A leaked Insomniac Games presentation slide shows how highly the company values time off. It’s on the same slide as Wolverine art, so that’s really cool to look at, too. Take it with a grain of salt, as with all leaks, but it looks pretty legitimate.
As shown in ResetEra, In the same slide where they advise keeping the game running (likely to test for bugs that come over the game running processes for too long) and playing the game (to see the quality), they instruct their employees to take time off. That may seem small, but it’s a big way to fight crunch, which we rarely hear about from Insomniac.
“PRODUCTION EXPECTATIONS
For Everyone:
Keep it stable: Always keep the game running, fix A’s
Play the game
Take time off: Don’t burnout, take some PTO”
We may think of fighting crunch as a “nice thing” to have in the industry, but crunch doesn’t help as much as you think it does. We look at crunch as a necessity, but even in writing, I’ve seen journalistic quality downgrade from someone being tired. I can tell because I’ve seen it before and fought to give my writers a break. Yes, you get more done, but you arguably are hurt more in the long run due to quality and worker retention.
If you don’t believe me, you can ask a studio that had multiple winning movies in a row, Pixar. During the production of Toy Story 2, Pixar had a life-threatening situation caused by crunch. It is detailed in Creativity Inc., but the author and founder of Pixar, Ed Catmul, explained that crunch rarely helps a studio out. He said that after the movie was completed, he implemented a rule that no one could work longer than 40 hours, which remained in effect for many movies and may still be in effect today.
He said that quality and work environment actually improved from the rule, and that was only Pixar’s third movie at the time. They’ve made a lot of great ones since then. Insomniac also pushes taking breaks, and they’ve made exceptional games.
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