One of the problems that the gaming industry has been attempting to avoid in recent years is a crunch culture. In terms of gaming, crunch often occurs when a development team is rushing to complete a title, involving employees working for lengthy amounts of time. One of the reasons some games likeHorizon Forbidden Westwere delayedwas due to a company wanting to avoid crunch. However, these cases of compulsory overtime still take place, withXboxand Bethesda specifically dealing with a recent report of crunch.
Early in June 2022 a report revealed that during thedevelopment ofFallout 76, the team at Bethesda experienced a great deal of pressure to continue coming in to work overtime, with low hourly pay and little incentive to do so. According to the report, this constant pressure on the development team is one of the reasons thatFallout 76launched in such a broken state, with fans of the series heavily criticizing the game.
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Now, Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty has responded to the report in via a Q&A when he was asked to address it. Booty began by stating thatXboxtook all reports of crunch culture “seriously,” before adding that the report and a lot of articles like it “tend to look backwards, sometimes pretty far back in time.” He then went on to say that crunch is something developers used to wear “like a badge of honor.”
Booty confirms that he doesn’t “justify” crunch, but he does explain that it was a part of the industry. “[Crunch] was just part of the industry,” he said. “It was part of the culture of the industry. I literally slept under my desk early in my career.” As much as crunch culture was a part of the gaming industry’s past, it still seems fairly prevalent in its present as well.Neil Druckmann of Naughty Dog studioshas previously said crunch culture has no solution, meaning that stories like that ofFallout 76’sdevelopment could happen again.
Alongside his comments about the gaming industry’s past, Booty also said that currently overtime should only be kept to personal excitement and passion for a project, rather than it being mandatory to finish work on a given title. He also stated that crunch could take place without his knowledge, but that employees could trust in the Xbox internal process. It seems that some trust is being built between employees and developers in more recent times, as multiple studios have delayed games or changed them to avoid crunch. Upcoming titles like thenewWitchergame have been stated to not have crunch, though some are waiting to see if there’s any truth in these statements.
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