Crunching to Death in Games | Games ReCaP

[Music] On August 28th in this past month 2025, a 35year-old Microsoft engineer Petique Pandy was found dead face down at the Mountain View campus in California after a suspected heart attack tied to chronic stress from overwork on Azir projects. His family, including his uncle, issued a public plea to Silicon Valley tech firms to halt excessive hours and monitor workload zoning. He was working late, possibly around 2 a.m. Leading up to this event, to his death. He was complaining his family and friends how stressed he was at work, how he had to work late hours to meet aggressive deadlines. And this has always been a issue, right? I know this is more in Silicon Valley, their close cousin to the game industry, but we're seeing the same problems happening now. The funny thing is that the tech companies went

through a similar, if not more aggressive layoff, strings of layoff before the game industry did. If you guys don't remember, Google, Apple, pretty much everybody in the Seattle area, Bay Area were laying off thousands and thousands of people to cut costs, cut down people. And it wasn't until something like AI started really booming a lot of people back into the Bay Area and a lot of tech basically not regaining a lot of those people that got fired eclipsing previous numbers. All right. AI boom is the biggest thing since the internet. Right. So, we're going to see we're seeing salaries on astronomical proportions. So, hopefully the game industry will see something like that to start to recover from this

crazy layoff cycle that we're going through. I'm mentioning that the game industry is like a shadow of the tech companies. So, it's always great to monitor the tech companies and seeing what's happening there so that we can pivot and be able to react or plan right ahead of time. So, what we're seeing is that at the 10 companies, they're crunching. It's being super competitive. Everyone's holding on to their jobs. And unfortunately, this engineer was so worried about his job security, he felt like he had to push, right? The AI boom is happening. There's a certain level of stability in terms of a lot of engineers. It's becoming like a huge talent surge, super competitive, right? So, a lot of people are pushing their limit right now to take advantage of this AI bubble, right? So, the game industry is going to be very similar. The game industry is

going to find a lot of these people who are lucky enough, especially in a time like this where jobs are limited and the people who are fortunate enough to hold on to a job are still competing with those that are looking for jobs because there's so much talent out there. This is a running theme with game industry is that we're replaceable. So as soon as you slack or you get too comfortable, it's easy enough to cluck you out and put another person in that would work probably at a lesser salary and harder than you. So for those thinking that crunching have subsided, right? I think it's been actually increased because of those reasons. This can be backed by the GDC 2025 stated in industry report uh details that 60% of game developers face mandatory overtime a rise from previous years with AAA studios enforcing on 70% of staff

compared to just 25% in indie studio. This gap widens as investment shrinks post pandemic forcing longer hours to meet live service deadlines. There's lesser developers working at each of these companies. Everyone is clutching onto their purse, being very conservative with their money, right? But the games are getting bigger. The games haven't shrunk, right? Graphic Fidelity is at a greater value every year. And the people who are at these jobs have to make up for the loss of headcount, right? In a way that that you're forced to crunch with lesser people. The job insecurity doubles it down and then encourage you to work harder to maintain that job because all you do is go on LinkedIn and see how your friends don't have jobs and you're just thankful that you have one. It makes a lot of

sense that crunch time have actually increase and it is concerning that it's been a while. Oh, I don't know the last time I heard about someone overworking to the point that they have a heart attack, but it is crazy again that Microsoft just continues to have this ability to top it the headlines in the worst way. And the crazy thing is Microsoft haven't really publicly commented on critique and just waiting for the news cycle to disappear, which I guess it's working, right? Even though another known fact is burnout affects 45% of developers with the GDC report and USC's ethical challenges study linking it to severe health declines. Right? We all know this. heart attacks. Turnover spikes by 30% due to crunch defined by Wikipedia. 65 to 80 hour work weeks over months. Anything over 40 hours is pretty insane, but 65

to 80 hours is standard in terms of overwork. A norm driven by tight schedules for titles like multiplayer updates or rushed releases. It's no secret a lot of these projects are being delayed. Talked about this many times. The dynamic of a team changes with every developer that leaves and now you have lesser people and the milestones and deadlines are the same. The only way to make up for that is crunching. And I think because developers are forced into disadvantaged place to make good decisions, they are expected to put in the extra time to maintain their job and hit those deadlines. Microsoft's broader policy emphasizes work life balance, but no specific response to Panty's death has been issued. like I mentioned before from the website People's Matters in September 25 notes that his tragedy

sparks a reckoning while HR Grapevine Reports call for better support echoing last year's GDC panels advocating predictive planning to cut overtime reliance. [Music] Predictive planning is pretty much you got to keep a team together. Even if you have this the 80 people that is required to make a game work, it really does matter who those 80 people are. Are is it the first time they're working together or is this the second project? So the disruption that we're seeing for all companies is that set of Eddie people is so different and getting someone ramped up getting used to each other's and the remote aspect of that to begin a project. All these are factors that can really disrupt mess up the flow of making a project. So with over 15,000 jobs like I mentioned before cut in this past year,

uh companies like Microsoft push and crunch despite layoffs risk further talent drain. So in the short term, incidents like this can heighten immediate health risks for devs. Everyone's stressed out. Everyone is going to have health problems. the right not just the people who are what's insane is that I'm seeing a lot of people on LinkedIn without jobs and I'm starting to see a lot of them like losing their damn mind with understandably right a lot have not faced this type of pressure where we're used to being laid off but there have always been some kind of hope of rebounding But when you're thrown into this crazy circus of everyone being laid off and not not enough jobs being posted and

every job that is being posted, there's over a thousand applicants, right? There is like a real deep sense of questioning your self-worth and then your families looking towards you for answers and you don't have them. It can really break someone down very quickly. And I'm seeing that a lot. You couple that with people who are at a job facing fatigue, right, with overwork, seeing these crazy amount of work, right? But basically a no hiring policy at this point. All right. It can only increase mental strain, reduce productivity while sparking temporary policy reviews. and will lead to rush releases with bugs which damage reputations of short-term revenue amid increased acetism and moral

dips. So overall it's a bad thing. All right. People are at these jobs overworked health problems trying to ship a game can't ship it on time. Companies are losing money even with great IP, right? Gamers are losing confidence because now they're playing games that cost the same and in some cases more. A lot of these games are being increased to 70 bucks to make up for profits loss, right, because of the delay or whatever. And they're getting buggy games. And we're seeing this with a lot of AAA. So the game industry as a whole is just suffering right now. And it the only way to reinvigorate this issue that we're having is release good games on time in budget and restore the confidence in a lot of these gamers in the long term the next 3 5 years what I see is a lot of devs may seek roles with better boundaries building resilience through

upskilling in the management or shifting to indie work right a lot of people are going to try to move up to be managers the industry could evolve towards regulated hours via unions which is what we're seeing a lot. I know Blizzard, a lot of those the WoW team and many others have became unionized. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out and how much protection they're having, especially in times like this, which I greatly encourage for a lot of these companies to have some kind of stability or a lot of these teams that have stability right now within their companies to take advantage of the fact that these companies are willing enough to hold on to them as talent to give themselves a chance and get unionized while they are still a hot commodity. It's very easy to deny unions when there's like this crazy shakeout that's happening within industry and it could be the one thing that save us like the unions could reduce attrition and setting ethical standards

right which is don't have these knee-jerk reactions from the major corporates who are looking at just the bottom line and firing everybody inadvertably just destroying themselves right because the one thing that is consistent about corporate management is that they don't understand how important for a creative agency, company, whatever group to continue to make successful games is to stick together, right? the core team needs to be the same and they are destabilizing that by getting rid of everyone and thinking that somehow hiring everyone back will get them back on track whenever they want to which is a grave mistake that I think we're feeling right now with all these buggy games and games that are taking longer years ago. Just look at the Assassin Creeds that have been developing. Like this recent Assassin Creed is much worse

than the Assassin Creed from 10 years ago. And that's the same company and it's not the same people that are making these things. If this continues to be unressed, I believe that in the long term it's going to risk further talent drain. If not already, people are looking elsewhere. if not everyone is looking to change up industries, but most importantly having major health crisis, right? Just dying. The main thing that we always hear about when you talk to older people and you ask them like what do they mostly regret, right? Living a full life, right? None of them ever talk about I wish I worked harder, right? That's the common thing that everyone talks about, always hear, but I think not enough consideration and actually taking it seriously.

So, I advise you guys put your health first. And without a healthy mind and body, you're going to have a harder time navigating through this tumultuous time. [Music] [Music]