Not much commentary from me on this, but I wanted to point out a couple of articles for those of you who try to look at the game development industry as a viable career choice.
Burnout, Crunch and the Games You Play
Slash and Burn Management: Unsustainable
Both great articles, both worth thinking about, mostly as someone interested in the field, but also as gamers who want to understand the industry a bit more. It’s a fun and even occasionally worthwhile thing we do, making games, but it’s not all fun and games. It’s work. Fun work sometimes, but work.
So You Want a Job In The Video Game Industry?
There’s also the “ea_spouse” kerfluffle from a while back that’s worth noting. Business does funny things to people sometimes. Perhaps in a world of fluffy bunnies and free money, we’d have different games. In the meantime, there are some curious factoids out there. There’s also this article on crunch that I quite like: Crunch is Avoidable
Crunch is a failure of management, but often management tries to paint it as a failure of developers.
I’m a software developer, and in the past I’ve been at places with insane crunch periods…. stupid demands for unpaid overtime, high stress, etc. But it doesn’t have to be that way….. my current company is utilizing agile development, and as much as I sneered at it when we started, it’s all but eliminated the idea of crunch time for us.