Post
The industry's dirty habit of burning out developers to hit ship dates.
Crunch refers to extended periods of mandatory overtime, often 60-100 hour weeks, leading up to a game's launch. It's been an open secret in the industry for decades, normalized as passion and dedication. Studios push employees to the breaking point to meet deadlines set by marketing calendars, not realistic development timelines. The human cost includes burnout, broken relationships, and developers leaving the industry entirely.
Example
Rockstar Games faced massive backlash when reports surfaced of 100-hour work weeks during Red Dead Redemption 2's development. CD Projekt Red made similar promises to avoid crunch on Cyberpunk 2077, then crunched anyway for months before launch.
Why it matters
Crunch is the single biggest sustainability problem in game development. It drives talent out of the industry and, ironically, often produces worse games because exhausted developers make more mistakes. The push for unionization in gaming is largely a response to crunch.
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