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One hidden reason why games industry has a huge crunch culture is simple. At some point, you're going to throw away a huge chunk of your game, and you have no idea what that will be or how significant it's going to be.
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As a common example, it's more common than you think for the art department to decide that their entire vision is wrong, and to redo every piece of character art in the game.
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Almost every game I've ever worked on has, at some point, had the UI completely thrown out and rebuilt, mostly because everyone gets sick of staring at the same UI scheme for years of development.
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Its almost a rite of passage in MMOs and other online games to discover that technical solutions for servers completely fall apart once you try load testing it with more than ten people.
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I've worked on a couple of projects where the entire RPG has been redone from scratch at the eleventh hour, usually involving reward pacing and 'OMG players are beating the game in 2 hours!' which has huge ripple effects through everything.
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A common problem in Free to Play games is to discover that you have developed a great, fun, interesting and exciting game where no one will ever pay money for ANYTHING. This can result in massive reworkings of huge parts of the game.
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You're constantly getting feedback that's wildy variable This can be feedback from an E3 demo, but can also be feedback from an executive, publisher or money guy or the CEO's nephew (no shit) that suddenly becomes top priority for REASONS.
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Code rot and tech debt can be huge: engineers code something for a prototype or to satisfy the harsh requirements of a milestone or demo, and other engineers (sometimes years later) that that code is unmaintainable or unshippable for a host of reasons.
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People outside the games industry CANNOT POSSIBLY IMAGINE how much time and effort is spent building and rebuilding the 'First Time User Experience' - i.e. first 15 minutes of gameplay. Easily an order of magnitude more effort than any other content.
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On SWTOR, huge swaths of story was written - and VOed! - before we were sure we'd have the tech to support those story beats! When we had to cut systems or content, those stories had to be reworked for the new reality - often without pursuing more VO!
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Games that drift a lot (i.e. are years late) may wake up one day to realize their games look like dogshit compared to newer, more modern games. So you may have to redo that art to be competitive -- which makes late games even later! Bigger problem with realistic art styles.
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Every art director has lots of stories about realizing that every piece of art they've gotten from an outsource house is complete and absolute trash. After cancelling that contract, every piece of that art usually has to be redone.
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And then you get to design iteration - the fact that lots of designs that seem like they walk on water and cure the lepers on paper turn out to suck giant donkey balls when actually implemented. Those have to be redone or replaced.
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All of the above are PRETTY NORMAL actually. Game development is NOT paint by numbers. Fun is subjective, the tech is mindbogglingly complex, and the market conditions you're aiming for are constantly moving. GAME DEVELOPMENT IS HARD.
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All of this is to say, it's easy to shit on production and management. And there ARE lots of production/management fuckups. But I promise you, these are not trivial problems. It's absolutely crushed some of the smartest people I've ever known.
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The flip answer is 'pad the schedule'. And we do. We pad 'em to hell. But there are two problems.
First, it's really hard to defend a schedule where a third of the project is simply defined as 'TBD'.
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First, it's really hard to defend a schedule where a third of the project is simply defined as 'TBD'.
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Different parts of the project will encounter more perfuckery than others. And good luck predicting where the icebergs are. Game development would be easy if we could!
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Coda: I literally could write a book chapter on each tweet of stupidity above, that's how big and stupid each of these problems are.
Also, if you got this far, then follow me, you cowards.
Some responses in another thread. https://twitter.com/ZenOfDesign/status/1340176012093612032?s=20
