While crunch has often been spun as a necessary evil in developing video games, one of the industry’s biggest companies is taking a stand against it. Embracer Group, which came into the spotlight earlier this year after a massive round of acquisitions, has shared a video from one of its studio’s HR heads explaining why crunch in the games industry should be a thing of the past.
The video comes from Dambuster Studios, the developers behind Dead Island 2, which is due to release soon, on February 3, 2023. As the studio enters what may be considered a crunch period at other studios, Dambuster’s HR head Helen Haynes has shared why she thinks crunch shouldn’t be necessary.
Coming from working HR in other industries, Haynes explains that plenty of other industries work to deliver projects on important deadlines without having to resort to “ridiculous” crunch practices. “The games industry is not that special,” she says, denouncing crunch as a “right of passage, ego, machoismic rubbish [that] doesn’t have to happen.”