Speaking to GamesBeat, Half-Life: Alyx animator James Benson spoke about crunch culture at Valve and said that “it seems to me that Valve basically doesn’t think it’s good or useful in terms of good game development practice to slowly erode your home life by working you to death.” Designer Greg Coomer thinks that “explicitly, we’ve purposefully made it so that crunch mode is not the norm, and hopefully not a thing that goes on at Valve.” When there is crunch it’s rare, done in the last few weeks of development and is done by a smaller group who will work extended hours.

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Many will say that the Half-Life: Alyx reviews, which have mostly been incredibly positive, comes because of the company’s approach to crunch. The game shows what can happen when developers are not forced to work long, tiring hours where they are unable to see their families. Developers want to get their games released, but it could be much better for sales and reviews if crunch isn’t just optional, but is also very rare.

In comparison, Anthem, BioWare’s sci-fi RPG, had very poor reviews at launch. BioWare is now rebooting Anthem, say reports. That game was reportedly developed under crunch conditions, prompting some developers to have to take time off for several weeks or months.

Anthem and Half-Life: Alyx are only two games and there are good games that have been developed with crunch and bad ones that have been developed without it. However, it seems that games are more likely to be high quality if the developers can make them in a healthy way.

It seems unlikely that things will change with game development in 2020. CD Projekt RED has confirmed Cyberpunk 2077 will have crunch, but it will not be as bad as the crunch development on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. While it is positive that things have gotten better at that developer, there are many others where crunch is normal but it’s unclear what will make them all choose to change.

Half-Life: Alyx is available now for PC.

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Source: GamesBeat