The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) said on Dec. 19 they published a report titled "2025 game worker labor environment survey," conducted on 3,000 people working in the game industry.
According to the report, the industry's average official weekly working hours were 42.9 hours, a slight decrease from a year earlier. However, unofficial working hours, such as work outside the office, were 9.2 hours per week, up 3.5 hours from the previous year (5.7 hours), indicating that the actual labor burden remains high.
In particular, the intensity of "crunch mode," meaning high-intensity work right before a deadline, increased further. The crunch mode experience rate was 35.5%, similar to the previous year (34.3%), but the average duration surged to 16.2 days, more than double from the previous year (7.4 days). Structural factors such as increased routine workload (42.0%) and system errors (40.6%) were analyzed as the main causes.
Differences in compensation systems by company size were also clear. Among large corporations with 300 or more employees, 72.5% provided monetary compensation for extra work, while only 7.7% of very small corporations with fewer than five employees paid monetary compensation. Instead, corporations with fewer than five employees guaranteed rest after crunch mode at a rate of 63.5%, showing that compensation methods diverge by size.
The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology was found to have a positive impact on work efficiency. A total of 72.0% of workers said they use AI in actual tasks, and that it reduced working time by an average of 32.4%. Productivity and the quality of creative outputs also improved by 34.8%, and 70.3% of workers said they intend to continue using AI technology going forward.