The idea of game developers unionizing has been a hot topic in recent years, particularly as concerns around crunch, or developers working extreme amounts of overtime on a game, became widespread. However, Evan Wells and Neil Druckmann, the co-presidents of Naughty Dog, have pushed back against the idea of developers unionizing to solve crunch, saying that workers banding together to demand better treatment from their employers might not the issue.
Wells and Druckmann expressed their skepticism that unions would solve crunch during a recent interview with Game Informer, in which Wells said, "I don't know if that [unionization] would be a solution to crunch." Wells went on to say that employees being told they couldn't work more than 40 hours a week, "would frustrate people to no end. There are people who really want to put in that extra polish on their own volition, and they would feel handcuffed."
The idea behind crunch, though, is that it's not always mandated by an executive. Instead, it's a culture of pressure that weighs down on developers, where a deadline is set and one worker can't take a day off because someone else would have to pick up their slack. In the same way Wells says people would feel handcuffed to stop working, crunch forces them to work extensively long weeks.
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