Crunching (forcing people to work long, significant overtime hours to meet deadlines) has been a major specter in the video game industry since its inception, especially in the last few years, when developers at several studios, including Rockstar, CD Projekt, and Telltale, have been reporting unreasonable expectations from upper management They report.

That's not to say that a brief crunch is a sign that something is inherently wrong. Being on deadline is common in many creative industries, and sometimes we impose it on ourselves out of passion for the project. But it is something to be avoided, and some of the aforementioned studios have vowed to rely on crunch to solve problems.

But that is not the only problem facing developers. Industry veteran Josh Sawyer, studio design director at Obsidian ("Fallout: New Vegas," "Pillars of Eternity"), commented on the issue in a tweet in reply to a GameDeveloper article yesterday I do (thanks, GamesRadar):

"I think burnout has already replaced crunch as the main danger in the gaming industry. Managers are setting their teams up to fail, and developers are collateral damage," Sawyer writes. I myself have suffered from burnout. I'm not kidding."

Burnout - sometimes called "occupational burnout" - is a state of general exhaustion

caused by prolonged exposure to stress.

It is important to remember that "stress" is a physical and chemical reaction that the body undergoes and can have very real medical implications. Stress causes measurable chemical changes in the body, dents the immune system, raises blood pressure, increases or decreases weight, and disrupts sleep schedules.

Burnout can take months to recover from.

"Like Crunch, managers may acknowledge that they are creating the conditions that lead to burnout, but may not take the necessary steps to change them," Sawyer adds. It is important that developers talk to each other, support each other, and keep the pressure on until change occurs.

Several other developers, including Jorge Murillo, a former senior designer at Blizzard who worked on the ill-fated PvE mode in Overwatch, joined the discussion: "My team spent years trying to create PvE Overwatch content. My team spent years trying to create PvE Overwatch content that people would love and support. I feel like what was all that hard work?"

Designer Nathaniel Chapman, who has worked for both Blizzard and Obsidian, also added that "the slow agony of something you don't believe in is ten times more soul crushing than the agony of something you do care about."

Still, solving the burnout problem can be difficult. It is easy to discover that a development team is burning out and take steps to avoid it. If overtime work is reduced, then the crunch is eliminated.

Burnout is difficult to solve, as the GameDeveloper article that Sawyer quotes and tweets here outlines. Along with expected causes like overwork, the report states that burnout stems from more abstract concepts like "lack of compensation," "lack of control," and "lack of equity."

As you might imagine, an industry with so many layoffs doesn't help. Still, Sawyer notes: since "game developers are far removed from the capital C crunch," there may still be hope, even if the industry as a whole is still putting out fires.