Last week, one of the biggest new stories was that Rockstar Games, in the attempt to finish up Red Dead Redemption 2, was making their team do 100 hours of work for certain weeks. This “massive crunch” was waved off by the team, but for the community of gamers, and certain developers, it wasn’t something to praise. It was something to be criticized and many did indeed criticize the developer for it. While some time has past, the story hasn’t died, mainly thanks to Ubisoft.
For you see, Gamasutra asked Ubisoft Quebec Managing Director Patrick Klaus about what Rockstar Games did and how it compares to them. His comments were blunt and to the point:
“While we can always do better, I can tell you hand on heart that [Assassin’s Creed Odyssey] hasn’t required a massive crunch, like maybe some of the triple-As from five or ten years ago. We can still always do better, but we have managed pretty well to succeed in delivering a game of huge magnitude which is hitting a good quality [level], while making sure that our teams are not burnt out and disgusted with working in games.
Ironically, many of the Rockstar Games personnel came forward to say that they were ok with the time crunch. That it was necessary and that they supported it, but many weren’t buying it. Even Ubisoft’s Senior Producer Marc-Alexis Cote added that this is something they had to do deal with once:
“It’s something we were very, very bad at 15 years ago, but as the industry is maturing, we are becoming better at managing our teams, managing our scope. Not every studio will grow in that way, not every team will grow in that way, but it’s one of the commitments we made to our team when we started: that we would manage the scope of the game, that it was super-ambitious, but that every two weeks we would release it with them to always make sure that it is doable.”
So do you agree with what Ubisoft said? Let us know in the comments below.
