CEO of Dead by Daylight devs Behaviour Interactive explains why they abolished crunch

Rémi Racine, CEO and executive producer at Behaviour Interactive, creators of games like Dead by Daylight, recently published a blog post with the title "Why I Abolished Crunch Time and Never Looked Back". In it he explains the 10-year journey that changed Behaviour from a company where "dishevelled employees groggy from another all-nighter" were a common sight to one where "crunch time is but a vague memory, where employees can always pick up their kids at school or daycare."

Racine explains that step one was to ban employees staying overnight and sleeping in the office, followed by no longer encouraging them to work on weekends. The end result, he explains was this: "In 2018, 0.25% of all hours worked at Behaviour were in overtime; that is not even enough hours to warrant a full-time position. That same year we launched 100 updates, collaborated to the creation of 15 new games, and gained 20,763,454 new players worldwide."

The results seem to speak for themselves. Though nobody's forced to work longer than their allotted hours, the company's seen no ill effects. "Since I enforced the no crunch time policy," Racine writes, "I’ve never lost a contract or a client; never missed a deadline; never gone over budget and, most importantly, never stopped growing."

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.