A game industry veteran questions Epic's Mike Capps claim that the 40 hour work week and game development are incompatible. Explores possible origins of crunch mentality, the necessity of overtime, and the slow shift from contained periods of crunch to the dreaded never ended crunch known as grind.

I believe recent high profile abuses of crunch have come from two factors. The aforementioned built in mentality that since someone is doing their “dream job” they should be willing to devote most of their waking hours to it, coupled with managers naive exploitation of the fact that few in the industry have ever made an hourly wage. The result is studios (infamously some EA studios) where managers simply expected employees to work nights and weekends as a matter of course, whether the needs of the schedule dictated it was necessary or not. Crunch in these instances becomes known as a grind (also referred to as a death march), which has no end in sight. There’s no discernible schedule, and no date or milestone to meet save for finishing the game. “Grind” is a pretty accurate description, too. The employees on these teams are eventually ground into a fine dust.

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