Thanks for filling me in. My question wasn’t rhetorical, and if Carmack is right that some games literally couldn’t be made without crunch time, that does seem like a good argument that it’s not a failure even if some people find it intolerable.
He's not. They could be made. They'd just cost more.
The race-to-the-bottom pricing effect is not one caused by line developers and it's not caused by customers buying the games. It's caused by management and executives eating the seed corn. It's going to have to stop.
Timing matters more in entertainment than other industries. There is an infinite amount of content you could pack into a game and it has to be delivered on time to be relevant to your customers and out do the competition.
There are countless games and films at every level of investment that come out too late to be relevant, Jodi Foster suffered from that fate not too long ago.
Crunch might make sense for something that doesn't have arbitrary deadlines, like a daily newspaper. How often do games have releases delayed? Crunch is only as necessary as the employer makes it.
His argument seems to be that much of what people call “crunch” is actually a labor of love, and that a norm discouraging overtime would discourage the level of personal investment that’s necessary to make great games.
