; however, it was also noted by some reporters that, overall, little progress had been made in the decade after the "EA Spouse" controversy.
[14][41] A 2014 IGDA survey found that, while the average number of hours worked had dropped since 2004, 81% of respondents said they had experienced within the last 2 years, and around 50% said they felt it was "part of the job" and expected of them.
[43] Anonymous Epic Games employees speaking to Polygon spoke of crunch time with 70 to 100 hour weeks by some ever since they released Fortnite Battle Royale, which has drawn a playerbase of millions.
While these employees were getting overtime pay, there remained issues of health concerns and inability to take time off without it being seen negatively on their performance.
In October 2021, Eidos-Montréal and Eidos-Sherbrooke were some of the first major studios to announce a shift to a four-day workweek as to improve the quality of life for its developers.
[15][26] A number of popular games developed under crunch conditions, such as Fortnite, Fallout 4, and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, all saw extreme commercial success and solid critical acclaim.
[25] However, there are also many games that avoided crunch throughout the entire development process that still received commercial and critical success, such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Apex Legends, Don't Starve and Hades.
The group found that cultural factors such as focus, team cohesion, and a compelling direction were more important than pure hours of work in determining how good a game was.
[2] Bugs seen at the launch of Fallout: New Vegas came as a result of a short production schedule forced on the team by publisher Bethesda and lead to an infamous “crunch” period for the dev team, said bugs and poor performance cost the developer Obsidian Entertainment a $1 million conditional bonus based on critical reception, though insiders claim the short deadline and conditional bonus based on a Metacritic score was essentially to avoid paying said bonus.