#RyseFacts Tweet About Crunches Backfires

rysefacts crunch

Ryse: Son of Rome is an upcoming Xbox One third-person action title being worked on by Crytek, makers of Crysis, Far Cry and hopefully at some point in the future a Y: The Last Man video game because that fits with their motif.

Since the game has been in development for several years and changed direction a few times, it stands to reason that the team would have been through a crunch or two. According to the Ryse Twitter account, the team has been served some 11,500 crunch-time dinners during the game’s development.

Besides being a rather large number, it’s also an odd thing for a game’s Twitter account to bring up. Sure, crunch happens, but I don’t think it’s a stat the public needs to know about. People who are much better at math than me totaled that up to about 58 days of crunch during the game’s development time (assuming the Crytek team is about 200 people).

Crunch is an awful fact of working in the Triple-A games industry. You need to put in long hours and at the end of it, you’ll probably be laid off unless you’re a permanent employee. It’s symptomatic of an industry that’s working under poor management, making crunch not only a necessity but sometimes a part of the culture.

What do you guys think about this? Should the Ryse team have tweeted this fact? What are your thoughts on crunch? Necessary evil, or something that needs to be gotten rid of?

Soruce – Ryse Twitter account

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mitch@gamersushi.com Twitter: @mi7ch Gamertag: Lubeius PSN ID: Lubeius SteamID: Mister_L Origin/EA:Lube182 Currently Playing: PUBG, Rainbow 6: Siege, Assassin's Creed: Origins, Total War: Warhammer 2

6 thoughts on “#RyseFacts Tweet About Crunches Backfires”

  1. This is most certainly not something to be proud of. A couple weeks of crunch is acceptable, but something as long as 58 days (and counting) is completely unacceptable. At that point you’re putting a massive strain on your employees’ families and personal health, and as someone who will soon be entering the industry, these things scare me. I can only hope I have some decent management that will prevent such things from happening.

  2. I don’t think it’s necessarily something to be proud of, every company does it to some degree but I do think it needs to be done. That said, I’ve never forced or previously been forced to do the overtime, I will always ask each day who if anyone wants to stay and help. I think it’s very important that people make the choice to stay, otherwise they won’t enjoy the work.

  3. Crunches aren’t necessarily limited to AAA developers. If you make anything with a deadline, you’re gonna have crunch times quite often. What bothers me is that Crytek isn’t exactly a masterpiece-producing company. The company as a whole barely pulls over an 80% average on metacritic, and their catalogue is small and spread out. It doesn’t make that sense to have such an absurd number of crunch times. I’d expect that from Rockstar or Activision. However, considering Ryse is a launch title in a new console generation (which is coming in mere weeks), you have to cut them a little slack.

  4. @trogador Just because they aren’t a company that puts out consistent games in the 90s doesn’t mean they have to have lower quality standards. Also Ryse is having a crazy crunch because so much of the combat was changed after E3.

  5. Crunch is terrible, but 7 years of development and (allegedly) only 58 days of crunch doesn’t sound as bad as some horror stories.

    Still, crunch is a large reason why I have no desire to get into the industry at all.

  6. Bungie has a crunch month every third month. they set up major milestones like that so hopefully when the game ships there is not a huge multiple month crunch at the very end. it is also super important that they don’t burn people out at the end of development since they have to have way more post launch support for Destiny than they did on any of the Halo titles. they need people to be able to finish Destiny and then dive straight into new content. We will see if it works as Destiny gets closer to launch

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