Naughty Dog Deserves To Spring Leaks Forever (The Jimquisition)

Consent is the issue for me on this matter along with denying retaliation. I am a workaholic, deep down, when I am passionate about my work (even hobbies) I will absolutely obsess about it. Bathroom, cooking, before I go to bed, I am thinking about my work. Thinking about what I need to do to continue it or if I need to fix something. However I also know when I need to stop and decompress. Whether my house has turned into a disaster, or I haven't eaten/drank/slept (or over eaten/drinking/slept). That is where the consent comes in. As a hobbyist I can set my own schedule, I can decide when to stop. When I am at work, I don't have that. I am REQUIRED to do this work. I can't stop if I want to stay in the job. Most of us though need to move on when it comes time to, to stay creatively intact. However as people we more often then not will stay in a job, even one based in abuse, because we feel strongly connected to that thing. It's an identity to say "I work at Microsoft" or "I work at Walmart" or anywhere, even though there are loads of competitors out there who would love to see that person's knowledge and ideas. So they get the ball gag out. And gag you... and it doesn't matter how much you might think about screaming the safety word, you don't. Because you don't want to "fail" and that needs to be addressed. That isn't consent anymore. If you can't say you're out.

If you're planning for a week where everyone has to work overtime you're planning to fail. Just be a responsible human being. Nine months from launch or whatever if you're seeing lots of bugs then you hire extra QA and dedicated clean up coders. For these companies though it's simpler to just abuse the contracted help.

Dinker

Crunch is no doubt a large factor in why AAA games need to have day 1 patches - people under pressure make mistakes.

Pete Spicer

I agree that crunch is usually an issue of mismanagement. It becomes more and more intolerable to hear of studios where weeks or even months of crunch become standard practice, where salaried employees receiving no overtime screw up their sleep cycles and their relationships with their families because someone up the chain got a bug up their butt about a feature in a competitor that they "had" to add in the eleventh hour or because they had a petty power struggle with another leader within the company and decided to salt the ashes of someone else's hard work, cost be damned. If crunch is the *occasional* week towards the end of development that mostly goes toward ironing out bugs (remember when games were released largely bug free, and didn't require hours of patches...?), I can kind of get behind it. I mean, a week of staying up late and eating pizza "in the trenches" could even serve to build up a certain kind of camaraderie, particularly if it comes with a round of much-deserved bonuses. But when crunch is the plan? The "magic" that's supposed to turn a game from a mess to a winner? When it happens with EVERY damn game the studio puts out?... Put on your shades and walk away without looking back, that sucker is exploding. Oh, and also? I think Jim has now officially spent a little too much time in isolation.

Kraken

I joined in on your manic laughter - it felt really good!

Dion Turner

I actually agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, how do you explain the amazing games we've gotten so far... which have come from companies that are infested by crunch? It would seem that the points made by your argument are refuted by actual reality.

Chris Skuller

I think good games are good DESPITE the crunch, not because of it (the EXCEPTION not the norm) . Art will always be better when workers are healthy and time is managed more realistically. We as the audience are being denied great art and entertainment due to harmful crunch. Yes... crunch STIFLES art and creativity. This is why it's so frustrating when customers defend these companies, and assume that crunch is somehow vital to the industry and art. FUCKING NO. Stop that crap.

Jim actually put out a vid on the falsehood of the claim that games need to exceed 60$ (especially when profits are the best they've ever been, partially because of micro transactions) Also, as technology gets better, it's also gets cheaper. This is true for every thing technologically related. And, the warning that games must be more expensive if humans are to be treated better is propeganda from the mouths of exploitative CEOs

I love how deliciously anti-corrupt-capitalism Jim is becoming. I also hope everyone knows that management abuses and exploitation are festering in the foundations of every damn business. Shit is getting bad... Unmanageable and unsustainable. Shit is going to boil over soon in the world economy, and we have to stand up for ourselves and each other (it's the only way things will ever get better)

This is very simple. If you have to work 60h in a week because of a spike, fine. It sucks but fine. If you regularly push 60h and that becomes a systemic problem, it means there should be 2 people working. This is true in every company and it has to become the culture. Might games be more expensive? Probably. Is the last of us 2 worth 80$? Probably.

Benedict Holland

The sad part is some people really do want to work that hard even if people specifically tell them not to do so, it's a big problem in many industries in Japan. If there's one silver lining to the pandemic, it's that we'll definitely see more people being able to work from home and not have to spend all day in the office.

RedBedroomRecords

Not to mention with the pandemic going on people desperately want an escape from the real-world tragedy unfolding, so the vast majority of them just won't have the energy to be angry at ND, especially not over something that already happened months ago. I personally think it's silly to try and "boycott" any piece of media in this day and age(unless it's Faux News of course) and Jim himself has said so several times in the past. Boycotts aren't helping the devs any(hell Rockstar devs were begging people NOT to boycott RDR2 on twitter because their bonuses were tied to game sales)I personally have a better idea-just buy the games used, that way you still get to enjoy them without any of the money going to the publisher.

RedBedroomRecords

Yes if i've learned anything from this pandemic, it's that pretty much every line of work that has you working for other people sucks in one way or another.

RedBedroomRecords

Correction on one thing, the whole game has most definitely not been leaked yet nor has the entire plot, as we still don't know how the game ends nor how a lot of these scenes connect to one another, so saying that the whole plot has been spoiled is a bit inaccurate and slightly misleading IMO. Anyways the game personally hasn't been spoiled for me, with the pandemic going on I honestly just don't have the energy to be angry at ND right now, i'm sure they will change for the better, if Rockstar can do it so can they. I don't think Jason deserved that dig though, his book "Blood, Sweat and Pixels" makes it very clear he does care about devs a lot, but he is also right that the game being leaked helps absolutely nobody and unfortunately it's pretty much impossible to hurt ND without the devs getting caught up in the crossfire, that's just the sad reality. Yeah crunch is bad and a failure of management, but there's no undoing the process that went into the game at this point and not playing the game I feel would be devaluing the devs even more then they already were by management(I remember Rockstar devs going on Twitter and begging people not to boycott RDR2 because their bonuses were tied to game sales), besides many LGBTQ folks who are looking forward to playing the very first AAA game with a gay protagonist shouldn't be put in the unfair position of being asked to not play something that means a lot to them. For many of them that will easily dwarf all the behind-the-scenes stuff. I'm personally still more excited about this game then any other game I can think of in my entire history of gaming, if anything the leaks only peaked my interest even more now that I know ND is taking some serious risks with the sequel and not just retreading old ground. I wish I could just fast forward to June 19th and have it be out already! On a sidenote it sucks that Youtubers just talking about the leaks are getting copyright strikes from Sony, that seems like a massive overreach on their part(and that might be worth doing a separate "industry bullshit" video on) and I totally get why Angry Joe was pissed about that(though i'm a bit dissapointed he believed that laughably fake 4chan leak was the real thing, hopefully he got my PM about the real leaks). Messages like these from the devs make me determined to buy the game day one to support them, besides they badly need during these uncertain times(sorry couldn't resist saying that LOL):https://twitter.com/EHillGameDesign/status/1255076488967188480?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1255076488967188480&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs9e.github.io%2Fiframe%2F2%2Ftwitter.min.html%231255076488967188480

RedBedroomRecords

I work in a creative field. I adore the work itself but the way in which employers (not just giant companies but even small agencies) actually brag about using your passion for the craft to get you to work absurd amounts of hours for pretty shitty pay is deplorable and makes me already hate the industry I'm only just starting in. I have no patience for the "crunch is necessary" argument. It's never necessary. It's the result of bad management and toxic work culture. If your employees wont go home unless you tell them to, you tell them. But the amount of times I've seen people be expected to spend 14 hours at the office because "we're a family and you can nap on the couch or make yourself dinner in the kitchen if you have to" tells me that no matter how small, most businesses love exploiting creative passion to much to give a shit about people's work-life-balance. And the great thing is that when you fight back, you'll often get semi-blacklisted through word of mouth. Screw those damn rifles!

Lea Chinelo

This may be interesting in light of your video as it kinda supports your points about Crunch: https://youtu.be/QuUXN-O2bvY?t=5519 The CEOs of both Remedy and Colossal Order (City Skylines) talk about Crunch and how they try to avoid it. I found interesting that they seemingly agreed with Crunch being the worst and admitted, that they had to actively force their employees to go home at times because (a) their employees are passionate and (b) finnish labour laws will kick the companies asses. Of course this is the CEOs talking and we don't know how it looks like from the inside, but I found the clear statement that "Crunch is bad because people suffer and we have to adhere to labour laws" quite refreshing. Great Video as always!

As much as I'd love for companies to be more responsible, I'd very much prefer if there were more governmental regulation of workers' rights forcing them to be responsible. Because lasting and wide-spread change would be much more easily achievable if it's founded in law rather than public shaming (as deserved as it may be). It would also help every other industry, all of which are in the same situation, just to a lesser extent for the most part. Of course those are socialist thoughts, which makes me very obviously evil. But that should have been obvious from the second I started bringing politics into a video game discussion: :x

Hansbert Emmer

As long as the public is buried in FOMO, and thus ravenously buys every video game that comes out ever, companies have no real reason to stop being abusive jackholes. It's why I pretty much gave up on well.... every video game company out there. I buy a very, very few games every year. And they never come from any big companies or famous names in the industry.

Trevor Bond