LET'S KILL CRUNCH

Meet the game makers determined to stop development from ruining lives.

- Jeremy Peel

The games industry never stood a chance. Raphael van Lierop, narrative director of Far Cry 3, believes the medium inherited crunch from its parent industries – the expectation of overwork baked into software and filmmaking long before a programmer first managed to steer a pixel across a screen. By the time van Lierop joined a game studio in the early 2000s, burnout was considered best practice.

“We didn’t at all associate these things with poor management or poor planning practices,” van Lierop says. “We believed crunch was a necessary prerequisite to creating something exceptional.”

It was only after a dozen years of 70 to 80 hour weeks, as van Lierop found himself putting his kids to bed only to turn around and drive back to the office, that he recognised an unhealthy spiral. “I recall a night in particular during a really heavy crunch period, my wife looking over my shoulder and reflecting that she didn’t understand why I was making so many personal sacrifices for something that didn’t feel that much like ‘me,’” he says. “I realised I’d never stopped to ask myself if this was something I’d wanted. Shortly after that game shipped I decided that I would never go back to another AAA studio, and Hinterland was largely born from that decision.”

Hinterland, which develops top-rated Steam survival game The Long Dark, is part of a new wave of studios dedicated to ending crunch. Though divided by continents, cultures and genres, they face shared problems – and offer a glimmer of hope that the rest of the industry can one day find similar solutions.

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