More developers than the Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart are celebrating the release of the game stating that it was developed entirely without crunch.
“[Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart] has an average score of 89 [on Metacritic], and I can't speak for anyone on the team except myself, but i didn't do crunch once“Tweeted game designer Grant Parker. “Weeks of 40 hours all the time. It is possible to work on a great game without suffering".
Parker's account was echoed by animator Lindsay Thompson, who said: “I have not broken once, for the whole production. A couple of late nights here and there to finish something, but completely stress free. It's possible. Team well-being lets creativity flow freely ".
“And those late few nights don't even feel like work when you're having so much fun doing this damn thing,” Insomniac narrative coordinator Justin Fennessy said in response to Thompson's tweet.
Nei tweet di follow-up, both Parker and Thompson have pointed out that they can only speak for themselves, not for the experiences of the entire multidisciplinary team. However, they both also pointed out that developers across the team were actively encouraged to avoid the crunch by Insomniac's management.
“I think the team as a whole didn't suffer from crunch and our management certainly encouraged it,” said Thompson.
Replies to Parker and Thompson's tweets are filled with support from developers at other studios, including Guerrilla Games, developer of Horizon Forbidden West who, like Insomniac, is part of PlayStation Studios.
The gaming industry, especially the AAA party, is infamous for its intensive work hours, which lead to burnout, not to mention a work culture that has made crunch widespread. The most recent and best-known victim of the crunch is probably the staff of CD Project Red, which, according to emails Bloomberg obtained in September 2020, he addressed six-day work weeks before the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, just over a year after CEO Marcin Iwiński said crunch would not be mandatory.
Studies like Rockstar Games, BioWare, and PlayStation Studios' Naughty Dog have all been the subject of crunch complaints, and the list doesn't end there. Unhealthy overtime is still definitely a problem within game development, but the problem is no longer a taboo that has been silenced for a long time and consequently an increasingly broader awareness debate is underway.
We hope that Insomniac's example, if the stories are true, will be the first of a long series.
