Blizzard would not be where it currently is without periods of overwork or “crunch”, the company’s now-departed co-founder Mike Morhaime told Eurogamer at Gamelab this week. However, he feels that this way of working is “not sustainable” and that the industry as a whole is moving away from it.
“Blizzard has definitely evolved around crunch,” Morhaime commented during a roundtable interview after an on-stage discussion of his 28 years at the company, which began life in 1991 as three-head studio Silicon & Synapse, Inc. “In our early days we crunched crazy hours to get the games done. I think if you’re a small studio, you’re living or dying by the success of the next project, it takes a lot of superhuman effort – or at least it did for us.”
“I can’t speak for other companies and I’m sure there are better ways of doing things, but for us, I don’t think we would have been as successful if we hadn’t put in everything that we had.”
