These are the video game studios leading the charge for a four-day workweek

theverge.com:

In January 2020, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, the follow-up to 2011’s critically acclaimed first-person explorer The Stanley Parable, had already been delayed. In this situation, most bosses in the video game industry would consider crunch, industry parlance for predatory, often unpaid overtime. But William Pugh and his team at Berlin-based studio Crows Crows Crows implemented a solution that goes against conventional industry wisdom. Producer Alicia Contestabile raised the idea of a four-day week in 2019, and then, a few months later, office manager Filo Franke and artist and co-founder Dominik Johann revived it. “At this point, the question was really, ‘How do we keep going?’” Pugh recalls over a Discord call. “And we were basically Iike, ‘Okay, let’s just go to a four-day week.’”

Prior to switching to a four-day week, Crows Crows Crows was a regular nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday organization; before that, it had been fully remote and operated a flexible working structure, paying employees for a certain number of hours per month because many of them were juggling multiple projects and clients. Pugh, a twenty-something with a background in theater who was only 19 when The Stanley Parable became an indie smash hit, admits this initial transition to in-office work was tough. “I found going in five days a week straight up stressful,” he recalls. “I didn’t have a good work-life balance.” Pugh had read about Microsoft Japan’s trialing of a four-day week, which suggested that workers were not only happier but more productive. So he and the rest of the team at Crows Crows Crows, which has six full-time employees, made the leap because, as he puts it, “there was no real reason not to.” Contracts were rewritten — the same