Bungie Delays Destiny 2 Patch to Preserve Employees' Work-Life Balance

[Tsing]

Destiny 2 fans want their game updated straight away, but Bungie doesn't care. That's because the developer has a conscience and actually cares about the mental health of its employees.

The revelation stems from an issue with Destiny 2's Lord of Wolves shotgun, which is overpowered due to its ability to fire off multiple rounds in succession. Bungie said it would be shelving the fix until July because it was eager to maintain the work-life balance of its workers.

That's good news coming from an industry often criticized for ridiculous work hours and crunch time.

"We could take the patch off the… off the 'patch factory', more or less, and ask people to work super long [hours] and add this thing in," he said. "We're having the conversation about, is it worth doing that? Or is it worth preserving work-life balance and ship it later, in July?

"That's the 100%, god's honest truth. It's always a cost-benefit analysis for people who are working super hard."

 

[Zarathustra]

I feel this is one where the developer can't win.

Go with mandatory overtime, and you piss workers and customers off because you are mistreating your employees.

Delay the patch and you piss off customers with buggy games.

IMHO, the right answer is to not launch the damned game until it is completely tested and the fixes are already in place. I would like to see a return to John Carmack's good old "when it's done" launch philosophy. Publishers demanding that developers stick to a launch date come hell or high water is doing nothing but causing problems in the industry.

 

[Brian_B]

Well... there is a middle ground.

Security related patches and game-breaking bugs - those need to be addressed immediately. Especially since those should have been caught in QA testing before release.

QOL, feature fixes, etc. Those can be delayed.

Content Additions - you should have padded your release schedule sufficiently so that you don't have to push it back. I can see having to push it back for reasons, but one of those isn't "work-life balance"... the real reason is we didn't budget the time correctly or something went wrong. Saying "Work-life balance" is just a cop out to earn you some sympathy.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I agree about a middle ground but often a lot things can work against something as complex as modern AAA games. I'm more for workers rights as even with overtime some never realize the real tolls for putting in those long hours until long after the paycheck has been spent.