Callisto Protocol director apologises for promoting crunch culture

gamedeveloper.com:

Striking Distance Studios founder and CEO Glen Schofield has backtracked on comments he made over the weekend that indicated the studio is crunching hard to get The Callisto Protocol out of the door.

Schofield, who co-created the Dead Space franchise and prevously co-founded Slegdehammer Games, sought to clarify why he hadn't been out promoting the title by explaining the dev team is working "six to seven days a week."

In a now-deleted tweet (screenshots of which can still be found online), Schofield said "I only talk about the game during an event. We are working six to seven days a week. Nobody's forcing us. Exhaustion, tired, COVID, but we're working. Bugs, glitches, perf fixes. One last pass through audio. 12 to 15 hour days. This is gaming. Hard work. Lunch, dinner working. You do it because you love it."

After numerous developers and industry figures began calling out the tweet, explaining crunch is a symptom of bad management, poor scoping, and generally speaking a huge red flag, Schofield deleted it and posted an apology.

"Anyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about the people I work with. Earlier I tweeted how proud I was of the effort and hours the team was putting in," he said. "That was wrong. We value passion and creativity, not long hours. I’m sorry to the team for coming across like this."

The games industry has a well-documented history with crunch culture, which can see development teams being forced to work long hours in a last ditch bid to polish a title to hit an impending launch date. Some studios have attempted to implement "zero-crunch" policies to help workers strike a better work-life balance, but in recent years there have still been reports of crunch at major studios like Rockstar, CD