Youd imagine everyone knows this now, wouldnt you? However, I do have a useful suggestion that might greatly assist others in the games development industry: stop assuming crunch is fantastic. If only Striking Distance CEO Glen Schofield had taken my services before the weekend.
Schofield was one of the original co-founders of Call of Duty developer Sledgehammer Games, and is now the CEO of Striking Distance, the new studio that is developing The Callisto Protocol. In a since-deleted tweet from Saturday (thankfully captured by up-n-coming games journalist Jason Schreier), Schofield thought it would be great to tout how hard theyve been working on their debut project by revealing how much work and stress he's having with his team.
We r working 6-7 days a week, no one is forcing us. Exhaustion, tired, Covid but we were still working. Bugs, bugs, perf fixes. One last pass thru audio. 12-15 hr days. This is gaming. Hard work. Lunch, dinner working. U do it.
Glen. No. First of all, working seven days a week, for 15 hours a day, will make anybody extremely sick. You can't know if your employees are doing it because they like it, or if its because their boss expects it. And, most importantly, this is not gaming. It's actually a terrible way of life.
Schofield deleted the tweet after a flurry of, well, passionate replies, then twelve hours later, the same day, began into damage-limitation in an attempt to walk back the remarks.
Game and SaveGreat news for PC gamers out there looking to save money and add more games to your backlog that youll eventually get to. Humble Bundle is now offering a Summer Sale where you can save up to 90% on games.
While it's wonderful to hear Jason apologize to his team, who are most likely to be affected by managers who extol the virtues of working themselves far too hard, there are a lot of omissions in this follow-up. Given that Jasons tweet including the original has 25,000 likes, it's perhaps naive to expect that deleting the first tweet would resolve the issues without taking a hit.
The ol Anyone who knows me knows that gambit is never a great start, not least when it in no way implies anything to the contrary of his previous remarks. But to summarize a tweet in which he proselytizes working through exhaustion, not stopping for meals, and doing everything all with the expectation that anyone working for him would do it for luv is just bonkers.
This is a great opportunity for Striking Distance employees, who will find themselves defying the norm, as well as becoming more and more attracted to the game. A boss' attitude toward over-working employees creates a workplace where such efforts are implicitly expected. One where employees naturally assume that if they arent expected to put in as much effort as the person next to them, they will be less interested in the game and consequently lose out on opportunities.
We have reached out to Striking Distance to see if there would be any new safeguards for employees from such long work hours, and we will let you know if they respond.