Epic Games in "Near-Constant Crunch" to Support Fortnite

Within the span of a month, we’ve had two major exposes released on the kind of worker abuse that’s become rampant throughout the games industry. First, we had Kotaku’s “How Bioware’s Anthem went wrong”, which talked about “Bioware magic” and a workplace environment that left people unable to work for months at a time. Then, Game Informer did an article on “The Rise and Fall of Telltale”, which documented a near-perpetual crunch as developers were strained to meet the tight deadlines of each episode of Telltale’s growing library of games.

And now, we’ve got a third report from our pals at Polygon: “How Fortnite’s success led to months of intense crunch at Epic Games”, which is perhaps the most disturbing report yet. Because while Bioware allowed people to take “stress leave” and TellTale would eventually suffer the consequences of their ways (which left people without a job and severance), Epic Games has a “meat grinder” attitude where they can happily and easily replace anyone who’s unwilling to endure up to 100-hour workweeks, casually discarding anyone who dare speak up, speak out, or try to maintain a life outside the company.

The report is well worth a read, as it’s fairly short as these things go, but it contains a number of disturbing quotes from developers who asked to hide their identity lest they suffer professional repercussions from Epic or other, future studios.

“I work an average 70 hours a week… There’s probably at least 50 or even 100 other people at Epic working those hours. I know people who pull 100-hour weeks. The company gives us unlimited time off, but it’s almost impossible to take the time. If I take time off, the workload falls on other people, and no one wants to be that guy… The biggest problem is that we’re patching all the time. The executives are focused on keeping Fortnite popular for as long as possible, especially with all the new competition that’s coming in.”

It goes on.

“The executives keep reacting and changing things. Everything has to be done immediately. We’re not allowed to spend time on anything. If something breaks — a weapon, say — then we can’t just turn it off and fix it with the next patch. It has to be fixed immediately, and all the while, we’re still working on next week’s patch. It’s brutal.”

And on.

“All [management] wanted was people who are disposable… the situation was, ‘Come in and do as many hours as we need you.’ They put the contractors in a situation where if they don’t do that overtime, they know they’re not coming back.

And that’s just a few of the examples from the “dozen” interviews that Polygon did with former and current employees. And in fairness, they also spoke to an Epic spokesperson, who made a very bad show of trying to defend and refute many of these claims. Again, you can read that disaster in the article itself.

So yeah. The industry is still messed up, live service games are built on the back of near-endless crunch, and Epic has officially lost whatever high ground it might have enjoyed.

Good times.