PDF Summary:Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, by Jason Schreier

Video games are meant to be fun, but making video games can be anything but. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, video game journalist Jason Schreier gives a rare look into the inner workings of the video game industry and the harsh reality of being a game developer: long hours, enormous pressure to meet deadlines, and an unpredictable, constantly changing work environment. Schreier discusses the development cycles of 10 games, ranging from indie darlings to AAA flops, as told by developers whom Schreier interviewed.

This guide organizes the themes and key ideas from the case studies in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels into four challenges that video game developers face: accounting for games’ interactivity, constantly evolving technology, the impossibility of making and adhering to a schedule during development, and interference from people outside of the development studio. Our commentary adds background information for readers less familiar with the gaming industry and further explores the human impact of industry practices.

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To understand the challenges Dragon Age’s developers faced, it’s helpful to first understand what a “game engine” is. In this context, an engine is like a skeleton for the game—it includes basic features such as physics, graphical rendering, and the save and load functions. Game engines save a lot of time by allowing developers to build off of that preexisting design instead of creating each new game from scratch.

The game engines used for previous Dragon Age games had become outdated, and they couldn’t render the kind of graphical effects the developers wanted. Therefore, BioWare decided to create Dragon Age: Inquisition using the then-top-of-the-line Frostbite game engine.

However, Frostbite was originally designed for first-person shooters; a completely different genre of game. As a result, developers had to program custom tools to enable even basic functions in Dragon Age, like swinging a sword instead of shooting a gun.

(Shortform note: The problems with Frostbite didn’t end with Dragon Age: Inquisition. Several other BioWare titles made around the same time also used Frostbite and experienced similar difficulties. Many gamers blamed Frostbite for the bugs and other problems those games tended to have upon release. Some also tried to put the blame on BioWare’s parent company, Electronic Arts, for forcing their game studios to use the Frostbite engine—although project managers have since come forward to say that isn’t true and using Frostbite was their own decision.)

Even after all of that extra work, the engine was unreliable, glitchy, and prone to crashing, costing developers even more time and labor. To make matters worse, the Frostbite engine got frequent updates, and each update required the Dragon Age team to manually move all of their code from the old version to the new one.

(Shortform note: This example of Dragon Age: Inquisition illustrates the importance of having not just a powerful game engine but also the right game engine for what you’re trying to make. While engines like Frostbite are designed for specific types of games, others—for instance, Unreal Engine—are much more flexible, according to some experts. In fact, many games from major studios across a variety of genres were made using Unreal Engine 4. Unfortunately for the Dragon Age team, they worked on this game before Unreal Engine 4 existed, and the previous version was outdated.)

Due to these issues, Dragon Age: Inquisition was delayed by over a year. Even so, developers were still adding and testing basic features just months before its November 2014 release. This strained development cycle resulted in months of mandatory overtime for developers to get the game ready in time. (We’ll further discuss the problem of mandatory overtime later.)

(Shortform note: According to BioWare’s former executive producer, the studio knew there would be a significant delay to Dragon Age: Inquisition because of the challenges of working with the Frostbite engine, but they agreed to the timetable set by Electronic Arts anyway. The reasoning behind that decision is unclear. Another problem the studio faced was the ambitious scope of the in-game world; even with a year’s delay and developers working around the clock, Inquisition simply didn’t have enough content to fill it, which led to a world that some describe as empty and dull.)

Schreier adds that this story, at least, has a happy ending. Despite the numerous challenges during development, Dragon Age: Inquisition was a hit—it blew away the sales numbers from the previous two games, and it received excellent reviews from game critics.

(Shortform note: Dragon Age: Inquisition was so popular that it became prominent in Google searches featuring the word “inquisition.” As a result, the Russell Crowe movie The Pope’s Exorcist accidentally used the symbol of Dragon Age’s Inquisition in place of the symbol of the real-world Spanish Inquisition.)

Challenge 3: Scheduling Is Difficult

The third major challenge that game developers face is knowing exactly how long it’ll take to finish making a game. Schreier notes a few reasons for this.

First, delays and setbacks are almost inevitable during game production, due in large part to the development challenges discussed in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Second, developers might underestimate how long certain tasks will take.

(Shortform note: As risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in Antifragile, predicting the future—such as how long a game will take to develop—is practically impossible. Furthermore, predictions become less accurate the farther into the future they go; for example, weather forecasts are only accurate for a few days, after which they become infamously untrustworthy. So, for video games with development cycles lasting years, any kind of predicted timeline is likely to end up being inaccurate.)

Schreier adds that another common reason for delays is that games are art, and it’s hard to know when a work of art is finished. Even if a game is fully functional, it’s hard to say that it’s “done.” For example, perhaps the graphics could be improved or a new feature added to make the game even better.

Are Video Games Art?

Schreier’s statement that video games are an art form is arguably controversial. Many people, such as famous film critic Roger Ebert, argue that video games are simply games, and they can’t be called art any more than baseball or poker can be called art.

However, some fans of video games point out that they have images, music, and stories, all of which had to be created by artists of some kind. Others point out that games can evoke emotions as effectively as any other art form, lending further credence to the game-as-artform argument.

Still others, including some video game developers, say the question is irrelevant. Whether video games are formally recognized as an art form has no bearing on the work and passion that go into creating them, nor on how much people enjoy them.

The Controversial Solution: Mandatory Overtime

Schreier explains that because development cycles often take much longer than expected, “crunch”—meaning enormous amounts of mandatory overtime—is a common practice in video game development.

Game studios frequently resort to mandatory overtime to meet important deadlines, such as having demos ready for major conventions. In some cases, developers have been known to work for as much as 14 hours a day, with no days off, in the weeks leading up to a major deadline.

Such grueling schedules take a heavy toll on developers’ personal lives and mental health. Keeping up with the work requires a fervent passion for gaming and a workaholic mindset; even then, exhaustion and burnout are common problems in the video game industry.

Does Mandatory Overtime Work?

A large and growing body of research indicates that mandatory overtime isn’t just bad for employees—it’s also bad for the company involved. First, it’s simply not effective: People become fatigued and reach a point where more hours worked don’t translate to more tasks getting done. Furthermore, exhaustion and overwork result in employees missing work, getting sick, and quitting their jobs, all of which hurts the company’s bottom line.

So what’s the ideal number of hours to work in a week? There’s no simple answer, but research has provided a couple of benchmarks: Working more than 45 hours per week is harmful to physical and mental health in numerous ways, and the maximum productive hours for the average employee is around 55 per week. Any time worked beyond that 55-hour benchmark doesn’t result in increased productivity. This suggests that it’s neither healthy nor productive for a developer to work 14-hour days, as that would amount to 70-hour weeks.

Case Study #1: Uncharted 4

Schreier says that almost every video game company resorts to mandatory overtime sometimes, but Naughty Dog is infamous for it. The company is known for creating games with gorgeous graphics. Everything from wrinkles in the main character’s clothes to leaves on trees is rendered with loving—some would say obsessive—attention to detail.

(Shortform note: Recently, Naughty Dog’s reputation has taken a bit of a hit thanks to leaks of their upcoming remake of The Last of Us. Some critics report that the remake is nothing but an almost-unnoticeable graphical update being sold as an entirely new game. As a result, these leaks have some gamers accusing the company of making a cheap cash grab using one of their most popular games.)

However, that level of perfectionism takes a lot of time to achieve, which is why Naughty Dog is also known for exploiting mandatory overtime. In the case of the studio’s hit action-adventure game Uncharted 4, Schreier says that employees often had to work past midnight for days on end to hit deadlines, including on weekends. While it’s common for other studios to have their employees on such a schedule for a few weeks, Naughty Dog’s developers worked those hours for months.

Uncharted 4 sold 2.7 million copies in its first week and got excellent reviews, with particular praise for its graphics. However, after its release, numerous developers quit their jobs at Naughty Dog, citing burnout as their reason for leaving.

The Impact of Crunch Culture

Schreier may be understating the impacts of Naughty Dog’s mandatory overtime: A former employee said that at least one developer ended up in the hospital from overwork, and around 70% of the studio’s game designers quit after Uncharted 4’s release. In addition, Naughty Dog’s high turnover rate and reputation for requiring long hours have caused problems for the studio in recent years—experienced developers aren’t willing to work there, so the studio has had to resort to hiring industry newcomers, resulting in significant production delays.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels was published in 2017; in 2022, Schreier stated in an article for Bloomberg that the video game industry is growing less tolerant of “crunch culture.” However, in the same article, he notes that crunch is still deeply ingrained in the industry. He says that’s unlikely to change until studio executives stop glorifying overtime and start valuing their employees’ work-life balance instead.

Case Study #2: Stardew Valley

Mandatory overtime doesn’t just hit large studios like Naughty Dog. It can be even worse for small studios and independent developers who don’t have as many employees to share the workload.

Schreier spoke to Eric Barone, the one-man team behind the beloved farming simulator Stardew Valley. Barone spent over four years working on the game, during which he says he put in anywhere from eight to 15 hours a day. He consistently told friends and family that it would be done in another month or two, but that timeline kept stretching since he had no supervisors pushing him to finalize and release the game.

(Shortform note: Creating your own game like Barone did is more doable than ever thanks to the accessibility of programming software and how powerful personal computers have become. However, there are downsides to independent game development: Making a game by yourself is a hugely time-consuming endeavor (as Barone discovered) and one that you won’t get paid for unless your game does well.)

Eventually, Barone struck a deal with a small publisher called Chucklefish Games, and Stardew Valley finally came out in February 2016. The game was an unexpected hit; it sold over a million copies in two months and made Barone a millionaire practically overnight.

(Shortform note: Barone publicly distanced himself from Chucklefish Games in 2019 when the studio was accused of exploiting developers and relying on unpaid labor. He emphasized that he was the only developer who worked on Stardew Valley—implying that he wasn’t benefitting from unfair labor practices—and said Chucklefish was only responsible for publishing the game and implementing the multiplayer feature. Chucklefish released a statement in 2022 that didn’t directly attack Barone’s post but made a point of listing the numerous features and re-releases the studio handled as Stardew Valley’s popularity continued to grow beyond what they or Barone had ever imagined.)

Schreier notes that Barone’s work situation didn’t improve after Stardew Valley came out; a few months later, Barone worked himself into burnout and couldn't bring himself to work at all. Having so many players meant that Barone was suddenly under enormous pressure to fix bugs and release new features. He frequently pulled all-nighters to develop and release patches—small updates designed to fix problems in the game—but those patches often created as many issues as they solved.

(Shortform note: Even in 2023, seven years after the game’s release, Barone was still developing patches for Stardew Valley, albeit at a much slower pace. In a Tweet from April 2023, Barone said that he was currently working on yet another update for the game that would add new content, including some much-requested new dialogue for its characters.)

Barone took the summer off to rest before entering a cycle of intense work and equally intense burnout. He’d push himself for weeks to crank out new patches—then, he’d have to take weeks off to recover.

(Shortform note: Burnout is more than simple fatigue; it’s a serious condition with symptoms including anxiety, insomnia, heart palpitations, and the inability to make even simple decisions. Furthermore, recovering from burnout often takes longer than just a few weeks or months—severe cases can require up to a year of rest. Forcing yourself to work before you’re recovered can trap you in a cycle of burnout like the one Barone found himself in. Trying to push yourself through a period of burnout can cause further mental, emotional, and even physical harm, up to and including death.)

Schreier says that he got in touch with Barone in December 2016 to see how he was doing. Barone replied that he was exhausted, sick of Stardew Valley, and thinking about starting a new game with a more realistic timetable.

(Shortform note: Barone, also known by his gaming alias ConcernedApe, announced that he’d begun work on a new game called Haunted Chocolatier in late 2020—although, as noted above, he continued developing patches for Stardew Valley even after beginning this new project.)

Challenge 4: Outside Forces Interfere With Development

The final challenge we’ll discuss doesn’t relate to game development itself. Instead, it’s a product of collaboration with investors, publishers, and other people outside of the game studio whose interests in selling the product might conflict with the developers’ interests in creating it.

Games Often Require Collaboration

Schreier points out that there’s more to making a video game than writing endless lines of code. Developers also have commercial and legal matters to tackle before releasing a game, which usually means getting other people involved in the development process.

First, studios need to pay their developers and cover overhead costs. Unless a company is large enough to cover all of its costs, that means striking funding deals with people outside of the studio.

However, when investors are funding a game, they have a say in the development process. For example, they might push for a game to be released before developers think it’s ready so they can start seeing returns on their investments. They can also pull their financial support if they’re unhappy.

(Shortform note: Problems like these often come from a lack of a shared vision—developers and investors have different ideas about how their game should be made, so they end up unintentionally working against each other. The solution to this problem is communication and collaboration: Developers should work together with investors to establish reasonable goals and milestones and keep them apprised of their progress.)

Second, developers often have business executives weighing in on their work, and possibly even copyright holders (if a game is based on an existing intellectual property). This can be especially frustrating because developers could find themselves taking orders from people who aren’t experienced in video game development. But without those people’s support, the game can’t get made at all.

(Shortform note: As a counterpoint to Schreier, there are times when outside perspectives and ideas can be beneficial. Someone with no background in game development might come up with a unique idea that people steeped in game development culture and practices would never think of. For example, an executive might provide some insight about how a character in a leadership role should behave, while a copyright holder likely knows key details about the setting that others have overlooked or forgotten. However, as with the “shared vision” principle above, communication and collaboration are key—it shouldn’t just be an outsider overriding developers’ decisions.)

Case Study: Star Wars 1313

Schreier ends this book with the story of the unreleased Star Wars 1313, a game in which players would have controlled a bounty hunter as he tried to make a living in the slums of the planet Coruscant. The developers, working for the company LucasArts, overcame numerous developmental and creative challenges only to see their studio bought out and shut down by Disney.

The first major hurdle that LucasArts’s developers faced was from outside the game studio. Star Wars creator George Lucas (who is, by his own admission, not a gamer) kept demanding creative changes. He thought those changes would be relatively minor, but in reality, they required the development team to redo weeks or months of work.

For example, Schreier says that with development already well underway, Lucas wanted the game’s main character to be Boba Fett—a popular character from the Star Wars movies—instead of the original character the design team had created. Lucas thought this would be a simple matter of changing the character’s appearance, but the developers had to completely rework the game’s controls and redesign the in-game architecture to account for the new movement options provided by Fett’s signature jetpack.

(Shortform note: George Lucas’s approach to Star Wars 1313 may have frustrated developers due to the extensive work his requests resulted in, but it isn’t unusual behavior for him. As Bob Iger explains in The Ride of a Lifetime, Lucas is notably possessive of Star Wars, and he sought to inject his own ideas into Star Wars products even after selling the rights to the franchise. For instance, Lucas was reportedly disappointed that filmmakers didn’t use his ideas in The Force Awakens, a Star Wars movie that he wasn’t supposed to contribute to.)

Despite these creative difficulties, a Star Wars 1313 demo was one of the biggest hits at a major gaming convention. Gamers and reviewers alike praised the demo and said they were excited for the full release.

However, Schreier reports that before the game was finished, Disney bought out LucasArts and shut down the company. Years of work on Star Wars 1313 had to be thrown away, while developers and fans alike realized that this promising game would never see the light of day.

The Legacy of Star Wars 1313 and LucasArts

Although Star Wars 1313 was eventually canceled, its popularity arguably lives on: Some of its ideas and designs seem to have been repurposed for television. For example, Grant Parker (one of the developers working on 1313) said that he spotted some of the set pieces he’d designed for the game in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

It’s also not entirely accurate to say that Disney shut down LucasArts. Rather, Disney shut down the production aspects of LucasArts and shifted the company’s focus to licensing. In other words, rather than making Star Wars games in-house, LucasArts would now sell the rights to make those games to other studios. For a while, there was even hope that Star Wars 1313 would be completed by another developer—however, that hasn’t yet come to pass.