Recently, the controversy over working conditions in game development has moved from the punishing workload involved in shipping big releases like Red Dead Redemption 2 to the stresses of keeping popular online games constantly updated, thanks to a Polygon report on the relentless crunch at Fortnite developer Epic.
While it may not move at the pace of the latest battle royale games, Blizzard’s evergeen online RPG World of Warcraft, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, still has an ambitious update schedule. The WOW team ships a major paid expansion, equivalent to a new game release, every two years, and substantial content updates every two to three months. So when I had the chance to interview John Hight, the executive producer and vice president for World of Warcraft at Blizzard, over video link last week, it was the first topic I raised.
“Generally our policy on the team itself is we want to be a no-crunch team,” Hight told me. “We’re not there 100% yet, but we’re really dramatically better than we were even five years ago, certainly 10 years ago. I think that very few parts of the team end up having to work any degree of overtime.”
Hight admitted that running a mature game such as WOW has its advantages: after 15 years of constant development, he said, “we’ve got a pretty good sense of what we need from a staffing standpoint”. But still, cultural change can be slow. “There’s still a few pockets… Largely this is people that are self-motivated, they want to put in just that extra little effort and they have a hard time letting go. As we’re finishing up a major patch or an expansion, I’m literally wandering the halls and saying, ‘Go home! It’ll still be there tomorrow.’