The Lighthouse of Guro: Korea, Crunch and the Fight Over the 52-Hour Week

In February 2017, a Korean reporter stood outside an office tower in Guro, southwest Seoul, late at night. The building should have been dark. Instead, light leaked through the blinds on floor after floor. Locals had a nickname for it: "the lighthouse of Guro". The tower was the headquarters of Netmarble, one of Korea's biggest game companies.

Inside, staff had their own jokes. Going home at 10pm counted as a half-day. Midnight was leaving on time. Two in the morning was overtime.

That reporting, and a death at the company that reached the National Assembly days later, helped push Korea into one of the world's boldest experiments in regulating game development hours. In July 2018 a 52-hour weekly cap began to apply at large companies. Eight years on, the cap is under pressure from studio bosses who say games cannot be made that way, while workers say the overtime has simply gone underground.

This is a story about Korea, but it is also about every studio on earth. Here is what crunch is, why it keeps happening and what has actually changed.

What crunch means

Crunch is the industry's word for long stretches of compulsory or expected overtime before a deadline: a launch, a demo for a trade show, a big update. It is not unique to games, but games are especially prone to it. Projects are large, creative and hard to estimate, and release dates are often fixed by marketing long before the game is finished.

The surveys tell the same story across two decades. In a 2004 survey by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), fewer than 3% of respondents said they worked no overtime at all, and 35% reported weeks of 65 to 80 hours. By 2019, 40% of IGDA respondents had crunched at least once in the previous year, and only 8% received extra pay for it.

The scandals that named it

The modern conversation began with a blog post. In 2004, Erin Hoffman, writing anonymously as "EA Spouse", described her partner's endless overtime at Electronic Arts. Lawsuits followed, and EA agreed to pay about $15 million to employees and to reclassify some developers as hourly workers eligible for overtime.

Big launches kept the issue in the headlines. In 2018, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser said in an interview that the team had been working 100-hour weeks on Red Dead Redemption 2, a remark he later said referred to a small senior writing team over a short period. It nonetheless opened a public debate about the studio's culture. In September 2020, CD Projekt Red told staff that six-day weeks were mandatory to finish Cyberpunk 2077, despite earlier promises that crunch would not be required. The game's troubled launch that December made the cost look even harder to justify.

There are counter-examples. In October 2021, Eidos-Montréal and Eidos-Sherbrooke moved to a four-day working week. The Game Outcomes Project, a study of developer survey data, found that mandatory crunch was associated with less successful games, not more.

Korea's turn: the lighthouse goes dark

Korea's version of the story was sharper because its games industry grew so fast. Netmarble rose from a mobile publisher to one of the country's largest companies in a few years, and its staff paid for that speed.

A survey of Netmarble employees by the group Labor Health Solidarity, reported in February 2017, found that 47.3% worked overtime three or more times a week, and that the average month ran to about 258 hours, around one and a half times the national average for regular workers. 30.6% said their longest continuous stay at the office had been 36 hours or more.

On February 9, 2017, a forum at the National Assembly asked whether the sudden death of a Netmarble worker was coincidence or the inevitable result of those hours. Netmarble Games' chief executive Kwon Young-sik promised change: no routine overtime or weekend work, substitute leave when overtime was unavoidable, and flexible working arrangements.

The industry's unions date from the same period. In September 2018, Nexon staff formed the games industry's first union, named "Starting Point". A statement of support from Naver's union that week accused many game companies of relying on unpaid overtime "in the name of crunch mode". We look at what those unions have done since in our story on the Neople strike.

The 52-hour week

Korea's labour law sets a 40-hour standard week, with up to 12 hours of overtime by agreement, a cap of 52. Companies with 300 or more employees came under the strict 52-hour limit from July 2018; firms with 50 to 299 workers were given a grace period that ran until January 2022.

For big game companies, it forced real changes. Many dropped the old "comprehensive wage" contracts that bundled overtime into a fixed salary, which had allowed long hours without extra pay. Unions at four game companies later reported that hours had improved after the cap and the end of those contracts.

But enforcement found gaps. In April 2021, a government labour inspection of one game company with 1,135 employees found that 329, about 30%, had broken the 12-hour weekly overtime limit, and that ₩380 million in wages had gone unpaid. A union survey in Pangyo in late 2020 found about three in ten IT and game workers reporting weeks over 52 hours.

The shadow work problem

The latest numbers suggest the overtime has changed shape rather than disappeared. Figures from the Korea Creative Content Agency cited by Wi Jong-hyun, president of the Korean Game Society, in September 2025 showed game workers putting in 44.7 official hours a week in 2024, against an all-industry average of 38.7. Unofficial work outside office hours, answering messages or fixing bugs from home, had risen to 5.7 hours a week, from 2.4 hours in 2020.

Wi called it a paradox: a law designed to cut hours had encouraged invisible overwork. He argued for extending the maximum period over which hours can be averaged from six months to at least a year, because crunch tends to cluster in the three to six months around launch. The same data showed 58.7% of surveyed workers supported more flexible use of the 52-hour rule, and 43.5% said crunch was necessary, up six points on the year before.

Studio owners have gone further. At President Lee Jae-myung's meeting with games executives on October 15, 2025, Netmarble chairman Bang Jun-hyuk reportedly asked repeatedly for flexibility on working hours, comparing games to the fashion business, where products must be finished quickly to catch a trend. His remarks were cut short by the president's spokesperson so that other executives could speak, and no change was agreed.

By the numbers

• 47.3%: Netmarble staff working overtime 3+ times a week (2017 survey)
• 52: maximum weekly hours under Korean law since July 2018 for large firms
• 329 of 1,135: staff at one game company found breaking the overtime cap (2021)
• 44.7: official weekly hours for Korean game workers in 2024, versus 38.7 across all industries
• 2.4 to 5.7: weekly hours of unofficial off-hours work, 2020 to 2024
• 40%: IGDA respondents who crunched in the past year (2019); only 8% got extra pay
• $15 million: EA's settlement after the "EA Spouse" lawsuits

What to watch

The debate is not going away. The games industry wants flexible averaging; unions want enforcement; and the government that cheered games at the October 2025 meeting has so far given no sign of loosening the cap.

WGC's take: crunch is a planning failure dressed up as passion. The best evidence, from the Game Outcomes Project to Korea's own experience, suggests it does not make better games, and the people who pay for it are mostly juniors and contractors. Flexible averaging could help studios with genuine launch peaks, but only if it comes with honest time records and paid overtime. Watch the National Assembly's labour committee and next year's KOCCA employment survey; if the shadow hours keep climbing, the 52-hour week has a problem no amount of flexibility will fix.