Crunching with CD Projekt Red on Cyberpunk 2077 | Roundtable News | Episode 239

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this game dev unchained is back at it again with your favorite host brandon pham i said that already with our unofficial second host ray graham how are you doing ray how are you doing what's up man i'm doing good and all right so if you haven't read the title uh this is a roundtable news episode where once a month i get together with my good friend over here and kind of giggle about the game industry uh on how well it's doing how badly it's doing uh the good and bad of it all so without further ado let's uh jump right into well before we do i always like to update with you it's becoming kind of um routine now uh how are you doing over there is everything we we've gotten through the blade runner fires we're still trucking along with the

pandemic uh how are things late it's funny the blade that's only one day it's only one day of like the the orange mars looking uh smoke outside uh but no yeah i'm hanging in i'm doing fine hanging in there um yeah i it's getting old at this point but we are still here and we're still trucking along and we still have jobs so that's that's not that's i think that's good yeah that's definitely from a privilege perspective over there in the bay area the tech job uh it's definitely safer than most most of the world that's going through do you have any crazy upside hopes before this year ends do you feel like it's going to be more of the same no crazy vaccine are you in any of that camp no there's some news about a vaccine that they had to pause some trials um because somebody got sick who was part of the trials that was on the news today

uh but yeah i don't really expect anything to happen until next year honestly yeah sucks man always the bringer of bad news without without further ado good plan still looks good [Music] fancy transitions yo well it's around it's around that time time of the year uh crazy enough haven't heard too many crunch stories uh maybe it's just well hidden people are just so worried about just keeping jobs but cd read especially your cd projekt red uh last year uh were confident in saying that they weren't gonna crunch and they weren't going to do any of that shenanigan and they're changing the air of their ways almost to exactly around crunch time when usually a triple a project does crunch they completely forgotten what they just

said so um there's so many ways to look at this of course you know they were battling uh bad press at the time uh and they're trying to kind of eliminate a lot of what they're saying by by uh saying that they're paying for overtime right and jason trier the always get the guy who's always breaking balls in the industry uh pretty much said no that's not true these guys were not talked to they weren't given the respect uh the time of day that the that they're sharing these news in the public and pretty much are just crunching like any other game studio too madly to their ships to a game that you yourself are looking forward to so as a fan of this game what do you say about all this man i mean how many how many six day weeks have you pulled brandon in your career after a certain point i

stopped yeah no not even like i i think the last time i was crunching like that i actually pulled it back to six to eight weeks because they were actually talking about doing seven day weeks and i was like i was like nah i need i need at least one day to break that work that i'm not working to chill and relax before i start working again um and i seem to remember that you were working with me on that project so now people could put one and two together and figure out which one it is but uh but yeah that's that's pretty much the last time i was crunching pretty crazy you know and and it's it happens you know like like sometimes things are not planned well or or the things come up and you need that final push right and it happens and and it sucks that yeah they did say oh yeah yeah we're not gonna crunch the cd project right is actually known for that and known for some bad practices from the witcher 3 game yeah um and so they try to say they're going to do something different

this time around but you know they're making very big and complex games uh it was getting down to the wire game has already been delayed kovid is on top of that um so i imagine there was a lot of stress you know like and i can't as much as i don't want crunch to happen and uh and we need to do something about it um i don't want a single lcd cd project red because it happens everywhere happens all over the industry on you do you think right now all the games are coming out on xbox series x and playstation 5. do you think those those devs are just at home chilling right now enjoying yeah i mean a nice nice cold drink that's important note to say man like uh yeah i think i think a lot there's a lot of red pairing going on where the industry is like suspiciously really quiet on layoffs and crunch uh and i think directly we know that our

friends are crunching and uh very scared about layoffs because this year has not been very good for them um i think this year's been great for video games it's been great for video i think we kind of talked about this right it's great for video games that have been out but games that are were supposed to be out later this year have i don't know man a good percentage of the people i talked to have been delaying vertical slices uh milestones way more than like everything's fine we're right on track and again this makes sense with the amount of parents who are teachers at the same time and people who aren't used to working from home suddenly having to set up a home office in their bathroom right because they never really suddenly they have to upgrade their like eight-year-old computer uh which was bizarre to me to kind of hear like there seems to be more people with like crappy computers

who are professional game devs like ourselves that are just having shitty computers i didn't know that but that seems to be mostly the case um and all that kind of is piling up and in more cases than not game developers are having a lot of problems um just hitting deadlines and milestones and um in result a lot of games are being pushed back i do want you to help me settle with this debate like i've always in the like there was a certain time in a period where like i mentioned before where i said no no more no more crunching and that's it right um and was we're pretty much safely respected in that way um and never really been like wagged down with the finger from management saying that you got to do what we say right um is that true do you feel overall or do you feel people really don't have a choice in in having to stay over time and like if for some reason they do their work

in that allotted 40-hour week uh do you feel like these developers have a choice in saying no or yes anymore or is it just i was in a small percentage here i mean i think you always have a choice and i think in california especially like i think you always have a choice but there's also a lot of external factors like oh i feel like i'm the team down or or everybody else is working hard why am i going home right now am i not a part of the team right so there's a lot of external forces that make you say yeah what are what more can you be doing yeah i don't do it in order like guilt man i just washed that guilt with a cold shower i did and a nice hot dinner by six o'clock like it doesn't hurt me anymore like i know there's always the uh wandering guilt eyes right that that people give you when you walk out

at 6 p.m like at a regular time yeah at a certain point in my career i just stopped didn't worry i'll see you tomorrow man should have got your work done see it but like it's it's that right like and i think there's a difference between crunching where somebody comes and tells you oh hey we're doing six six day weeks or seven day weeks four months and and you saying what more can i shove into this game to make this game awesome you know what i mean uh and i think that those those are different and they should be considered different i i personally believe in uh i don't believe even if what more can i shove into this game you're probably also shoving in more bugs yeah you're probably also hurting your health like even though your game may be awesome like you are you are doing damage to yourself into your life and so maybe that's not the right thing but but i do think

that's a personal decision that you're making right versus management telling you hey it's time it's time to do six day six to eight weeks okay yeah well so let's go over the facts with cd uh project red in particular right so the company a way to kind of fight back a lot of this bad press again because they went back on their word uh they announced that they would be giving ten percent of revenues to employees as extra crunch bonuses right uh that kind of got torn apart uh shortly after um you know we were going through a lot of these tweets uh from developers but also a lot of from jason schreier talking to these guys privately of course uh a quote such as last week's weeks were our final sprint and this is kind of like the public facing version of this and this one they said hey as part of these hard decisions we're gonna be in recent years giving ten percent of annual profit uh as our company generates in 22 will be split directly to the team and then uh jason schreier replied directly last year the bosses of

the project approached me for an interview they wanted to announce the cyberpunk 27 they would be avoiding mandatory crunch this week to send out an email the staff announced the studio one minute okay so that's that's the beginning of that story right but like um when we go into the tweets and it's all super crazy i didn't read every single one of this long ass thread man but this is where twitter is so effective uh in in having conversations with people but uh it got into the nitty gritty of things and in some cases like he was talking to a lot of anonymous people they were looking at 12 to 15 hour days five days a week sometimes saturdays are mandatory uh but on these days i'm pissed off but i have to remember i'm the one who asked them for a job plus the money some people are kind of like defending uh cd projekt red which is yeah you know the case is here i i think also i think when you've crunched in the past in some places you do get compensated sometimes um not

just through bonuses like here's the thing we know that uh we know that cyberpunk is gonna make some money so if they're gonna give folks ten percent profit and share that much team hey that might be that might be worth it um all the work that you did over these years maybe you're right yes i i don't see that game not selling right but then another situation sometimes you know the game ships goes gold and you're gone for a month or you're gone for a couple weeks um to make up for all the extra time that you put in of course it doesn't really make up for it but um but it kind of offsets it offsets some of that damage right when you get yeah okay i'm i'm working but i've always worked for for a month like let me just chill out and relax now then yeah like uh let me tear off your arm and give you some of it back i mean yeah the same argument can be said about that yeah i mean if we're talking but if we're talking profit share on cyberpunk 2077 like i don't think any of those devs are

going to be crying about it yeah i think it's one of those things where come bonus time they're not going to cry about it yeah but look at the incentive though like when you said incentive like that it's a one-and-done type of thing of course people in that area probably don't have a lot of studio choices to go to besides cd projekt red you know they're very popular in that region right and are the only one that has that amount of uh flexing that it can do right and command over developers nearby but like you're essentially setting up a an incentive to stay just long enough um like in my personal uh story right you know i've worked on big franchises with mega game of you know top selling game of the year right and supposed to be these life-changing moments um but even with that it's more like hey i'm just going to do one more and i'm out it like precedes the exit plan no one wants to keep doing this over and over right

uh it's a lot of the reasons why even naughty dog pumped out these masterpieces these games are epic and they know it's gonna be of quality when it is out but those crunch time just turns people out to a point where one or two games and you're done so the it's it's the old old factory logic where like you you squeeze the juice out of someone's talent just enough and you recycle younger talent into into its place right and it it never seems to be like a long-term deal with with talent right and i think i think it's one of those like um it's hard to kind of see the big picture right a lot of these developers they look at one to two projects uh and and then they don't look past that right uh and they don't really pay attention to the older talent that's making an exit and so

i i feel in the long term for a company the quality of games can go down right so cd projekt of course we know we we know that 27.7 is probably going to be a good game everyone's looking forward to it um and it's hard to make that other side of the argument because games like them like rockstar like naughty dog seems to be continuously pumping out these games with new completely new teams at some point right so i'm asking i'm throwing this question over to you it's like will that formula never stop working to the point where they take a pause because it is kind of in a way seems to be working for them where they're taking that chance and opportunity for new talent to be cheaper and more refreshed to take on the next challenge what do you think yeah like i don't i don't know i don't know is that what

they're doing i have no idea just talk just talk to any rock star people man uh it feels like not a lot of people stay past two games at most right or three yeah yeah but i i think that only works as long as you continue to make games that everybody wants to work on yeah right and so you're making these these big titles that uh everybody wants to work on and so you can continue to churn through people because you're like hey i we know that if we turn to these people there's there's like people in line that would just die for the opportunity to work for us you know i think i think you could say that about naughty dog you say that about rock star you could probably say that about cd projekt red um where they know oh i want to work on this game and that this game is going to be the game that will suck all the oxygen out of the room whenever it releases and i could say that hey it's on my resume i worked on it um and then your resume looks great now because you have one of those or two of

those games on under your belt right um i think it's a huge advantage for for game develop to say hey i've done a rockstar game where i worked on a naughty dog game you could work anywhere else after that yeah you will you will get a job anywhere else after that um so it's good for them and the companies is always going to make these and but it's kind of weird now because the company's in that position now where it has enough money to take enough as much as much time as they needs to make a game that will sell and succeed mm-hmm right and and and through that they also churn through talent and and and jam even more and then what the team sizes can't do but yeah they still end up being successful and then they also have all the money behind them for the marketing because the market is a big part of it too right and so now and then when they were game releases that's the only game you're ever going to hear about during that time and so now you get more sales

that way too um like it's the game would have to be a real big flop for it not to sell you know what i mean because people are going to pre-order be ready and be lined up for it um so yeah so it works like but i don't i don't i don't know if it's if it's a purposeful thing but i just think this is how it it works you know uh because of the the pedigree of those games so do you think there's ever going to be a change in that and is this just how our industry is going to continuously to work because it seems to be no one's challenging it uh like even jason schroer and all these people are always pissed and then this when the game comes out everyone forgets about it and just say game of the year stuff well yeah jason's the same website that jason works for will cover that game yeah celebrated yeah they'll celebrate their podcasts but they also they'll also have some articles that will talk about

crunch and what's wrong with it but it will it will be overshadowed by all the countless articles they're going to write about how good the game is right yeah or every not even how good it is but every aspect of the game and and they're going to break it down and talk about it for weeks and weeks and weeks and that's all you're ever going to hear about they're going to be the same that's that's the exact same website that will do that uh so you know like you know why they have to do that because they have to get people to click on their articles and they gotta get the money so that's exactly why they're gonna do that right well i'll explain my struggle recently i finally am like digging back in my steam library and playing through it right so i i popped open finally red dead two haven't played it right just been oh wow yeah i'm way back and like that the internal struggle of a game developer and the game i was like wow i don't see how they could have made this game without [Laughter] you know what i mean this is this is no way like it took me eight years to make this masterpiece of a game right and i'm like

it would have taken them like pretty much like a full 12 year cycle or more at normal time yeah the crazy crazy thing about that is that i hear about their tooling and their in the process of building the game yeah and i'm like oh like man that sounds miserable like like the the tools are bad oh like the actual actual engine and editor and all that yeah yeah yeah the tools are bad i can't even imagine that yeah and then and then the result that you see is like so amazing and you're just like wow those guys were like suffering for years and that's another thing man that's crazy too like you would like an open world game so i made you know a lot of single-player games with bad tools and it feels like it takes forever an open world game like red dead 2 with bad tools you know like it would have saved them years just those like itty bitty programs opening up all the time every time everything i would i would believe so right but like but then they can't like

it's kind it's the same thing i was talking about before it's like they're still successful they still make a whole bunch of money uh yeah the game probably took two years longer than it really should have if it had really nice streamlined tools that were built for iteration and artist artist iteration but you know who cares if the end result is the end result right yeah um and that's that's kind of what i marvel at because you know i worked on teams with bad tools and then people were just like oh these tools are bad like i don't want to iterate i don't want to do this yeah and then you then you look at red dead redemption there's this clearly really really well polished yeah super well and then you hear the stories of how bad the tools are you're like oh man how bad the tools were how bad people were treated how how much people would burn out from the cycle and yeah yeah and that's why man that's why they were just uh it seems like the industry will always have this problem jason schrei will always be employed writing these like expose articles uh it hasn't really changed like even with the

up war i mean i would say this like last two three years is all definitely a lot more article i think there's a lot more knowledge about crunching in our industry well with regular gamers it seems to be a lot more coverage about this yeah but in terms of change like uh i mean i think people are more careful about how they talk about it in public but internally you know they're still doing things like i'm just reading this thread it's like people are you know they're still doing six days a week it's pulling and they're gonna keep doing what they need to do to finish the game like it's not changing anything but uh but them being scared of bad press i mean there's really nothing internal and until they start caring about what the real reason is for developers health and and benefits right it really doesn't matter you know they're addressing it for other reasons because it's only temporary right right but i'm always struggling with this because it's hard because it's

an entertainment creative endeavor it's always going to have last minute changes the deadline will always stay the same and it's part of creative human nature to always try to squeeze whatever you can to the last minute all right so even if they had these great tools at red dead they would have tried to make up that time with other things that they kind of left on the cutting floor right you people have to come back they'll put more things in for sure yeah yeah people have to think about like of all the things they put in red did there's so much more they didn't put in because of time or quality or polish right um they just had to go with what was there i don't know man it's just it just seems like it's just a definite manny if you're in the industry he's going to have to crunch no one's going to be there to protect you except for yourself if you're like really yeah i think that's what it comes down to you have to protect yourself i i think like i said i think there's a difference if somebody's telling you you have to

stay here at work or we're gonna do mandatory six to eight weeks and you don't show up you only show five day weeks and then people all give you side eye and you're getting talking to about it i think that's a problem yeah right but if it's if it's like oh no we're all in this together and i'm gonna do extra work because i want x feature to get in the game because it's gonna make the game awesome i can't stop you from making that choice for yourself right yeah and and then and then there's the gray area in between where it's like i'm going to do that because i feel that is what is expected of me yeah it's that you you know that sucks yeah i think it's i think it's hard i think it's hard right and especially and then new york at a company where where has a legacy of making great games like you have to live up to that legacy so that's extra that's extra pressure on you right um i think it's possible to make games that great without crunching it without doing all this and properly planning it out um [Music] they exist they're out there they've

actually been made uh i know they exist i know indie level maybe but like yeah yeah i'm trying to think of triple a big project that hasn't been and we know that yeah and we know that uh working those crazy hours is not good for you so it's not really good for your productivity is that really good for the game not good for your family and all that stuff yeah yeah but we know that there's studies on that it doesn't make you more productive like if you have more rest you'd be more productive but the game will just take longer it costs more yeah um and it's it's that choice you have to make right it's the it's the hidden hidden agenda that kills you as a developer right i mean i'm probably always gonna be like if i don't wanna crunch i won't crunch and there's really nothing on management that can do legally right if you're in like a comfortable country like the usa i don't know how poland is it's i think it's like [ __ ] you but like

it's actually not true right like in california in california it's uh it's employment at will yeah right so they can fire you for any reason sure it's a bad look though i don't think uh right so it's very hard to like force them in the crunch they say no they're gonna have to find other ways to get you and i think it's the other ways that kind of swipe at you that uh is a thing of concern right so even if you like you know uh stand up for yourself and say hey i'm no i'm not crunching i'll be here tomorrow i'll see ya yeah first and maybe for the remainder of the game development of that project you'll be fine but they're gonna try to swipe you through uh yearly reviews right saying that you're not a team player they they ding you on salary increases they ding you on bonuses they do whatever they can yeah they may they may like still still pay you and and give you a raise and all that

but you best believe whatever whatever discretionary bonus you're going to get for that game you work oh yeah it's gone yeah you're not again you're not getting a big piece right better or promotional opportunities that your your peers are going to get a better chance than you so they these are ways that like management trying to get at you if you kind of push back and it's very very much hidden agenda stuff yeah yeah i'll tell the story about what happened to me one time this is like i won't mention a couple years of people or anything like that between me and you man it's fine i'll let you figure that out i'll figure it out um all right everyone pull on ray's resume linkedin right now we'll go through it together we'll figure it out no but i was you know working on a team we're trying to figure out um the the discretionary bonus for for the team oh [ __ ] you're part of that dude see i've never been at that echelon level

where you get to decide as a lead where the piece of pie goes all right let's give you some glimpse here i was i was trying to get my team a lot of the pie because i'm like we're on schedule we're on track everything's getting done we're engineers we're good we're good so we should be getting hooked up yeah and after i got back was like oh well no your team doesn't really crunch are your team's not here on the weekends there's other teams here that are always here on the weekends and stuff and i was like yeah because we're on time we're on top see that's the biggest thing man yeah and then i was like i was like so how how do you reward that and the answer was the answer was which i thought was hilarious was we reward that because you get to go home that's your reward you get to go home and spend time with your family and i was like oh okay like that's that's messed up but um right

that's the end right all right that's attitude right like you're gonna leave oh okay so you don't need this you don't need this bonus money the people that here all the time need that bonus money because they need to be rewarded for the time they put in even though maybe the time they're putting is because they didn't plan did it execute or not on top of it right like maybe if that's the reason why why do you get why do you reward that um why do you reward uh yeah last place it's what i see this is yeah that's essentially it yeah yeah that kind of stuck with me because i'm like okay so doing a good job it's not really being rewarded you know doing your work on time no you're doing exactly what you're supposed to do yeah you didn't put the extra like that you just confirmed like 99 of uh of the grunts out there their suspicion of how the system works you just completely unveiled

i mean this is a one this is just one anecdotal um sure but that that's the feeling you know you know as a grunt myself i've been in those positions where you can see how they are overly complementary of people who are staying later and this is the this is the effed up thing about this whole mentality of staying later is better right i was at a place where i'm always an early bird i come in like at seven even earlier if they let me and try to finish out by four or five if they let me do my eight hours in or nine even uh try not to leave before five if i have to get my [ __ ] done and i'm out right and of course the guy who comes in at 12 p.m and stays at eight looks like the harder worker therefore is rewarded right because somebody nobody it's a game dev studio ain't nobody there at seven o'clock in the morning ain't nobody there that early

but just that look the appearances of stainless and it's just i don't know what it is maybe it's just from college years uh whatever that mentality is from it kind of stuck with the industry and always has been and all it will be where if you're out before the sun is down somehow you're a bad worker somehow you're not a team player no matter how good you are if it was if it was summertime that's that's a long time you're waiting for the sun to go down but yeah exactly right so i i've tested this theory man i've done i'm done the reverse i showed up later i stayed later and in some cases you know less than eight hours but i'm out at seven p.m and suddenly wow that brandon guy is really pushing it hard this week man you see him he's out there he's crunching therefore it's such a backward way of rewarding people and just what you said nancy

like i'm getting my stuff on time and like i i think i've talked to renato a bunch of times about this where he's like the guy who's staying late means he's not efficient i mean that's the only reason why he's late uh and the reason why he's he could also he could also be pretty bad and she'd be also overwhelmed sure sure but there's inefficiency in that methodology right there but somehow that in-game industry is just so highly rewarded and uh and again that lifestyle is kind of more towards single people right uh towards younger people it's a demographic that's carved out to work like that and uh that's that's why we want to recycle the old all the time and bring in the new um and i don't think that's gonna change the games are getting better bigger next gen i don't know if you've seen all the consoles uh it's gonna require bigger teams more resources

uh expectation i would say is like 5x uh in terms of quality or here's here's the thing is if game dev companies are smart it's really yes the demands are getting higher the asset you know demand on asset and content is getting higher you need to figure out a way to to generate that content cheaply yeah and i and i don't mean outsourcing i mean like procedural tools better tooling better iteration so that you can generate a ton of stuff really quickly and then when you want to hand craft and make something great he's focused on that one little thing but then you have all this other content that is just generated uh procedurally it really put effort and um behind that you know and so and some companies are doing that some companies are really thinking about that like um uh what will call it uh ooby with like i'm sure they're doing some some procedural things with these they're open worlds

yeah they probably are figuring procedural generation has been like a huge buzzword especially from the environment art field like people's yeah i feel like two three companies in the last five years that i've been at first thing that pops up in our first meeting is like all right how do we procedurally uh generate environments uh at will where level designers can just put it together like lego brock's like hold on man you can't just do but the way whatever yeah yeah i guess it gets a bad rap right but there's different levels there's different levels of doing it but it requires like a freaking gta studio that's done open world correctly before to take that extra step to find the shortcuts you know i mean i feel like there's a missing step in between that understands the pipeline of how that works i'll definitely say horizons eurodon did again did a good example of this where i don't know if you've seen the gdc presentation where they did they talked about their vegetation on the

terrain right um you look at that game the vegetation is very varied and there's a lot of cool stuff right um do you think an artist went in there and hand placed every tree hell no like they just say in this area i want this type of tree at this kind of density like show me what that looks like and and they relinquish some of the artistic control uh and then the computer generates what the thing is supposed to look like because there's no way you can generate all of that data by hand it's just impossible right that's right that's that is that developer that was definitely the first time they did a game of that size right that's the size yeah i mean that's the first time they did an open world game they're mostly single player from killzone yeah let's say mostly killzone right yeah is there another big game that they made before killzone maybe but it's mostly it's mostly killzone games i i know them for yeah mostly kill zone games yeah so i

mean they came from a very singular narrative type of game like halo-ish with multiplayer and they went to horizon zero dawn right and but the the thing is they've always been technology advanced even for single player game they're like always ahead of the curve of what's hot i'm talking about those i'm talking about the studios are like first game out of the gate they're trying to like re rev revolutionize the way we make environments uh at first go with the new team with all the problems that comes with creating a new studio and a new team it's like come on man hold on man let's make let's make that let's make limbo or something like easy first let's make sure we can make a yeah a simple game like uh look that those are the problem problematic studios that are always coming into these new generations with tons of ideas and basically zero experience and execution right always a disaster never works out um

and rarely the what no man's sky like a studio like no man's sky like figures it out but you know like like many right wow took a while to figure it out took them a while exactly they became an experienced developer first and then they were able to promise this open world procedurally gender that's what i mean man that's the step you gotta [ __ ] up a few times first uh as a team before you get to this revolution and i'm not opposed to it man i'm not like uh because the problem especially an environment artist is facing right now isn't about their jobs being replaced by outsourcing or any of that it's really like hey you're one guy now i expect you to do 10 guys work right and expect the same type of quality right that's the problem this gen next gen that that's the same type of quality they want better quality better quality right yeah so that that's a fine problem that means you're super employed if you're tech savvy and you can figure this out and you're adaptable right um i've also seen these type of games

going the opposite direction we're not they're not asking for bigger teams they know that's an impossible route it's not affordable they're actually gotten smaller the core team at least uh on these triple a games have gotten to 100 person type a little bit more uh but like they are looking at co-development outsourcing studios to help with the grunt work or procedural generation uh generating solutions right that's what quad bolts or both right yeah they're not looking to grow what was a three hundred to six hundred they know it's not sustainable the game if anything uh they haven't announced it to be more than sixty dollars is it still sixty dollars for ps5 right or is it seventy dollars no yeah yep so it's it seems like it's gonna be seventy dollars right that's not much right that's not much anyways but it is it should be um so yeah

with those problems crunching is still being a thing i think that's what we started off with um the the mindset of management is much worse i think um i think they're more cautious because of bad press but in reality i don't think bad press is doing anything to change how they operate they just have to do a nice tweet or just hold on long enough for the game to come out like the only thing cyberpunk needs to worry about about all this crunching is making damn sure the crunching is paying it off like they say it would right the game has to be damn good well they announced yeah they announced gold the game has gone gold and yes and yes all eyes are on that game right like it has to it has to come out and knock it out of the park people forget about the crunching right yeah torches and pitchforks will be out if they made all these crunch get this bad press it came out and it sucks yeah

the only the only other way for to really make a splash and make a change would be for everybody that's gonna buy the game to just not buy the game right and like we know that guys that's not gonna happen right so yeah i i mean like these roundtable discussions are i think every few times we we would talk about a crunch story but i'm starting to get tired of talking just because of the fact that it doesn't really change anything we complain about how it's unright but like is the conversation needing to be have any had anymore i mean what's the point i don't feel like there's a point no i mean there's some teams out there that are trying to do do it the right way and not crunch probably plan out i would go the extra mile and say all teams if they have to crunch they push they push the date you know like and and i i i've seen this happen right but of course for some teams you have publishers you have limited money the date is not the date you know i know when a new studio

is made dude when their press release says hey we're going to change how we are how the industry is we're going to be a ceo that does not crunch we're going to bring in diversity right that's a press release of pretty much that's the press release of every new studio that comes out in the next five years right and what happens time goes just like cd red project one year later when crunching needs to be had suddenly you know they're uh what do you call a memorandum just thrown out the window i'm also i'm also not averse to hey this week for this milestone yeah we have to crunch to get this milestone done we gotta we gotta push on this right i'm not opposed to that right it's when you're like hey guys six days a week you need to work you need to work every saturday for the next four months like you know what i mean like that's for what reason ah yeah that's really yeah i think this is why there's always like although it seems pretty one-sided there

is a two-sided argument to this um from all levels right we keep saying you know the big large teams are always encouraging crunch if the small teams too like indie levels especially i think even harder know that they have to make up for their lack of people and they always crunch well for that it's it's different too because like they have skin in the game yeah they have percentage royalties like like that's that's just percentage roses some in some cases that's their company yeah right right so and so like it's all on the line here and it's only them and and so yeah they're gonna overwork and we you know we know plenty of people that are indie devs that have their own company and they have all they have all overworked themselves for sure but like but now you're overworking it for yourself right so it's a little different that's way different than again somebody's like um yeah so what are you

doing this weekend uh yeah yeah no you're not you're not doing that this weekend right like that's totally different than like you own that company and you're and you're you're working to your success right i i think at on your products right i think i think that attitude still is with the large teams because um the owners are saying that right the owners like for these 600 plus teams are like hey the skin is in the game and if you want your benefits you want this yeah there's a there's an extra layer to that of course because they don't you know the grunts basically don't own any piece of it but like it's hard man unless you're cool with jumping from company to company all the time every company kind of runs like this to at a certain point right so let's say you do jump ship that ship most likely will reach a same breaking point where a decision has to

be made are you crunching or not and uh i think in a very much same way you're just delaying the inevitable you're eventually going to have to come to terms of who you are who you want to be known as my management i mean there doesn't seem to be a way around it i mean i was thankful to a certain point where i was cool with the consequences where like yeah i mean i'm gonna get swiped right from the bonuses i'll get swiped from any future promotion if i am looking towards that which i call a suckered steel right if you want if you want that carrot at the end of stick and i gotta wait two years for it i'm getting my carrot right now uh by getting a new job right i can get that right now right i'm never like a guy who invests in someone else's future right like i'll make my own decisions yeah create my own destiny here but a lot of people are stuck in that and i've seen so

much so many people kind of hang up their dreams on the intangibles it's like if you crunch you'll see that bonus well how much bonus well you'll see it's gonna be life-changing yeah for me it was never about the bonuses right like um it's really just about doing a good product yeah yeah and make it a good game and well that's easy for you so the guy who kind of decides the bonuses well i'm talking i'm talking before before all that says yeah it is like you know i i was young single and then i could just and i had no friends other than the ones i worked with so yeah it was a hang on what's the fun place to be at right because that's where all your friends are at and then you're just working on on the game together until two three o'clock in the morning and why not you know i mean what else you gonna do um and then you know with age you you slowly start you know you have family

and you have other things you're like oh okay well this seems kind of silly i don't want to do this and then also for me i also i was having migraines and serious yeah seriously some health problems yeah health problems and i'm like oh well this this doesn't seem very good like this seems pretty stressful right so right and then you they start reevaluating like what are you doing you know well let me help me with this game plan then right we obviously know this is going to change there's only a certain amount of period of your career where you're young and single that you can do this to earn your stripes at the company right if you were to give advice to people out here if you were to look at your career like all right you can do this for like three four years but you better have a game plan at the end of that where you don't have to keep doing that what would that be to navigate through this industry get to the age where you're comfortable get to a company that treats you right yeah my advice is don't don't crunch for the company and crunch at home on your own stuff i see side hustling

yeah it's the only way that's i wouldn't say it's the only way but that's definitely that's something that i did that's something i didn't do and if you're gonna crunch and put your health at risk you better you better do it for something that's your own damn thing yeah yeah if for your own benefit for your own learning that's a good way to go you know so this is the thing yeah i think i i i signed off on that obviously the podcast is named after that whole lifestyle but uh that that exactly man i think exactly what you're saying is is true it's like um the guarantees is what i've always had a problem with crunching it's like if my boss tomorrow says hey this game is going to be number one you know it i know it right uh if you do this much it will equal this much by this date guaranteed right that's a different story that is something

very tangible uh but most of these bonuses don't work that way and they don't i think all of them don't but i would say for there's at least five or six games where you know if i bust my tail in this game i'm i'm gonna see six figures like you you know that like yeah they're just like there's five or six games that that are that yeah uh if you're not one of those five or six well sucks forget about it right but but uh but for the most part you know you work on gta you know the bonuses are gonna be nice what's the sacrifice what are you what are you putting up what are you willing to put in on the table yeah yeah yeah there's still so rarely the case like you said those games and uh so you're saying ninety percent of time it's not worth it if there's a thousands of games each year there's only six games that does that yeah more than 99 i'm saying as somebody who is suffering from migraine headaches from working yeah uh it's most definitely not working

worth it i i i i promise period period it's just not worth it like your health is way more important than uh than some video game period like and as much as i love video games as much as i love the industry it's not more important than my health yeah you know long term yeah yeah ever yeah plus you like you said you want to keep put i'm always uh i don't know it's like an egotistical part egotistical part is that right the ego side of me i'll always want to put in work that i can say is rightfully mine like more so than just a glorified prop it's like hey even as a lead like you really have so little input on a game like freaking rocksteady uh not rock well rock state of games but as well as rockstar games like uh red dead two right um you know it's not i did this part of mexico that's all me

it's like hey unless you're sam hauser or danhauser like i don't know anybody else from that game that is worth a damn even though you know they probably did a lot of evolution revolutionary things to it right there's very in the public eye there's very little people that's involved that game where this you can say that game wouldn't exist without well they do that on purpose though too right yeah like like when it is time to get all the credits there's only there's only two people to talk to you know to me exactly okay so so in that regard it's not worth it it's never worth it man like if it's a great game it's very few that actually share the spotlight with leads of that team right um it's not our type of industry uh well any entertainment industry is kind of like that to be honest uh unless you kind of grave your you carve your own road path but yeah i mean

it sucks i'm sure people gonna enjoy the game everyone's gonna move on uh that's just the way things go uh but let's go ahead and move on to the next subject i know we spent a good amount of time and we're almost to the hour mark but i do want to at least cover amazon and what's going on over there right so i don't know where you were when amazon was acquiring twitch they announced like they're gonna go into gaming in a big way i feel like you were the type that had doubts because you know game development's hard right i think i i felt the same i think most game developers felt the same and this is no hate on double helix right i'm from california but when when double helix was kind of turned into amazon was like yeah all right this this is this is them being serious um this kind of played out the way i

thought it would play out multiple cancels games no premiere amazon games that even made a glitch on their own platform twitch which was surprises like you guys really don't rig your system then if none of your games can hit the top 10 in in viewership right uh and they're they're still keeping on trucking they're still investing and out of the blue they came in with luna um which makes sense because they have you know cloud servers second to none right um are they number one out there with when it comes to providing cloud servers with aws they're they're up there or or yeah i believe they're number one and i think google gcp is number two i think yeah or maybe maybe us or microsoft zero is number two well this is how crazy they are because i think at one point if

not now at one point netflix used aws or their clouds for their streaming right i don't know if it's the same it's still true or not but that's how big they are um but luna ever since they announced this in the past month i haven't heard too much about it what are your thoughts about this uh is this gonna make a dent is this something what was the point of this are they bored all that prime money just rolling in they don't know what to do with it why they keep trying i think okay i think it's interesting i think this is interesting because one uh you're mentioning about amazon game studio right um they actually did release a game uh called called crucible yeah and then terrible name for their first flagship title and then and i was you know like hey they released something so that's that's that's good that's a good thing um but they but they just announced that they're actually shutting it down um last week

they just announced that they're closing up shop on it um so it's like okay so that didn't work out right and maybe and maybe they just don't have the expertise in house and the the right management to make video games like hey maybe they don't um so now what the what they do have though is infrastructure and internet and bandwidth and all of those things so uh jumping onto the streaming the streaming chain and train and coming out with a streaming platform makes sense you know people people that are into streaming are saying streaming is the future for video games like the stream google games is the future microsoft is gonna be in the space sony probably will be as well um we already know stadiums in this space um maybe it is the future maybe this is the way that you will get your games or a large portion of the industry will get their games going forward

and so amazon wants to make sure that they don't miss the boat so like i i think hey if anybody's going to do it it will be people with a lot of server infrastructure at their disposal and so amazon google microsoft that all makes sense right i feel i feel very um i feel in this very certain way how kind of when vr came out and was on a hot streak everybody and their moms suddenly have a vr set and it was kind of like to kill the competition by confusing the market like i felt like that was the strategy for a lot of these companies not to be number one but to confuse the market where no one becomes number one uh and somehow facebook kind of pulled ahead and finally getting some crazy traction with quest right in the very much same way like suddenly everybody has the streaming service

for the same games essentially and xcloud is the only one that has like a strong enough library and seriousness behind it uh you don't think so man come on stadius ain't [ __ ] uh playstation has a strong library but they're like three months behind any new releases right uh at best because their their release game is so hot so it's not like a true streaming only streaming device right x cloud is going to be the same way though right x5 is just going to stream whatever's on game pass and like game pass is a great deal like don't you get me wrong game best is a good cheap deal um but the game pass library isn't exactly not great yet but they have the most modern and amazing games right now they have all the microsoft first party but microsoft first party day one releases the the ea the ea stuff

i ain't waking up out of my bed for the microsoft first not yet i mean they don't have the star power of playstation games for sure right yeah but with the ea pass ea play all the a games all the zenimax games that soon are going to be in there they are a clear leader at least for streaming out of all the streaming services we are the clear leader of if you're going to get something in terms of content and the amount of content yes for the price too so luna the third weird brother that's coming into this offer is nothing new right you know their screenshot is showing a game that is available everywhere else it's like this is a one chance to show what's special about them and they can't do it well let's well let's be real for a second right because with the streaming stuff the one thing that luda i think is doing right is i think right out the gate it's working on your phone right so that's something that stadium

was in the next game was delayed on it's like oh you want stadia you can only use it on your tv or on a laptop uh yeah and then if you were like wrote it down this whole play anywhere like why can't i play it on my phone if i could play anywhere right so luna was like no no you paid your phone and then they partnered with ubisoft so so ubisoft games are going to be on on on luna as well like that's their old little separate channel are they going to be on apple devices too because uh xcloud isn't amazon has a special relationship with apple for some reason well well your boy your boy phil spencer said something about that um this week too about how how uh xcloud will for sure be on on right yeah yeah they have to do you really see amazon somehow just playing sticking it out and somehow uh like i think all of these

what all of these things are doing is just proving out the tech proving it out proving out the market getting their feet out there maybe maybe they're not the winner today maybe somebody else will come up tomorrow and be the winner but they're they're they're at least staking out and innovating trying to try to see what what they can do here um i think it's interesting i think it's interesting from the aspect of like you know we're talking about these new consoles about to come out and they're all sold out and you had to pre-order them and they're all you know 500 wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to pay the 500 you know when it dude i get offers every day to download uh stadia and i'm not touching that [Music] but if you look at it from the perspective of say like the the platform holder too it's like hey i don't have to make i don't have to make the consumer hardware right i can actually make really good hardware that is scalable in

a server blade in the infrastructure that i already have right get economy of scale and then and then provide you a service of downloading these games and then for the gamer it's super convenient because like boom boom boom you're playing you're in the game immediately uh no loading right um there's a lot there's a lot of good right like i also think yeah there's a problem of devaluing the value of games and and what what money is the developers going to get out of this and like was the deal right i think stadiu's business model is good for developers but it's a terrible business model for the consumers right um i think uh luna's going with the more uh they're ten dollars as well right yeah well they're going with more like it's ten dollars a month for i don't think you have to buy the games i'm not sure six dollars a month during its early access yeah and i don't think you have to buy the games i think the games are just there right so they have to strike these

contract deals with the game developers and get them on service so their service will probably have less games than say stadia maybe right because they have to strike these deals right um so we'll see and microsoft is going to be the clear the clear content winner content winner right but i have no idea like in practice how how well stadia will will do right um is let's see sorry i said i meant x cloud i have no idea how x-cloud will do but um yeah x-cloud will stick with it because it seems like and they reiterate many times that that's their future they already know they're they're second to sony when it comes to content and they're doing their best to kind of equal that playing field but they're more about like quantity at this point than quality yeah that's fine well they're going the other way right they're going they're going in their way they're covering their own path which is smart they're going away priority they give you a ton of different types of games

for tons of different types of experiences kids could play adults can play yeah they're getting upset first party yeah yeah yeah and sony's fine dining which is fine nintendo's kind of like in their own playground doing whatever they want i would say i'll say i'll say nintendo's fine dining as well like okay okay but fine dining fight dining in terms of gameplay yeah no i agree i agree nintendo will always be there they're never going to go away they have such great content stated again yeah i think amazon's just doing because they have extra cash it makes sense it probably doesn't cost them any much more money to kind of free up some computers for running this stupid program this little pet project right they know they know they need to be a part of the future yeah it's also a good vehicle for your for your dev team it's also a good vehicle for your game engine it's a good vehicle for for twitch sure but i i i

i amazon confuses me because they are the one of the richest companies in the world and at first when i thought they were creating a game studio that that game studio would be the most spoiled game student in the world but it was the opposite so we know game devs from that studio and they're like counting pretzels and well it's not that bad but it's like pretty cheap right and it reflects the the master of that company right bezos he's the cheapest mofo ever right i don't know yeah oh well i maybe i'll work at amazon sometime in the future so i i can't i can't make it well i'll say this they are cheap so prove me wrong right pay me double but like i will say this right they know they need skin in the game they will stay as long as they need to uh like all the industries they're a part of right um they have enough cash to stick around

and i don't even think they have a clear strategy of when to really take over and try to be number one they're just gonna let the whatever industry they're in let's say the game industry now cloud uh streaming um kind of eat itself up right and just have uh very much the same way that apple is kind of you know they stole their model from amazon trying to roll up all in one subscription right they're just bettering prime right so to them it is a great uh uh additional service for their prime subscriber to one day maybe even up prime subscription right uh that's their number one driver so it's a fine strategy they'll make money in that way they're not really looking at it to compete to be number one whatever right um even with twitch that is the number one streaming that by far still but you know getting

somewhat competitive um they bought that right they didn't become that so uh stadia is just i don't know man i i don't i have a hard uh time believing that five years from now we're still talking about stadia because they don't even provide updates like they don't care like this is a pandemic year this is where everyone's at home and looking towards the game industry or any other entertainment streaming services to kill their time and they haven't really [ __ ] nothing buzzworthy nothing data worthy like this is the time they should be killing it right now right if they've done some uh some stadia connects or whatever you want to call it like they've done some updates some video updates right but they have not really moved the needle i agree i do i do think that they're holding some cards close to your chest i do think that that

they're holding some stuff in and then they want to come like and make a big splash with whatever the next thing is and then after that big splash after that big splash if it flops it's a wrap right that's why i think it's the current situation well then the next big announcement might be their last is what you're saying it's a hit it or miss it i agree man holding their chests and i would say and i would agree that uh and i would say that with the announcement of luna you don't didn't already see that as competition no more see it as a curiosity without no validation that that's the future yes but there's i don't know man amazon and google is in the same camp even though they have a lot of your your friends over there from the ubisoft camp like legit game developers i still put them in the category of tech people trying to make games and they don't understand well i think that's i think that's

google but you're describing google right but um but i think that's why they hire those people right brazil hey we don't know what the hell is going on with video games but y'all do so it's like y'all y'all need to solve but that's why i put google and amazon the same thing right because they try to hire you all know what what this industry is about but all i'm hearing from the other side is like we really don't know what's going on because all the announcements amazon's been making games for five years right it's more than that seven eight years now from their first time they acquired these studios after twitch right yeah baby look it up yeah you look it up but dude like that's a red dead redemption the release you did it's been it's been eight years eight years dude is a long time to have nothing to show right i would say i'll say this i'll say this like they've shipped some games

i'm actually looking at the game ships they've shipped some games like you you don't care i'm going to name them and you're that cut what i don't know the only one that is probably the one that we do know is the grand tour game that was released in 2019 right to another grand remember you met the grand tour uh the british car car show they made a game they made a game uh based on that well i i'm in crucible crucible shift crucible ship this year oh my god castle and then new world new world is about to come out next just stop guys like there's a certain point where i'd be obviously if you're just hiring these dudes for charity i'm thankful you know you have all our game developer friends still still having jobs and benefits but like at a certain point it's like be be responsible and let these guys have something on their resume worth putting on and have a chance i'll say this

making any video game is a feat yeah um getting any game out is is something that comes with where the it's an accomplishment it's worthy to be on your race because they will get you another job no matter how crappy that game is you're like hey i made a video game that will get you a job somewhere um maybe just to get you a job with naughty dog but it gets you a job somewhere that will then get your java daddy dog maybe right like so so that's how i mean that's fine that's a very optimistic that's very optimistic to get through a crappy game i like that i definitely highly uh suggest i've seen people like that i've seen people go through that yeah they have a lot of crappy games under their resume to no fault of their own i've been there i've worked on crappy games but i've been to getting get to the next step yeah yeah it sucks and i'm sorry amazon and google employees i wish you guys the best but with eight

years and with google stated what three four years now you got nothing to show and i'm just gonna have to agree that management doesn't know what they're doing uh or not paying attention to what the industry is happening but you also know you also don't make a video game six a long time so yeah man it's a long time to amount to nothing dude nothing's worse than building a mountain and looking back it's like that's a crappy mountain right it's it's it's just the most burned out destroying thing for a game developer and i just feel like hey if you're gonna waste your time waste it like i much rather you crunch on cyberpunk right that's this is where the argument is if there's two sides to the coin and you're gonna crunch on something at least crunch on something that's gonna be celebrated somehow if you have that choice all

right and i think people choose convenience uh and at some point it it kind of bites them in the butt like it kind of hurts them in a way because you like i imagine and i i'll end up with this right amazon google all these guys went over there and i will say this through comfort first it's not it's not it's not like wow google has this tremendous reputation to put out quality products and sticking with it right that's not google or amazon i don't know i i think google ads no google has a reputation of making really high quality things that people want to use and then when they cancel them that's why people get upset that they think yeah because it was good right so so but they do have a reputation of canceling things that people use exactly that's that's what i would say is definitely what they do all right and the same thing with amazon right so i

yeah there's a reputation where it's more about the money and comfort which is a fine place to kind of if you're like burnt enough where you're like hey i'm just looking for a place to kind of plant my flag for the next five years for me my family family for some stability i celebrate that that's cool but let's be real right that's that's what you're there for and and that's completely fine but you know at some point i think i think i'm only saying this because i know a game developer if you're a true game developer a part of you yourself is always going to be at pain going to work knowing that this is not a great game and that kind of kills the creativity of it i think and that i feel like brings down the industry a bit because it kills a lot of creative people spirit who's just done with it and just trying to see the end of the day right and uh

at the end of the day the industry the best best best games in the industry are only like the top 56 for five percent of the industry maybe if that yeah um and the rest of them are not the top yeah but you still are making them because like maybe you could carve out your niche maybe you could carve out your market maybe you can just be successful doing the thing that you that you love to do right so i i've been like i said i've been there man i've worked on some bad games where i'm like i know this game would be bad and i and i and i think and i think i think you were even in the studio i'm pretty sure yeah i'm pretty sure i'm speaking from truth here yeah where where i'm like oh man this game would be bad and like and then i like bounced like got out of there right that's what i mean i respect that some people don't have that option though sometimes and then i've also worked on bad games that were just bad and they shifted they were bad uh and i didn't make sense

but then also i learned a lot in that process right so it's like what do i get out of it you know something you know matters too right well let's all right let's end it with this what's your prediction here you you kind of put out a very interesting point where stadia is building up to a grant announcement and it's a make it or break it moment for them because i really do think they don't have any more chances after the next bus i don't think google has that much patience uh anymore he's not saying anything yeah i don't know if google has patience or if google's willing how much money google's willing to lose on the thing yeah but i i just know like i just feel that they have something like okay here it is with all the features that they promised here's an example of why this thing is cool i think it does have a lot of a lot of cool features uh they just have to show it in a game that people want to play um and then maybe they could turn it around i'm not i'm just not sure i'm gonna say

i'm sure it won't be good you can't you can't you can't just come up with a red dead two there's a track record that kind of led up to it and they need yeah i read it two equivalent to be great i i don't know if they need that first they just need a good game first man they need a good game that they made internally that shows off why stadiu is a good platform to play games on that's what they need it like red red dead yeah nah man like you know which people worked on right there now you know law that takes the mate now they just need to make it okay this is this is the frustrating part and i know i keep saying and i know you're tired right this is the frustrating part about game development i really do feel in any type of creativity somehow there needs to be that danger of accountability of losing your job that pressure to somehow come out on the other end for with something great i don't know any games that was made through comfort and just plain love

and great benefits you know i mean i don't know any game that's actually been made like that and so that makes that argument kind of hard and i feel like google and amazon even though amazon's super cheap those tech guys are so comfortable and this kind of goes with facebook too facebook as a product has dwindled as a uh in quality because all you hear about facebook employees is that it's a freaking zoo and gym uh like it's a playground for adults like how are you gonna get anything done if you're at the buffet all day right so there needs to be some kind of danger and pressure for creativity to kind of thrive and i i don't feel like these tech companies any of these tech economies can have proven that any of these well-fed developers have pumped out a good product without pressure i would say this like all these tech guys may have all these creature comforts like that yeah but i but i in my experience i've seen i see most tech people don't

even partake in those creature comforts for for the most part uh they you know well they'll they'll partake in the food for sure yeah but but but they won't partake in all the other nonsense for the most part or because it's you know it's it's about the work but i do believe they are not subject to the same deadlines and the pressures do you think that plays a factor in a great game though or is it completely a myth i i think a deadline allows you to concentrate your efforts right because if you've ever had a deadline you don't need to concentrate your efforts yeah and so uh deadlines and time constraints help crystallize the idea faster because you have to you have to you can't mess around you have a limited amount of time it's a focus um yeah yeah and so i think that that helps to make it a good game because you have some sort of deadline um but then also the great great great great gate games that

we talk about have have the luxury of having money where they can take even longer to make a great game right so they have even more time to really and i think the time the more time that we're talking about here is just more about polish and putting more things in rather than uh crystallizing of the idea like to get the idea down in fact okay now we have to just make a ton of content and polish the hell out of it and so you need to any time for that always um so yeah so that's that's my thoughts on it like you know uh i've worked at a tech company before i work at a tech company now i could say um but but i know the uh i know the pressures of game development right and um yeah i think if there's too much pressure you don't make anything good because there's just too much pressure yeah uh but having a deadline so what i do is i'll i'll string this on you and make this personal for me first and personal for

you yeah there's a 21 year old brandon that i compare myself to where that guy will go to the end of the earth to push out the product versus now where i know kind of the limits of the earth and there is a wisdom that comes with it for sure and i am a better artist now than before but there is some kind of hunger driven quality there that i feel that creatively that that version will beat me in terms of from from start to finish right there's something there and i feel like maybe if you can kind of share that insight because i feel like 21 year old gray supe ray's super hungry and stuff there's a there's a there's a lifting quality to that where in the same time period the hunger part that's crazy i think the hunger is what makes you do do what you do right crazier things

yeah and you're going to go and push yourself harder because you're you're hungry for it not saying that i'm not hungry for it now right you have other comforts i'm hungry for i'm hungry for different things now yeah i mean yeah um but yeah yeah definitely definitely like all this talk that we're having here myself when i was 21 when i was 21 you kidding me i still in school when i was 21 right again i would and i was all-nighters like no problem all the time all the time you know because that's what you do that was what was life that was the whole point yeah yeah well i'll uh i'll you know we're replacing what well past the hour mark i want to thank you again we made this all about crunch but it is a thing that at some point man i need to sit down and write an essay about because i don't know where i am with that because as a creative i feel like it is necessary as part of the secret sauce of game development and i just need to do some homework about are there games out there that actually required no crunch but became game of

the year right i can't think of it i wouldn't say game of the year but one of the great games of all time i i do think there's there's some games out there that are really good that have not been made with crunch people some people talk about it on twitter and stuff and like oh the game i made you know it doesn't we didn't crunch and this is what we did and it's pretty cool game um yeah but that's not a pretty cool game most of those most of those cases are not a game of 900 people working on a big open world game like like i'm looking at that it's like not gonna happen all right so you know the lakers just won right yeah and i'm dragging this longer but i just want to say a kobe lebron any great sport athletes are not just doing enough to become who they are like i just can't think of any greatness that does the

bare minimum hours a week of a athlete or a game developer and here's my argument against against that pick one of the scrubbiest nba players that you could think of that dude would embarrass the hell out of you right nba but that's not great this is better than average no no no not better than average you you you are far from an average basketball player like you are look far below average right now let's just be real right yeah yeah and then nba players are all above that yeah super superstars like they're all superstars for basketball because they got to the nba right and so then when you think of the gap between the scrubbiest and basketball players and like lebron james and michael and magic and and some of it is also those guys are also genetic freaks okay right so that definitely plays into it right that allows them to be

so some of them rolled the genetic the genetic uh lotteries yeah a lot yeah it doesn't mean it doesn't mean they didn't work hard of course they worked hard right but they also got some genetic help to make them freaks of nature right and they also some of them have mentality that helps them push through some of the pressures right um but i would yeah i would never i would never say that some other basketball player who's that michael jordan was just some scrub who's not trying hard like all those guys all those guys are trying very hard right right yeah i guess that makes sense like the hard work does play a factor but then that doesn't take away from people who are not great that does hard work as well they just don't have that extra element to it and so i guess i think it's possible i think it's possible but we just hear about the success stories are always about somebody crunching and putting in the extra work and we don't hear about the people that

are like oh yeah we didn't graduate well you know what ray i'm gonna start and changing that trend i'm gonna do average amount of hours each week average amount of work and then when my game is out it's going to be above par and i'll i'll be able to call out call out on twitter and see what what responses you get i'm sure i'm sure there has to be somebody out there i i do remember seeing it but i just can't remember what games it was that means it didn't exist dude you're just streaming well i want to thank you for your time man and this is uh i will do some homework i'm going to look at some games because it's time to kind of change the narrative of this i'm tired of seeing jason even though i love his expose articles it's just getting tiring seeing how the industry hasn't changed and i'll just i'll say this like he ain't he ain't doing an expose on some other companies that are crunchy that nobody's ever heard of why because somebody's ever heard of them they won't get the clicks like he's he's focusing on the games that he knows the big ones we'll suck the oxygen out of the room we'll elevate his position

people will click on the link i know you know i i don't know what this is right i know that's true i mean it's self-promotional for sure yeah and um i wish i think i hope by the end of the last gained evidencing episode i'll have this answer for the industry where there is somewhat of a formula where you don't have to crunch where you don't have to do all this crazy stuff that seems to be part of the formula um our work doesn't also mean overtime right hard work can be just eight hours of hard work uh and i just want to find because i'm always in the middle of this i can't definitely say just do you eight hours and your game is going to be great because we all know at the 11th hour there's just some things you just got to put in and you're just going to have to push your team to do it uh otherwise you might get canceled right uh i don't know any way other way i mean

yeah i'll say on on when i worked on support yourself that was the least amount of crunch i've ever did and like it ain't no grand grand theft auto or no red dead redemption or no uh last of us but it's a damn good game you know and we and we we put work in worked hard but i also didn't crunch like i crunched on some games that are truly horrible right so take that take that for what you will okay it just makes me sound you left at five you told your team to work harder and then you saw them the next morning when you came in okay that's what that's how i got all right guys i want to thank you for your time thank you ray uh as always uh you can find him with his twitter handle at waterass right uh and uh w-a-d-a-r-a-s-s feel free to tag him argue with him

switch some uh points with him he's uh he's always there on tweeting and uh see you guys next month for the next round table but also next tuesday for the next kingdom chain episode thanks y'all [Music] you