Is crunching something that's often planned or is it more because of external circumstances (like planning failure or scope expansion)?
The answer to your question is âyesâ. It really isnât an either/or situation, because the attitude towards crunch will vary significantly based on the studio culture and team leadership. Some studios are much more crunch-conscious than others (like my current employer), while other studios are notorious for extended working hours be a regular part of their regular day-to-day operations (like CD Projekt RED). Crunch also comes in varying degrees. It usually starts fairly light (e.g. an extra hour or two a day) but grows in intensity over time, typically culminating in 14+ hour days at the office and weekends to boot. All studios (to my knowledge) have some form of crunch for the former reason, while some will pile both on.
In most studios, whenever thereâs a scheduling failure and the leadership believes that we can make up the difference by crunching, we crunch. This type of crunch typically builds up slowly over time and hits hardest near the end of the project when the bugs are coming in fast and hot. It is during these months that we put in extra hours to try to keep the number of open bugs manageable. Much of the time, itâs because stuff we hadnât fully tested during production (since things were still in flux) is being fully tested now, so all of the bugs from the shipping game content fall out. As the number of bugs being found ramps up, the amount of work that must be done to fix those bugs also ramps up commensurately, leading to an increasingly intense crunch period. However, itâs important to recognize that this crunch is not viewed as sustainable. Itâs a temporary measure that we know will eventually end.
In the case of studios that have long hours as the default working state, I hesitate to call it âcrunchingâ anymore because those studios will also ratchet it up even further when they need to - they just take their "normalâ 60-80 hour weeks and push it to 80-100 hour weeks instead when they do crunch for the above reasons. Because they regularly operate on really long hours, I hesitate to call what they do normally âcrunchâ. I prefer to call them a âcrunch studioâ or âcrunch cultureâ instead, because itâs part of their planning process and expected.Â
Crunch is usually the second response to scheduling problems (behind cutting content) because it doesnât affect the projectâs budget as much as more extreme actions like delaying or canceling. Itâs primarily used as a stopgap, a measure to fill in the smaller cracks in the schedule in order to make things whole. Most team leadership understands that it isnât sustainable for too long, which is why it is usually a temporary measure.Â
Some developers have a naturally higher tolerance for crunch than others. Most have it when theyâre young and grow out of it as they mature, but some manage to retain it. If/when these rare developers get promoted into lead and executive positions, they often bring their crunch tolerance with them and project expectations of it (consciously or unconsciously) on their subordinates. This leads to a studio growing biased towards finding and favoring devs who have a similar crunch tolerance. This is how crunch culture at a studio starts.
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