Jobye-Kyle Karmaker

When I left Naughty Dog late last year they threatened to withhold my final paycheck until I signed additional paperwork stating I wouldn't share their production practices. They finally relented when I assured them that was most likely illegal...

Hey Jonathan, while I am in no way trying to doubt what you said at all: Isn't this an industry-wide problem beyond ND? Like all the big studios probably got this problem, or is it just ND is the worst bcuz it's in the spotlight with their high-profile, AAA games?

It’s not a widely reported thing because it’s not “sexy” but I’ve worked for some of the biggest/best studios in the industry and almost none of them crunched - and the ones that did had extremely short crunch. Plenty of studios have great work life balance and create GREAT games

can you please give some examples of the game studios you worked for so that I can at least convince the people that their wrong when they say that Great games require sacrifice and hard work and crunch.

Worked at Bungie on Destiny 2, didn’t crunch a single day. I was at Monolith on Shadow of War and crunched MAYBE three weeks? And every day we were fed. Worked on Forza 7- and again didn’t crunch a single day. Funcom/The Secret World and Turbine/Infunite Crisis NO CRUNCH