The Wolf Among Us 2 was slated to be released in 2023, but developer 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Telltale Games has 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:announced another delay for the highly anticipated sequel. Switching to Unreal Engine 5 to implement newer, more interesting features has resu🐷lted in Telltale having to redo much t⛄hat was previously done. Telltale also faced difficulties rebuilding the company and hiring new staff during the pandemic as it tried to grow back into the studio it once was.
While some developers may have chosen to overwork employees in order to meet their deadlines, Telltale Games made the wise d❀ecision to postpone the release and not subject its employees to a vicious crunch cycle. This is a very low bar to clear when it comes to maintaining a decent working environment that doesn’t drive droves of developers to quit, yet big companies seem unable to do even this simple thing.
"It doesn't do any of us any good to ship something that's not ready," Jamie Ottilie, CEO of Telltale Games, said. He also said that it’s “not fair” to ask his newly hired staff to crunch, and he has concerns about “maintaining a healthy work culture”, and that, “As an industry […] we just have to stop doing it and make better choices.” Valid, and good advice for all industries! I promise nobody will die if you have to take a little longer to work on a game so it’s actually playable.
Telltale isn’t the first company to take a stand against crunch – Embracer Group put out a video last year🍨 ༺titled ‘Why Crunch Has To Die’ that put the same point across. That hasn’t stopped controversies about big developers enforcing crunch periods. Activision has, apparently, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:been incentivising overtime with bonuses in the form of shares, and DoorDash credits for any developer who works more than ten hours a day. Striking Distance had staff 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:working six to seven days a week at the tail-end of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Callisto Protocol’s development, just to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:create a sub-par product.
It’s obvious why studios do this – money. It always frustrates me that studios would rather release a buggy game with performance issues than spend more time working out the kinks. They’d also rather overwork their developers, create a toxic work environment and destroy any semblance 💟of work-life balance than delay a release date. Who does this help? Players get a worse product and end up having to wait for patches anyway, studios get roasted online for releasing a game that barely works, and developers end up having to work even more overtimꦺe to fix something that didn’t have to be broken in the first place.
My god, just delay your game release. It’s that, or wo❀rk your employees to the bone, which apart from being horribly unethical, is a great way to see employee retention plummet like a stone. Here’s hoping that in 2023, we get more worker power and employers who treat their employees like people, not game-making robots. It’s better for us all that way.