Death Stranding: Hideo Kojima confirms Sony studio in 'Crunch' period to meet release date (Pic: Kojima Productions)
With PS4 sci-fi adventure Death Stranding set for a release date of November 8th, Hideo Kojima has now revealed that the company are entering crunch phase as they push to get the game ready for launch.
Via Twitter Hideo Kojima announced that his company are currently trying to finish up the development cycle of the game. Kojimas tweet reads:
DEATH STRANDING has the element of something [thats] never existed before, the gameplay, the world atmosphere, the visuals which we aimed to create. The studio I established [is] trying our best to deliver the product launching on Nov 8th. Still in crunch time of dev.
However, a single word in that statement will send shivers running down many peoples spines: crunch. There has been a lot of discussion over crunch culture in the industry of late, with heavy criticism laid onto companies that demand employees work long hours late in a games development cycle often for little or no extra pay.
Aside from monetary concerns, the worry with rushing a video game to meet a given release date is that this often has a negative effect on the mental and physical health of the staff working on that game.
DEATH STRANDING has the element of something never existed before, the gameplay, the world atmosphere, the visuals which we aimed to create. The studio I established was tiny indies but trying our best to deliver the product launching on Nov 8th. Still in crunch time of dev pic.twitter.com/sNvTAc7wwB
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) August 1, 2019
As an example, before the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 it was widely reported that Rockstar staff were working unhealthy hours in order to complete the cowboy adventure on time.
Co-founder of Rockstar games Dan Houser revealed this information in an interview with New York Magazine stating: We were working 100-hour weeks, [several times in 2018].
Though Houser went on to say We obviously dont expect anyone else to work this way. Across the whole company, we have some senior people who work very hard purely because theyre passionate about a project. His statement still raised questions about the ethics of staff working overtime to push for a set launch date – something we know happens a lot in the gaming industry.
Death Stranding currently has a release date of November 8th and will be a PS4 exclusive. Hopefully, staff wont have to work unethical levels of overtime to complete the project. Then again, its hard to speculate as we still dont know a huge amount about the game!
Everything Kojima has revealed about Death Stranding so far has been relatively abstract. We do know that youll be playing as delivery man Sam Porter Bridges (performed by NormanRead More – Source
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