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Crows Crows Crows, alongside a growing number of independent studios - Die Gute Fabrik, Young Horses, Kitfox Games, Armor Games, Ko_Op Mode - plus, most eye-catchingly, Guardians of the Galaxy maker Eidos-Montreal and its subsidiary Eidos-Sherbrooke are pushing back against such ingrained approaches to work. According to the latest IGDA developer satisfaction survey, crunch has only intensified since the pandemic began. Erin Hoffman lifted the lid on EA’s grim working hours in the early noughties, and since then, crunch has remained endemic within the industry, despite evidence of overwork’s harmful impacts on health and work quality.
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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 pay for four days’ work instead of five.įor years, stories about labor and workplace culture have made headlines in the video game industry for all the wrong reasons. “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. “I found going in five days a week straight up stressful,” he recalls. 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. 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.
![crunch hours crunch hours](https://balerps.wa.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Baler.jpg)
“And we were basically Iike, ‘Okay, let’s just go to a four-day week.’” “At this point, the question was really, ‘How do we keep going?’” Pugh recalls over a Discord call. 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. But William Pugh and his team at Berlin-based studio Crows Crows Crows implemented a solution that goes against conventional industry wisdom. In this situation, most bosses in the video game industry would consider crunch, industry parlance for predatory, often unpaid overtime. 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.