Workers' rights in the game industry is a topic that's reached fever-pitch as of late, sparked by mass layoffs that come without warning, studio closures, and horror stories of game dev death marches.
The labor required to make giant, sprawling worlds is partly the reason such stories exist at all. And when you think of virtual worlds that are astonishingly huge, Ubisoft and its open world Assassin's Creed series comes immediately to mind.
In a recent interview with the leaders behind Assassin's Creed Odyssey studio Ubisoft Quebec, the conversation turned to crunch and work-life balance. Though any one person's experience in the same studio will differ from another's (the bosses here admit there is work to be done), they were able to offer a view from the top of one of the biggest game productions of 2018.
Edited for length and clarity.
So you’ve got all this experience managing big teams and things like that, and of course right now we’re doing this interview amid these conversations about these labor issues, we're talking about unionization, talking about crunch, these mass layoffs that happen all of a sudden, work-life-balance.
I’m wondering, what do you think about these conversations that are happening, and how do you address these things at Ubisoft, at your studio?
Patrick Klaus, Ubisoft Quebec Studio managing director: Yeah, it’s a very real topic. And it’s something where the studio, over the past few years, has tried extremely hard to be super-proactive about, trying to hit the sweet spot of competing with the best, but also making sure that our teams, our talent, our creators, are in a good position to continue to develop, [they're] feeling good about staying at the studio and we want to provide a certain work-life balance.
"We...think that it is a false economy to burn out our teams. We risk losing them, or we risk disengaging them, and we will simply not get the best out of those talents if we’re forcing them to work insane hours in crunch."
We put a huge focus [on this] post-Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, which was a tough one. It was our first big triple-A [game] coming out of Quebec City. [We had] to look at improving some of the ways we develop our games in terms of scope, of the work that we take on in terms of prioritizing our investments, in terms of role and responsibility, in terms of tools; to be more efficient in the way we work.
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.
We collectively, on the management team, think that it is a false economy to burn out our teams. We risk losing them, or we risk disengaging them, and we will simply not get the best out of those talents if we’re forcing them to work insane hours in crunch. We’ve got some way to go, but I’m feeling good about what we have achieved.
Marc-Alexis Côté, senior producer, Odyssey: Let me jump in...The way we’re going to keep making better games is if we keep working together as a team, and keep growing the team. The only way to be able to do that is if people want to keep working together. And the way to do that is to have a good work-life balance on the team -- because [a bad balance] is when problems start to occur.
I’ve been at Ubisoft Quebec since June 27, 2005, since the day the studio opened. I’ve been a programmer, a level designer, a game director, a game designer, a creative director -- I’ve seen pretty much everything. I’ve seen the growth of the studio and I’ve seen game production from many different angles. And definitely, at least here, within Ubisoft, the way we approach these big triple-A productions that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars is very different today than what it was in the past.
I think where we have matured is in the way where we manage what we are trying to achieve. It might sound trivial, but [the way] you avoid crunch in the long term is to continually reassess where you are, what you’re trying to achieve, how much work is left to be done, and to become better at measuring that.
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 reassess it with them to always make sure that it is doable.
Just to follow up: Patrick had mentioned being proactive, you talked about tools and efficiency and evaluating [progress] on a regular basis. Could you discuss in practical terms how you communicate with your staff? You mention every two weeks you talk to people? And also what metrics do you keep track of as far as the labor and the workload go?
"It might sound trivial, but [the way] you avoid crunch in the long term is to continually reassess where you are, what you’re trying to achieve, how much work is left to be done, and to become better at measuring that."
Côté: We try to have our teams evaluate the workload themselves. So we have creative objectives that come down from creative direction, from the teams themselves. But we want them to scope their own work, so we say things like: "This is the high-level goal that we’re trying to achieve, how would you achieve this?”
We try to bring the team in, bring a lot of principles of agile development into the larger scope of game development, so you don’t necessarily approach this as if it were only an engineering project, but rather try to approach this as a multidisciplinary work where everybody sits together and tries to [do] this work together.
And if it doesn’t fit -- sometimes the teams will decide, “This is so important for us that we’ll put in extra work.” And a lot of times when we see a team put in extra work, what we’ll do is we’ll rest them a bit afterwards; again, [in order to] not accumulate the kind of debt we often see on a three-year or four-year cycle of a project.
If a team says, “Oh we really think this will make the game better, we want to do an extra push.” It’s like okay, but then you need to lift the foot from the pedal just a bit to stay in good shape and maintain this kind of balance. These are the kinds of tools we put at the disposal of the teams to be able to scope properly, and come up with solutions to attain the creative vision so that it's not a dictatorship. Rather, it's really something that is an ongoing discussion between the management, the team, and the creative part of the team as well. And, again, resting people on a regular basis so that they can stay fresh and motivated.
A lot of jobs in studios in creative industries -- they’re not set 9-5 jobs. Do you think that’s a possibility; to have that kind “regular schedule” of a “regular job” in game development?
Côté: We give a lot of flexibility to our employees to structure their schedule around the work that they need to do. I really try to see this as kind of a three-year cycle, or four-year cycle depending on the project.
A lot of time during the development of the project, it’s not a 9-5 job as you would say. It might be a 9-3 job, it might be a 9-4 job. Sometimes it’s a 9-6 job, so again production of a video game is not constant work. We’re asking people to be creative, that’s what we look for in people.
But we try to give them the flexibility of both. It’s not about just showing up to work. If you’re in more of a down period, we think it's good for you to be home if you need to be, and let you cool down and think about things that could make either the game better or your career better, or everything.
But sometimes...and again a lot of times it comes from the people themselves. They have a brilliant idea, they want to implement it, so they’ll push for a couple of weeks and then rest a little bit.
Klaus: If I could add, what we’re finding is that we’re getting better results with a certain amount of autonomy [for our teams]. Obviously, with autonomy comes responsibility of the teams, of the individuals. That works better for us.
But also, we are not in New York, San Francisco, or London in terms of talent pool. So we need to keep our teams, our creators, fulfilled and happy and engaged in the studio. Because if we lose them, you know, it’s tough to find that level of talent that you’ve invested in. So it’s win-win to really care for our teams, not just to ship a game but also to [keep] our teams healthy.
In terms of some of the checkpoints also, in our projects we look at the deliverables, we look at what was achieved against what was planned. We also analyze, together, the team health results, based on certain indicators.
What certain indicators are you surveying? Can you give me some examples as far as measuring team health?
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