If you need mandatory crunch to ship a game in 2020 you are truly bad at your job. You have no excuse. You fucked up, you constantly made bad decisions, and you were unwilling to face reality.

Games have been a professional career for more than two decades. If you haven't formed the knowledge and patterns of how to do it properly by now, you should leave the industry because you aren't helping.

If you are new to the industry and don't know how to ship a game without overtime, for the love of all that is holy, fucking ask someone! There's piles of us who know how to do it and would gladly tell you what you don't want to hear.

Here's how to not crunch: Constantly re-evaluate features and timeline. When someone tells you something won't fit, then you kill something to make it fit or extend your time line.

That's it. That's the whole thing. That's all you have to do.

If you come at me saying "but then we won't make a great game" let me tell you: you'll make better games when you learn to plan and adjust properly.

Tired people make mistakes. Tired people take significantly longer to get things done. All you are doing is burning people.

You think you'll get more done by crunching but you won't. You'll get more done by being calm and measured and making sure people don't have to work under extreme stress and pressure.

All the research shows that after ~two weeks of crunch, people's productivity starts to drop to *lower* than their non-crunch output. This literally means that crunch slows you down.

"But sometimes stuff happens at the very end that requires overtime."

Nope, sorry. If you schedule to be done your build a month before your hard deliverable date, then if you find a critical issue on the last day, you have a month to fix it.

"But then we have less time to make a good game."

Newsflash noob, when you say this, the inverse is true: you never had enough time to make your ideal game. And this is the hard reality.

You either setup an infinitely sustainable timeline, or face reality.

BTW my original tweet said "mandatory crunch" but you should be able to ship a game in 2020 with almost no overtime at all, and most definitely no crunch.