Riot Games Addresses Burnout and Crunch By Giving Employees a Week Off (theverge.com) 59
Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends and Valorant, will be giving employees the week of August 10th off to "disconnect, recharge, and reboot," the studio announced in a blog post published Tuesday. The Verge reports: Riot has recently expanded beyond its global smash hit League of Legends, including releasing auto battler Teamfight Tactics, Hearthstone-like card game Legends of Runeterra (which are both set in the League of Legends universe), and Valorant, a brand-new tactical shooter that takes cues from Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch. But in an industry known for overwork and enforced overtime, referred to as "crunch," to ship and maintain games, Riot is giving employees a break to help with their health.
"As game developers, we're all hyper aware of the effects of crunch and project-based deadlines," Riot said in its blog. "We owe it to ourselves and to you to prioritize our health as a team (well, many teams) so we can bring you new experiences long into the future." Riot also said it would be "shifting some patches and release timelines a bit" to accommodate the break and that "a few teams are also staggering their time off to make sure everything is running smoothly."
"As game developers, we're all hyper aware of the effects of crunch and project-based deadlines," Riot said in its blog. "We owe it to ourselves and to you to prioritize our health as a team (well, many teams) so we can bring you new experiences long into the future." Riot also said it would be "shifting some patches and release timelines a bit" to accommodate the break and that "a few teams are also staggering their time off to make sure everything is running smoothly."
That seems rational... (Score:3)
This seems so rational, I fear for the mental state of their management.
One can only hope that their devs aren't already in burnout or else that one week won't do squat.
But kudos where kudos are due... in today's society finding a company as high profile that doesn't just throw its workforce into the grinder while the management sips champagne and does coke on a yacht is uncharacteristically human and decent.
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A whole week? That's not enough time to wind down from years of putting in 80-hour weeks..
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Will they use the time well? It would probably be tempting to just binge a week in some game or streaming service. A week isn't enough time to unwind and start to relax.
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A week is just enough time to get withdrawal symptoms.
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Anywhere else we would call this a furlough/temporary layoff though and pretty much every hospital, FedEx etc have all done it in the recent past to stem the losses from not having sufficient work for the last 3 months.
Natural terminology (Score:1)
"disconnect, recharge, and reboot,"
The Internet of Things includes people, naturally.
Do they get to choose whose devices they are?
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Well, they could specialize if they want to do so, but the management obviously sees them as "tools" in general.
A whole week (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow.
How many months of crunch is this supposed to compensate?
In a week you cannot get rid of months of stress, that takes much longer. What the game industry needs to do is to stop setting deadlines it cannot meet, and adopt a normal working schedule. That's 40 hours per week, BTW, and has been like that ever since we got rid of the ~90-hour work week of the industrial revolution.
Re:A whole week (Score:5, Interesting)
As a former game dev (17 years in the trenches) I agree that a week is peanuts for compensation. If the devs get actual profit sharing then crunch can be compensated for that way as well.
As for the schedules, back when I was a game dev the release dates were fixed if you wanted to get discs manufactured and on the shelves before Christmas which back then was 60% of the year's sales. If you missed your manufacturing slot you got pushed to the back of the queue. Cartridges had a six month lead time fully paid for up front. CDs & DVDs only took a couple of weeks to get made.
With today's digital releases I guess it's not as critical.
Re:A whole week (Score:5, Insightful)
If the devs get actual profit sharing then crunch can be compensated for that way as well.
Pay doesn't address the underlying issue in America (not just gaming) that people are being worked to the point of burnout.
One of my friends moved to America when I moved to Europe, both with the same company, same positions in different facilities in different countries. She earns twice as much as I do. She is miserable and perpetually tired and burnt out. There's a deep cultural split between America and the rest of the west when it comes to working.
America holds up its economic productivity figures as the golden standard for the west, The rest of the west holds up mental health and well being and says this is more important (often while sitting on a beach somewhere while being mocked by Americans for always being on holidays).
I actually wonder how non-American game studios do this. Horizon Zero Dawn was a Dutch game so Guerrilla Games should in theory have to offer their employees 5 weeks leave + reduced working week or additional days leave on top of that, and also have some kind of workers council that ensures employees aren't going over the standard work week.
Crytek could theoretically be fined by the German government if their employees regularly work over the normal work week.
I'd be keen to hear what it's like working for European game developers. Is the problem everywhere or is it American working culture exploited by studios.
Re:A whole week (Score:4, Informative)
My first job after graduating was with a tiny British games studio on a 35-hour 100% flexitime contract. Never had crunch time.
My second job was with a larger studio, which this time I'll name because you might have heard of it: Jagex, the company behind RuneScape. 40-hour contract, essentially no overtime, although I did usually stay an hour late once or twice a week to play my colleagues' minigames for fun, and occasionally filed a bug as a result. Back then the company did occasional company holidays to celebrate milestones: not a week off, but a weekend in Vegas or Tenerife, chartered plane and hotel included. Round about when the company hit 300 people the founder handed on the CEO role to a "professional" CEO, and the company jollies were downscaled a long way from a weekend abroad to an evening in a marquee. I did do one or two Saturdays of overtime just before I left the company, having requested them so that I could leave things as neatly tied up as possible. The only other person I saw in the office on Saturday was the security guard doing the rounds.
I later went back to the first company. By then the culture had changed: the owner was inspired by the working hours of Walmart managers, and as a dodge around EU working regulations had hired a bunch of programmers in Moldova, outside the EU, on 60-hour contracts. I refused to sign a 60-hour contract, and my 40-hour contract was officially "part-time". It goes without saying that I was more productive than the burnt-out Moldovans.
Nowadays I'm in "serious gaming" and working 37.5 hour weeks with negligible overtime.
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The rest of the west free rides on American economic productivity.
Studies have shown that overworking people doesn't actually increase productivity. It just makes you look busier.
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The rest of the west free rides on American economic productivity.
We don't free-ride on anything. You guys could keep the benefits of your economic productivity to youself, that's why they are your GDP figures. You being more or less productive has no impact on the rest of the world.
Ask yourself if they could maintain their way of life without massive defense subsidies.
Erm, no need to ask myself. The answer is already clear to everyone that the American MIC is an exercise on national retardation.
Or massive protectionism from the EU to defend their workers from foreigners.
That has nothing to do with your productivity.
Or tariffs to keep American goods out resulting in a truly profitable trade surplus that pays for their welfare states.
Tariffs exist to address economic inequalities. Tariffs which don't address these invariably have a bigger negative imp
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Yeah... this is sort of a weird article to me. I'd rather see the press pay attention to places like my former employer who didn't ask their employees to crunch in the first place, except perhaps in very rare circumstances, and certainly never for any extreme duration or degree.
Some slight crunching near big deadlines is inevitable, and really, few people complain about it, because everyone gets excited near the release of a new product and wants it to succeed. Believe it or not, there ARE companies, even
Re:A whole week (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the story that gets pushed around a lot but it doesn't reflect reality. Americans do work more hours than most Europeans but not by much. Indeed [oecd.org] Ireland, New Zealand, the US, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Israel all work pretty much the same number of hours. Yet we never hear about the "burnout" working hours of the Irish or New Zealanders.
Usually this is couple with the idea that more time off makes Europeans more productive when they are working. This is also nonsense [oecd.org]. Americans are still more productive per hour worked, despite working slightly longer hours.
The reality is that European governments have exceptionally strong labour laws which make is hard to let people go. And because it's hard to let people go employers are reluctant to hire people in the first place. Which results in higher unemployment [oecd.org]. Particularly youth unemployment [oecd.org]. The push for more time off is not driven by the desire for a better work/life balance, although it's appreciated. It's an attempt by those governments to decrease unemployment by capping the number of hours each worker can work.
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You're falling into a trap of averages. The scales make no sense for the OECD graph, but when looked at in terms of hours worked per week it puts the USA on average at around 42.2 hours per week. Compare that to 39 hours for week for Germany and the Netherlands it doesn't sound like much, but averages are swayed by outliers. I.e. those numbers are put there not by the population but by the number of people routinely working 50+ hours weeks, a figure far higher in the USA than Europe.
That directly results in
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I appreciate you writing out such a long reply. But all I'm seeing is a re-hash of the same unsubstantiated claims you made in your first post.
I'll let you google burnout statistic by country because they vary greatly but what doesn't vary is that USA tops those stats.
I already supported my claims with links to OECD statistics. Why should I google sources for your claims too? They're your claims you support them.
Err no. That's not how jobs work. That has to be the dumbest thing I've heard. You either have a job or you don't. You don't have a job and decide not to employ someone because you're worried about not being able to fire them, and labour laws do not protect jobs being made redundant. Also part time and contract work is in fact a thing that exists in Europe too. Honestly I have no idea how that statement of yours was thought up.
It shouldn't be "the dumbest thing you've ever head" Labour Market Flexibility [investopedia.com] is a pretty well established concept:
Supporters of increased labor market flexibility argue that it leads to lower unemployment rates and higher gross domestic product (GDP) due to the unintended consequences of tight labor market restrictions. For example, a firm may consider hiring a full-time employee, but fear the employee will be extremely difficult to fire and may claim costly worker's compensation or sue based on alleged unfair treatment. The firm may choose to take on short-term contract workers instead.
Such a system benefits the relatively small number of full-time employees with especially secure positions, but hurts those on the outside—those who must move between precarious, short-term gigs.
At least more so than "worker productivity vs economic productivity", which I've not heard of. Are you su
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Not to mention internet enabling "day one patch" that can match the size of the supposed 1.0 game itself.
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It's not just video game industry too.
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For me it took 6 months of psychiatric care and of course I never did and never will recover fully.
Stress and burnout will mess up your nervous system the question is only to what degree.
Re:A whole week (Score:4, Insightful)
What the game industry needs to do is to stop setting deadlines it cannot meet, and adopt a normal working schedule.
Not only the game industry.
When you estimate a week for a project and management "corrects" that to 3 days and if you end up taking 4, you get asked why you didn't do it in 3 "as agreed on".
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That's why I always double my estimate, get it corrected down, then I have plenty of time to do my job.
Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I get the sentiment but unless this was mandated vacation and deducted from employee allowance then it has nothing to do with normal vacation and is news worthy.
Is it enough to compensate the shitty crunch time culture and fix burnout issues? Probably not, but still a step in the right direction.
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I get the sentiment but unless this was mandated vacation and deducted from employee allowance then it has nothing to do with normal vacation and is news worthy.
Yes, but nothing along those lines was actually mentioned...
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
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Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Yes...
Nice numerical co-incidence on the userid. Reminds me of someone.
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I get the sentiment but unless this was mandated vacation and deducted from employee allowance then it has nothing to do with normal vacation and is news worthy.
So we should just flood /. with news every time a shitty company happens to take vacations now? This is about the least newsworthy thing posted on /. in decades, for fuck's sake, BeauHD has made msmash look like a real reporter in contrast.
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So we should just flood /. with news every time a shitty company happens to take vacations now?
Only if you didn't read or understand my post and still think equate this with a normal vacation.
Yes, it's newsworthy that in this industry a company does something other than rape their employees.
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Yes, it's newsworthy that in this industry a company does something other than rape their employees.
No it's not.
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No it's not.
Yes it is! And you know I'm right because I used an exclamation mark which makes my comment more serious than yours.
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And being marketing spam for a company doesn't change the fact that it's significant and newsworthy that it happened. Precisely because of how you described the company in the first place.
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Hyper dubious about their sincerity (Score:3, Informative)
Then don't hyper set deadlines that require your workers to be "crunched" in order to be met. Deadlines are not an unexpected occurrence, they're a regular part of your business, that you have to plan for.
And time off shouldn't be a concession that you make to your workers, it should be a right that they don't need to ask.
But maybe I'm being too cynical.
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I had a job where we had "crunch" situations, but they where planned well beforehand, including the planned time off afterwards. We did work on machines that had to be taken down during the work, and downtime of course costs big money. So to do it 24/7 a colleague and I would do 12 hours on / 12 hours off shifts for maybe 2-4 weeks, and then have 1-2 weeks off afterwards, without having to use any of our vacation time.
The one thing that was making it work out quite well, was that the planning was very good.
Yep, four weeks on, two weeks off. Not software (Score:2)
That's similar to the offer I got when I was younger - four weeks of long hours hours, followed by two weeks off, then repeat. That was for opening new fast-food restaurants. The first few weeks would be hard since most of the staff doesn't know what they're doing and would need me there, and stuff will not work and need to be fixed. That makes sense for opening a new restaurant - opening is going to be hard and there is no way around it.
It seems perfectly avoidable in game development. It
Wow (Score:3)
One week off during a pandemic and without the option to choose the date? What a bonus!
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NOT!
.
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I don't get it. You have unpaid vacation in US? Wouldn't this basically be a suspension?
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Most people in the US have negotiated a paid vacation, where hours or salary continues to get paid. The only places that doesn't apply really is for very junior workers where most of your vacation is unpaid, but these days even McDonalds gives PTO because they couldn't compete in the labor market otherwise.
We also get unpaid vacation if we somehow churn through all of our paid vacation and then there is short and long-term disability, sick leave, maternity and family leave which pay a variation of 70-100% o
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"Meanwhile, most of Europe is off the entire month of August. Go ahead, try calling offices there or getting any work done."
I live in Luxembourg, here the building industry has 3 weeks mandatory vacation for every worker in the business in August, all building sites are closed, no contractor is allowed to work.
Their other 3 weeks vacation they can take whenever they like.
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So economic output in August dies? I've never seen EVERYBODY in a mandated time off in Europe, hell, I worked in tourism industry during my student life, July, August and September is when I actually worked and saved money, 10-14h/day, 7 days a week as a 15-18yo. Also in the dotcom world, never had more than a week off at a time.
In the US, most people have a negotiated vacation time. Mine accrues at 14h/month right now due to seniority (4.2 weeks/year) on top of regular holidays, paid sick days etc. then we
Holiday (Score:1)
great, but the reboot takes a week (Score:3)
That is great, but it takes a week to disconnect and reboot, the recharge starts week 2.
I have tried it many time and every time it is the same pattern. It takes me a week to forget about work and then I can start to recharge.
Paid or Unpaid? (Score:3)
The original blog [1] post doesn't state if the time off is paid or unpaid. It's likely paid for salary workers, but what about hourly workers?
[1] https://www.riotgames.com/en/n... [riotgames.com]
past due (Score:1)
If the company is at a point it recognizes that this is needed then it is probably really bad and at a point where people probably need 3-4 weeks. It takes companies forever to admit to an issue and they never seem to enact a solution that gets things to where they need to be. They love half measures. It lets them feel good about "doing the right thing" without actually expending the needed resources to do the right thing.
I don't work in that industry. I don't particularly work much past 40 hours a week
Ok, I will be the honest jerk since no one else is (Score:2)
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OP is right though. Unless their entire business is a few dozen employees, Riot Games aren't even close to the amount of work other companies put in these franchises. A properly modeled games engine should be able to handle these rather minor changes.
I've played League of Legends way back when they first came out and occasionally tried them out, the game never really changes a whole lot, you can still run it on a 5-year old computer and be fine so they're not overhauling the engine or upgrading the graphics
Just FYI (Score:1)
I don't usually post but what the heck - Riot employee here, wanted to comment on some of the posts. I think this is a great move by management and while I get some of the cynicism here, I'd like to see them recognized when they make a worker-friendly call like this.
First off, this is a paid holiday. Second, Riot has open PTO, i.e. take as much as you need, and while how much people actually take varies a lot, I can tell you that Riot is not one of those companies where having an open PTO policy leads to pe