Former Dead Space creator and now CEO of Striking Distance Studios, Glen Schofield, has revealed on Twitter that the real horror of The Callisto Protocol is working on it as the studio is crunching quite a bit. In the tweet, Schofield said the following about The Callisto Protocol crunch work:
I only talk about the game during an event. We r working 6-7 days a week, nobody’s forcing us. Exhaustion, tired, Covid but we’re working. Bugs, glitches, perf fixes. 1 last pass thru audio. 12-15 hr days.This is gaming. Hard work. Lunch, dinner working. U do it cause ya luv it
Less than two hours after he made the tweet, Schofield deleted it following widespread condemnation from online commentators, including developers, players, and journalists. The unsustainability, the pressure from the CEO saying this, and saying it's because you "luv it" were all criticized particularly. This post would seem to establish that the CEO of the company is expecting that you work upwards of over 100 hours a week to get a piece of entertainment out, far more than the traditional 40-hour work week.
Update 3/9 11:02PM:
Following the amount of attention his first tweet got, and subsequent removal of it, Glen Schofield put out a new statement on Twitter:
Anyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about the people I work with. Earlier I tweeted how proud I was of the effort and hours the team was putting in. That was wrong. We value passion and creativity, not long hours. I’m sorry to the team for coming across like this.
What is Crunch, and how is the game industry addressing it?
Crunch culture is a problem for the game industry, with studios like CD Projekt RED and TT Games being prominent examples of it called out in recent years due to unsustainable work pratices.
As the industry matures, there has been far more focus on it in recent years as employees have talked about their work experiences and the costs of the practice, which has been widespread in the industry. We've even seen former crunch-heavy studios like Rockstar and Insomniac Games making concerted efforts to revise their production methods to make working on games more sustainable. Titles like Insomniac's Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and Frogware's Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One have helped foster discussion on how they were made without crunch.
The Callisto Protocol is set to release on December 2nd.