Naughty Dog Fans Be Warned
The Makers of The Last of Us and Uncharted have been doing some of the same things that the old Telltale did.
UPDATE: It Just Got Worse
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The Makers of The Last of Us and Uncharted have been doing some of the same things that the old Telltale did.
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A little bit of crunch and high turnover is one thing. Severe crunch is something completely different. And No. Not all studios do this. That is a fallacy.
With the scope of their games I’m not really surprised.
Smh... it's 2020 and you'd really think studios would learn by now...
crunch is bad and anybody who excuses it is enabling a toxic mindset for those in charge. crunch doesn't "make good games", nor is it needed regardless of the scope. plenty of masterpieces were made without crunch, and i dont know who needs to hear this, but the last of us of all things is not worth crunch.
crunch is not some artistic pursuit, it's overworking employees for less pay than they deserve and pretending it's a good thing. glad more people are becoming aware of naughty dog's gross tendency to do this.
A bit different of a situation. Crunch is obviously bad and should be avoided but Naughty Dog isnt going to go out of business like Telltale did. The amount of crunch the dev team does isnt going to affect sales. (and I highly doubt 70% of Naughty Dog is going to willingly quit after Last of Us 2 releases. Its still their job and people arnt just going to leave it without some kind of plan joining a different studio. Im sure people will leave once its done but it wont be close to 70%)
Hopefully studios actually start to focus on not working devs to death now that its becoming a very known thing in the industry and not a great look. Sadly I doubt that will change any time soon though. (Hopefully New Telltale keeps that promise.)
CD Projekt Red at this point is well known for putting their employees through crunch so bad that they themselves labelled their work culture as inhumane but continue to do it anyway, yet the internet can't stop circlejerking them.
At the very least not all big studios overwork their employees, Nintendo, one of if not the biggest game company of all time is well known for not forcing release dates (except for Sakurai who does it to himself). Hell even EA and Ubisoft, regardless of your thoughts on their products, are apparently great places to work at.
Just gamers being gamers.
Here's the thing.This is coming from a huge capitalist conservative:
Just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's right. Legality isn't a guide for morality.
Thank you
Jonathan Cooper, former animator at Naughty Dog:
When I left Naughty Dog late last year they threatened to withhold my final paycheck until I signed additional paperwork stating I wouldn't share their production practices. They finally relented when I assured them that was most likely illegal...
The truth is I have no awful crunch tale. The "story animators" as we were known were averaging 46hrs a week when I left and I personally never went over 55. The story team is super organised and we reacted to whatever was thrown at us. That's not to say others weren't suffering.
For the demo shown last September, the gameplay animators crunched more than I've ever seen and required weeks of recovery afterwards. One good friend of mine was hospitalised at that time due to overwork. He still had over half a year to go. There have been others since.
The reason I left is because I only want to work with the best. That is no longer Naughty Dog. Their reputation for crunch within LA is so bad it was near impossible to hire seasoned contract game animators to close out the project. As such we loaded up on film animators.
While super-talented, they lacked the technical/design knowhow to assemble scenes. Similarly, the design team ballooned with juniors to make up for the attrition of key roles. Every aspect of finishing this game took much longer due to the lack of game experience on the team.
Don't get me wrong, these kids are mostly awesome and the best were great. It's just when the junior/senior ratio is out of balance things can really grind and more time is spent training than actually working. (LA teams, make sure and pick them up when all the contracts end.)
Contract work is a huge part of the LA ecosystem to ship large games. Unlike game design, there is a thriving animation industry here and seasoned animators can (often) choose their projects. Most of the contract story animators quit last year.
Those that don't can be at ND for 2-3 projects (with pauses inbetwen) and, while paid overtime, never receive benefits or the security of a full-time gig. This is the way the industry is moving so workers need more protection rather than the carot of a fulltime job "one day".
There are ND stories worse than this but like everything on my twitter I'm focusing on animation. For TLOU2 fans, the game should turn out great with industry-leading animation. I would just not recommend anyone work at Naughty Dog until they prioritise talent-retention.
Ultimately, ND's linear games have a formula and they focus-test the shit out of them. While talented, their success is due in large part to Sony's deep pockets funding delays rather than skill alone. A more senior team would have shipped TLOU2 a year ago.
Crunch is inevitable especially with huge companies like Naughty Dog and CDProjektRed but at least NaughtyDog tells people in interviews that there will be crunch and that's something they need to be ok with so it's not like they were tricked into it
Guess you can't like a company for making good games anymore damn.
And they said lately that to some degree there will be crunch for Cyberpunk but that they try to limit it as much as possible,in the final stage of the game they have to do this unfortunately but they're honest about it at least.
And then they hire people from the film industry with little experience?
If Naughty Dog was so honest then they wouldn't have threatened to withhold somebody's paycheck so they couldn't talk.