I've only been in the biz for 4 years at 2 companies, but 90 hours sounds outrageous to me, especially on top of the previous crunch and piddly payoff promised. I would have laughed in your producers face, because I know no matter how much determination or commitment I have, my programming productivity will fall to zero (or below!) after 60 hours in a week; that's just biology. From what you say, it sounds to me like they are very desperate, so you should start thinking about what you would do after a layoff. Even industry (especially this industry) veterans can run a company into the ground faster than you can imagine.
The IGDA Quality of Life committee has some good resources on crunch: http://www.igda.org/qol/
Peter M Alan Wolfe wrote:
Heya, I'm fairly new to the game industry, just hitting my one year mark earlier this month, but being a long time ameteur/indie game developer having been doing it for about 14 years now on my own. Our producer just asked that we work 90 hour work weeks until further notice, and we have been working 3 months solidly at 60 hours a week, with a couple months before that of crunch like that on and off. We of course are getting still only paid for 40 hours and are promised "3 days paid vacation" at the end of this project. This is a fairly reputable company w/ aprox. 60 employees and our upper management are industry vetrans of aprox. 20 years each (and some of them you would surely know about!) I knew about the unpaid overtime going into game programming but 90 hour work weeks seem a bit excessive. What's been everyone else's experience, is 90 hours just par for the course sometimes or is that beyond reasonable in a modern day "professional game shop"? Im curious to hear what people at different companies have experienced and what the overall climate of the industry is regarding crunch time. Thanks a bunch, Alan --------------------- To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html
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