In an industry that's still struggling with crunch culture, Bugsnax developer Young Horses has decided to break with not just the games industry, but most industries in general. They've implemented a four-day workweek.
In an interview with , Young Horses co-founder and president Phil Tibitosk said that move was to fulfill the studio's ethos of "a healthy, creatively fulfilling business that supports our lifestyles."
"Those lifestyles being ones where growth of t✃he studio is not very important and sustainability of the happiness of the people who work here is much more our focus," Tibitosk said.
The studio began a trial run of its four-day workweek last July, moving from 35 hours per person per week down to just 32. Each person works longer and the four days they're working, but there's also a day of rest breaking up what was once a five-day workweek.
Tibitosk noted that the transition was relatively simple. After the eight-person team agreed to the trial, the trial run went off without a hitch and so the studio made the switch permanent. Young Horse's small size also made it easy to measure the team's productivity to ensure that losing three hours per week per person didn't hurt overall efforts.
"We know what we have to get done and by when, or we're making our own schedule entirely and things get done when they get done," Tibitosk added.
Although Young Horse's small size made it easier to move to a four-day workweek, Tibitoski said it was still possible for larger developers to make the move too, but it would require buy-in from the top. That doesn't seem all that likely, given the current anti-labor response from companies like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Activision and Ubisoft.
Crunch is still very much a problem in the game industry, and not just because it leads to developer burnout. Hardspace Shipbreaker dev Rory McGuire 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:recently told TheGamer, "There’s countle🧜ss studies [that show] after 🤡just two weeks of crunch, productivity falls, and no company crunches for just two weeks. They crunch for months and months.”