Scandinavian crunch: Pid developer Might and Delight goes its own way

On January 12, 1914, Henry Ford stopped making his employees work more than eight hours in a day. Twelve years later he made Saturday a resting day, putting a workweek at 40 hours. Before long, his competitors followed suit. It turned out that a shorter workweek made machinists not only more efficient — to the point where they produced more cars than they had before — the workers also stayed with the factory for far longer, meaning less time had to be spent teaching new employees.

A few decades earlier, in Germany, industrialist Ernst Abbé shortened the hours from nine to eight at his optics factories in Jena, and noticed that they produced more microscopes. Thirteen years later, the German-American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg summarized the experiment: "Ernst Abbé, the head of one of the greatest German factories, wrote many years ago that the shortening from nine to eight hours, that is, a cutting-down of more than 10 percent, did not involve a reduction of the day's product, but an increase. [...] This conviction of Abbé still seems to hold true after millions of experiments over the whole globe."

Laborers and unions had already been fighting for an eight-hour workday since the early 1800s, but it's around the early 20th century that we can see some of the first capitalists and factory owners beginning to feel the same way. People like Münsterberg and Ford were no union-sympathizers; to them the 40-hour workweek was just a cynical fact of the human body, a min-max point of production efficiency — if it happened to improve the quality of life for the workers, that was just a side-benefit. These men made their employees work less as a way to increase their profits.

This is the point that some development experts use when they criticize the video game industry's use of crunch. Crunch means overtime — often a lot of it — at the end of a product's schedule to make sure that it is finished on time. In the games industry, crunch is more or less a certainty. In a study from 2009 by the International Game Developers Association, one in two developers said that they experienced crunch either often or very often, and to most of them crunch was a part of the regular work schedule — when it's close to release, it's time to crunch.

Evan Robinson wrote an article for the IDGA in 2005, pointing to the work of people like Ford and Münsterberg and heavily critiquing the use of crunch. "There's a bottom-line reason why most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago," Robinson says. "It's the single most expensive way to get the work done."

Others focus on the human cost. "Crunch is totally damaging, but much more so to the individuals involved," Chris Kruger of Kruger Heavy Industries told Develop in 2010. "An almost failed marriage in my case."

It's often the developers that defend the practice. The same IDGA report that said that half of developers often experience crunch also asked whether respondents agreed that "crunch is a necessary part of development." Developers turned out to be separated — about one in three agreed or strongly agreed, almost half disagreed or strongly disagreed, and the remainder were unsure.

People like Brendan McNamara, the lead of Team Bondi during the production of L.A. Noire, have been loudly defending the position that this kind of overtime is necessary for game development. "If you want to do a nine-to-five job, you [should] be in another business," McNamara said in response to critique of the overtime policies at his company. Rod Fergusson — then a producer at Epic Games — made similar comments. "I am a believer that if you're going to make a great game, and there is that caveat, I believe that crunch is necessary," Fergusson said in a 2009 GDC session. "I believe it's important because it means your ambition is greater than what you scheduled out."

The video games industry seems to be in a slow-moving battle over this. On one side stands the IDGA, firm in its belief that everybody would benefit from an industry that has a more reasonable relationship to overtime. On the other stand managers like McNamara, saying that hours like this brings teams together, and that they fuel the passion necessary to make games.

The kind of overtime that Westin and his team have been through is typical of the places they've worked. The Swedish industry has less of a problem with hard crunches — when mandated overtime exists it comes in small chunks and is well paid. The soft crunch is everywhere, however.

According to Per Strömbäck, spokesperson at Swedish Games Industry, Swedish game developers work overtime because of ambition and loyalty. "Crunch is seen as a good thing among the developers," Strömbäck says. "A lot of our members claim that they more often try to send their employees home than make them work overtime.

Looking back, this was not always the case. "We have had this discussion for many years," Strömbäck says, "and I think it's safe to say that it has given results."

The Swedish games industry started in the mid '90s, which makes it about two decades younger than its American counterpart. Just like in America, stacks of money quickly turned passion projects into companies and basement coders into corporate managers, and it happened much too quickly for any reasonable business culture to develop. Stories from the early days of Swedish game development make it sound like the gentrification of the Wild West. There were battles, and the culture changed as a result of those battles.

In 2004, DICE, the developer that makes the Battlefield series and one of the oldest Swedish game studios, was caught trying to get rid of its local union club. The union members had started to complain over the systematic use of unpaid overtime, and three people were fired. One of them — the chairman of the club, Stefan Eriksson — told the story to Kollega, a union-related magazine. "As soon as our members wanted to get paid for their overtime, the hammer came down hard," Eriksson told Kollega in 2004. "According to the bosses, if you can't handle those hours, you don't belong in this industry. They don't seem to understand that this is a workplace — and workplaces have rules."

After a union organization had leapt in and threaten legal action — DICE was forced to listen. The fired developers all got generous settlements, and DICE was forced from then on to contribute regular funds to its local union club. After the dust had settled a developer at DICE told Kollega that "the climate is much better now" and today EA DICE has signed a "collective bargaining agreement," a formal contract between union and employer that forms a strong protection for the developers.

It’s worth noting that there is no such thing as a "video game developers union" in Sweden. The union organisations that deal with the game industry are all wider in scope, and they deal with several industries. Very few developers are actually personally involved in any union. The largest numbers we heard were at Paradox, makers of Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis IV, where, according to them, about 25-30% of employees are connected to a union.

In an article from July of this year two of the leads at Paradox told Polygon stories of the long crunches that they and their employees waded through in the early days of the studio. These days, Paradox has a reputation for being one of the friendliest companies in Sweden, and Johan Andersson, the current lead of Paradox Interactive, is a strong voice against the practice of crunch. "Overtime just isn't effective in the long run," Andersson says. "This is a creative business and you need to stay sharp to produce; if you work overtime you lose that sharpness. Crunch leaves you with burned out developers, instead of more productive and experienced colleagues."

Susana Meza, PR at Paradox, tells us that up until 2013, less than five people have left that company. Instead of the passion-filled and destructive place it was in 2004, Paradox now seems to be a gathering place for a lot of the most experienced Swedish developer talent.

The examples set by these companies — DICE listening and reacting to the union threats and Paradox reaping the long term benefits of good scheduling — is important. "These kinds of things have a ripple effect throughout the industry," says union ombudsman Hannes Lundholm.

Lundholm is a part of "Unionen," the biggest Swedish private sector union and the one that most often represents game developers. He is the one whom his colleagues point out as the video game development expert.

"There is still a lot of unpaid overtime going on, but overall I'd summarize the conditions at Swedish companies as 'pretty good,'" Lundholm says. "It's a lot like the dotcoms of the late '90s, companies built by enthusiasts that are generally uninterested in unions when they start up. Nowadays, the dotcoms have matured and they contain some of our largest member groups, and as both the developers and the audience are growing up, game culture is growing up as well."

Images: Might and Delight, Capcom, Electronic Arts
Editing: Russ Pitts, Matt Leone
Design / Layout: Warren Schultheis, Matthew Sullivan