Bungie has overhauled its policy on overtime. There are no more forced overtime hours at Destiny 2.
Luke Timmins is the Head of Engineering at Bungie and has been with the company for 16 years. He remembers how it used to be. For 18 months, the staff had to push forced overtime to support the launch of Halo 2 in November 2004. Everyone worked 50 hours or more a week for over a year and a half.
Halo 2 almost killed Bungie
The “Crunch,” the overtime, on Halo 2 nearly killed Bungie. It was brutal, Timmins says. He has never seen people work as much as they did back then.
Those who survived Halo 2 and were still at Bungie vowed: “Never again. We will never do this to ourselves again.“
The Crunch you want to have, and the Crunch you have to have
Timmins describes Bungie’s struggle against the Crunch in a talk at the Casual Connect conference. Gamesindustry reported on it.
According to Timmins, there are two types of Crunch:
- the Crunch you want to have because you really want to add a feature
- and the Crunch you have to have because the game must be ready by deadline X
Both types of Crunch are dangerous and can lead to poor outcomes for the company and the individual. Even if the overtime arises out of passion and positive reasons, it is dangerous.
Overtime burns out the company and its personnel, says Timmins. Some even felt guilty when taking a vacation. Managers must ensure that employees can unplug sometimes.
The problem is: once a company has established a culture where overtime is normal, it becomes hard to change. People then either take vacation out of passion or fear.
Bungie was only able to solve the problem when the management was restructured to focus on employees and their well-being. This has a lot to do with “one-on-one” conversations.
Once a week, one can observe how half of Bungie’s staff walks through Bellevue Park in Seattle and talks to each other. Every week, there are these one-on-one meetings between managers and their people. They are mandatory. Only then do employees express how they really feel and do not mumble to their boss, “Everything is okay,” when asked about their well-being.
In these talks, goals are set for the employee. Every six months, they are reviewed by all Bungie managers.
There was still Crunch in the base game Destiny, no more in the DLCs
The fight against Crunch at Bungie was long and hard. With Destiny itself, there were still overtime hours. All DLCs and expansions for Destiny 1 and also Destiny 2 are now created without a full forced Crunch. Bungie is proud of this, also because they now plan and organize better.
With Destiny, mandatory vacations were first introduced because people wanted to push overtime.
Especially the Crunch that developers want to have is a problem that Timmins knows himself: There is always a feature that a designer desperately wants in the game, but it is four months behind schedule and does not fit into the game at all. Timmins experienced this himself with Halo 2: “Before I knew it, I was sitting in the office until 4 a.m. every day and hadn’t seen my wife. Most designers always have an incredibly good idea and things that absolutely need to get into the game.
But then one must have the strength to say: “No, it’s not possible. We can’t do this, and that’s okay.”
“The moment you no longer have that strength, everything falls apart,” says Timmins.
What can happen when Crunch is part of the company’s DNA can be seen in this sad extreme example:
Crunch Time: Young Developer Works Himself to Death – 89 Hour Week
