13 ms·

Secret developers of the video game industry

106 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

danso 11y ago
Not to derail an otherwise interesting article, but the OP picked a not-great anecdote to lead with. The Red Ash Kickstarter was controversial because it was launched by the studio that was (and is) behind a high-profile Kickstarter: Mighty No. 9, a game billed as the spiritual successor to Mega Man which raised $3.85M. At the time that Red Ash was announced, Comcept claimed that Mighty No. 9 was pretty much done and that they needed to get another game into the pipeline. Midway through the Red Ash campaign, people noticed that Mighty No. 9 was marked by retailers as being delayed. When Comcept was questioned about this, they claimed that it was a mistake...only shortly after the Red Ash Kickstarter failed did Comcept admit that Mighty No. 9 would be delayed [1]. As you can imagine, that led backers to think that Comcept had tried to be hush-hush about the delay so that it wouldn't affect the Red Ash campaign. It hasn't helped matters since then that Mighty No. 9 continues to be delayed, even failing to meet a deadline to produce a demo that was meant to make up for the delay. So...to use Comcept in the lede of this story, as if it were the use of these "secret developers" that pissed fans off and caused the Kickstarter to fail...That just seems...a bit misguided...The OP couldn't find any other anecdote to lead off with? [1] http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mighty-no-9s-shady-delay-1722766843 http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mighty-no-9s-shady-delay-...
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  What makes you think there was only one thing that made fans upset? The OP links to a concerned fan, as well.
vvanders 11y ago
Crediting is a much larger issue than just what's referred to in the article. I worked on a title for ~3 years, many of those being 6-8 months of 75-100hr weeks. Saw marriages destroyed on that project, people pushed to the edge. I left ~4 months before ship because I knew if I didn't it would be the end of me. Twice I blew the stoplight in front of our house because I was so exhausted. Yet it was insinuated that I didn't work hard enough since I came in the office at 8am and left at 10pm(everyone else left 12am-2am). You want to know what I was credited as? "Special Thanks" That and many other reasons is why you'll see the game industry burn through talent. I've never seen a collective of some of the sharpest, creative people I've ever worked with exploited to such a degree under the misplaced reason of "Passion". The place I worked before then was very much white-label, with very similar issues and working conditions. I think we did get the studio logo on the back of the box but there was a very clear agreement where no logos could be placed in-game.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  The games industry has a worker abuse problem. All those companies proudly talking about their 18 months of crunch? Nooooope, shouldn't happen. This shouldn't be a thing you're proud of. You shouldn't be proud of your employees for slaving to death on those projects. It's very tough. Compared to the "regular" tech industry, people in video games can be so passionate about what they're making. It almost seems comparable to founding a startup, except you're just an employee working on a project. You, reader, wherever you're working: Imagine if every single member of your team was incredibly passionate about the work they do. They are building their own baby. They have the vision, they have the motherly drive that puts the existence of their baby ahead of their own. You can see how that could be abused by companies? It's possible to be passionate without driving yourself crazy like that, but in the video games industry it's far too common and it becomes the norm. In fact, I was going to post about this a few minutes ago - and then you yourself described the problem better than I could. Credit in your story is not the issue. The 8 months of 100 hour weeks is.
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    Precisely. And because of that enthusiasm there's always someone else in the funnel if anyone burns out or leaves. Also, because games are art the most successful franchises can get away with completely broken processes as long as it doesn't go over some threshold (which appears to be very high judging by the success of even very broken releases).
    - ido 11y ago
      Might be better in some places than others (e.g. europe vs the us). I've worked in the games industry for about 5 years now (another ~7 before that mostly as a web dev) for several companies and never had insane crunches like that. I mostly worked in Austria and Germany.
  - kls 11y ago
    When I was young, I was in the simulation industry in Orlando and the game industry was taking off there. Tiburon, who would become part of EA later, was snapping up the young simulation talent, in the area and I had an offer to move over. That was the day I decided that web development did not look like that bad of a tradeoff. Game dev was a cut in pay from simulation salaries, which where already well under web dev salaries and the work days my friends where pulling bordered on the insane, crunch mode for 12 months or more with no ownership stake. Now I was young at the time and had no issue with a long day, I ended up in a startup, pulling similar hours but I had a small stake in ownership. My friends that did go into the field, on the other hand, have very fond memories of the work (similar to soldiers in battle trying to pull off a heroic effort) but they have a lot of regrets overall for entering the industry and feel that they have been damaged as an employee after they inevitably became disillusioned as happens when you life goals of your 30's and 40's start to materialize. Simply put, the game industry has an almost inexhaustible supply of young bright talent that are falling over one another to get a break in the industry. My nephew being one of them, I literally staged an intervention with him and asked him to talk to several of my friends that left the industry. But he is young and cannot see past his 20's so he is well on his way in the industry. His college girlfriend just split on him over the hours, as she wants to go out and be 20 something, but that has not rocked his confidence in maintaining course in the industry. It is unfortunate, a lot of bright kids get sucked down that hole, I am thankful I was not.
hellbanner 11y ago
It's not easy for indies, either http://gamasutra.com/blogs/QuantumPotato/20150928/254690/iOS_Game_Discovery_is_Broken.php http://gamasutra.com/blogs/QuantumPotato/20150928/254690/iOS... (Disclaimer, I work with for poster's company)
patio11 11y ago
Related and interesting: the IGDA's guidelines on credits: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/collection/6CD37C4B-C8E6-42BB-AC7B-E5A52615F622/IGDA_Game_Crediting_Guide_Draft_9-2.pdf http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/collection/6C...
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  It's particularly interesting to this conversation because it has no teeth. IGDA is hope and a dream. It took real unions a lot of hard work to get movie credits to accurately credit people. Presumably it would take the same for games.
crocal 11y ago
How cute. Sometimes you don't appear on credits. I have been working with more than 100 people on 2.9 millions of real-time safety critical code for nearly a decade. It has been unknowingly used by millions of people around the world and there will never be any recognition for any of us. Grow up.
- sdrothrock 11y ago
  But you can put it on your resume if you change jobs or go work as a freelancer, right? That's the problem -- imagine you have a decade of blank space in your resume.
  - crocal 11y ago
    You can work on classified project and still mention them in your resume. I have plenty of resumes like that in the team. As long as I have a way to verify skills (by calling someone), it's perfectly fine. I don't need to know the details. No one should leave a blank line in a resume.
    - sdrothrock 11y ago
      The article cites "white label" companies that aren't allowed to mention what they've worked on, though. I'm not sure how that would work other than you saying that you worked at X company, but not being able to cite a single product you worked on.
      - chkuendig 11y ago
        It's the same for management consultants. Just use a generic project name. "Major RTS Franchise, 90% Metascore, ##M sales" and then list your responsibilities.
- patio11 11y ago
  In a few industries, for industry-specific reasons, who appears on credits and the exact contents of those credits actually does matter for career advancement purposes. Video games are one of those industries. Film and academia are two others. It is critically important to your future if you're an assistant professor or software developer working on the 3-D engine that your work get recorded in the industry-standard manner. It is difficult to appreciate this if you're not in academia, but getting your name listed first (and not second!) in the paper edition of a magazine that no one reads is actually really important. Many of the rest of us work in industries without this professional norm. That's wonderful for us, but does not itself fix the problems of this norm for people affected by it.
port6667 11y ago
It's interesting to hear more about the video game industry insides. I wonder if id's success helped start this atmosphere. (Read masters of doom) They were portrayed as rockstars, friends, who busted ass and made a popular game which made them all rich. I fell for that idea when i was young, luckily i never got into the industry. I later read some blog post of an EA developer's wife or something, going on and on how much he had to work and wasn't compensated for it, etc.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
  I love Masters Of Doom, it's one of my favourite books (make of that what you will). But I guess the main difference is that the id guys were pushing boundaries and working themselves to the bone on something they truly loved and felt passionate about. It was self-imposed and unlike the hordes of faceless developers working in sweatshop conditions to churn out the latest CoD or whatever, they actually received a huge amount of credit (and the fame and fortune that goes with it) for their hard work. I agree, there's definitely this romanticised image of game development in the developer community. It's something I always aspired to get into but the sacrifices don't seem to be worth the rewards, at least in my case.
  - AimHere 11y ago
    That's a bad example. I'm sure the CoD developers generally think they're making some of the best games ever, and they have the sales figures and the plaudits to prove it. Gamers like to sneer at CoD, but I'm certain there's a lot of care and enthusiasm that goes into each iteration. It just gets sneered at harder than a lot of games, because it's perhaps overpopular for what it is. The people making uber-cynical cash-milkers at Zynga or King, or those German shovelware job-simulator games with Microsoft-style trade dress are likely far more likely to fit your description than some blockbusting AAA bestseller like CoD.
  - port6667 11y ago
    I love it too, read it every few years. Great book.
  - 11y ago

106 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

danso 11y ago

Not to derail an otherwise interesting article, but the OP picked a not-great anecdote to lead with. The Red Ash Kickstarter was controversial because it was launched by the studio that was (and is) behind a high-profile Kickstarter: Mighty No. 9, a game billed as the spiritual successor to Mega Man which raised $3.85M. At the time that Red Ash was announced, Comcept claimed that Mighty No. 9 was pretty much done and that they needed to get another game into the pipeline. Midway through the Red Ash campaign, people noticed that Mighty No. 9 was marked by retailers as being delayed. When Comcept was questioned about this, they claimed that it was a mistake...only shortly after the Red Ash Kickstarter failed did Comcept admit that Mighty No. 9 would be delayed [1]. As you can imagine, that led backers to think that Comcept had tried to be hush-hush about the delay so that it wouldn't affect the Red Ash campaign. It hasn't helped matters since then that Mighty No. 9 continues to be delayed, even failing to meet a deadline to produce a demo that was meant to make up for the delay. So...to use Comcept in the lede of this story, as if it were the use of these "secret developers" that pissed fans off and caused the Kickstarter to fail...That just seems...a bit misguided...The OP couldn't find any other anecdote to lead off with? [1] http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mighty-no-9s-shady-delay-1722766843 http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mighty-no-9s-shady-delay-...

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
What makes you think there was only one thing that made fans upset? The OP links to a concerned fan, as well.

vvanders 11y ago

Crediting is a much larger issue than just what's referred to in the article. I worked on a title for ~3 years, many of those being 6-8 months of 75-100hr weeks. Saw marriages destroyed on that project, people pushed to the edge. I left ~4 months before ship because I knew if I didn't it would be the end of me. Twice I blew the stoplight in front of our house because I was so exhausted. Yet it was insinuated that I didn't work hard enough since I came in the office at 8am and left at 10pm(everyone else left 12am-2am). You want to know what I was credited as? "Special Thanks" That and many other reasons is why you'll see the game industry burn through talent. I've never seen a collective of some of the sharpest, creative people I've ever worked with exploited to such a degree under the misplaced reason of "Passion". The place I worked before then was very much white-label, with very similar issues and working conditions. I think we did get the studio logo on the back of the box but there was a very clear agreement where no logos could be placed in-game.

scrollaway 11y ago
The games industry has a worker abuse problem. All those companies proudly talking about their 18 months of crunch? Nooooope, shouldn't happen. This shouldn't be a thing you're proud of. You shouldn't be proud of your employees for slaving to death on those projects. It's very tough. Compared to the "regular" tech industry, people in video games can be so passionate about what they're making. It almost seems comparable to founding a startup, except you're just an employee working on a project. You, reader, wherever you're working: Imagine if every single member of your team was incredibly passionate about the work they do. They are building their own baby. They have the vision, they have the motherly drive that puts the existence of their baby ahead of their own. You can see how that could be abused by companies? It's possible to be passionate without driving yourself crazy like that, but in the video games industry it's far too common and it becomes the norm. In fact, I was going to post about this a few minutes ago - and then you yourself described the problem better than I could. Credit in your story is not the issue. The 8 months of 100 hour weeks is.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Precisely. And because of that enthusiasm there's always someone else in the funnel if anyone burns out or leaves. Also, because games are art the most successful franchises can get away with completely broken processes as long as it doesn't go over some threshold (which appears to be very high judging by the success of even very broken releases).
  - ido 11y ago
    Might be better in some places than others (e.g. europe vs the us). I've worked in the games industry for about 5 years now (another ~7 before that mostly as a web dev) for several companies and never had insane crunches like that. I mostly worked in Austria and Germany.
- kls 11y ago
  When I was young, I was in the simulation industry in Orlando and the game industry was taking off there. Tiburon, who would become part of EA later, was snapping up the young simulation talent, in the area and I had an offer to move over. That was the day I decided that web development did not look like that bad of a tradeoff. Game dev was a cut in pay from simulation salaries, which where already well under web dev salaries and the work days my friends where pulling bordered on the insane, crunch mode for 12 months or more with no ownership stake. Now I was young at the time and had no issue with a long day, I ended up in a startup, pulling similar hours but I had a small stake in ownership. My friends that did go into the field, on the other hand, have very fond memories of the work (similar to soldiers in battle trying to pull off a heroic effort) but they have a lot of regrets overall for entering the industry and feel that they have been damaged as an employee after they inevitably became disillusioned as happens when you life goals of your 30's and 40's start to materialize. Simply put, the game industry has an almost inexhaustible supply of young bright talent that are falling over one another to get a break in the industry. My nephew being one of them, I literally staged an intervention with him and asked him to talk to several of my friends that left the industry. But he is young and cannot see past his 20's so he is well on his way in the industry. His college girlfriend just split on him over the hours, as she wants to go out and be 20 something, but that has not rocked his confidence in maintaining course in the industry. It is unfortunate, a lot of bright kids get sucked down that hole, I am thankful I was not.

hellbanner 11y ago

It's not easy for indies, either http://gamasutra.com/blogs/QuantumPotato/20150928/254690/iOS_Game_Discovery_is_Broken.php http://gamasutra.com/blogs/QuantumPotato/20150928/254690/iOS... (Disclaimer, I work with for poster's company)

patio11 11y ago

Related and interesting: the IGDA's guidelines on credits: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/collection/6CD37C4B-C8E6-42BB-AC7B-E5A52615F622/IGDA_Game_Crediting_Guide_Draft_9-2.pdf http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/collection/6C...

WorldMaker 11y ago
It's particularly interesting to this conversation because it has no teeth. IGDA is hope and a dream. It took real unions a lot of hard work to get movie credits to accurately credit people. Presumably it would take the same for games.

crocal 11y ago

How cute. Sometimes you don't appear on credits. I have been working with more than 100 people on 2.9 millions of real-time safety critical code for nearly a decade. It has been unknowingly used by millions of people around the world and there will never be any recognition for any of us. Grow up.

sdrothrock 11y ago
But you can put it on your resume if you change jobs or go work as a freelancer, right? That's the problem -- imagine you have a decade of blank space in your resume.
- crocal 11y ago
  You can work on classified project and still mention them in your resume. I have plenty of resumes like that in the team. As long as I have a way to verify skills (by calling someone), it's perfectly fine. I don't need to know the details. No one should leave a blank line in a resume.
  - sdrothrock 11y ago
    The article cites "white label" companies that aren't allowed to mention what they've worked on, though. I'm not sure how that would work other than you saying that you worked at X company, but not being able to cite a single product you worked on.
    - chkuendig 11y ago
      It's the same for management consultants. Just use a generic project name. "Major RTS Franchise, 90% Metascore, ##M sales" and then list your responsibilities.
patio11 11y ago
In a few industries, for industry-specific reasons, who appears on credits and the exact contents of those credits actually does matter for career advancement purposes. Video games are one of those industries. Film and academia are two others. It is critically important to your future if you're an assistant professor or software developer working on the 3-D engine that your work get recorded in the industry-standard manner. It is difficult to appreciate this if you're not in academia, but getting your name listed first (and not second!) in the paper edition of a magazine that no one reads is actually really important. Many of the rest of us work in industries without this professional norm. That's wonderful for us, but does not itself fix the problems of this norm for people affected by it.

port6667 11y ago

It's interesting to hear more about the video game industry insides. I wonder if id's success helped start this atmosphere. (Read masters of doom) They were portrayed as rockstars, friends, who busted ass and made a popular game which made them all rich. I fell for that idea when i was young, luckily i never got into the industry. I later read some blog post of an EA developer's wife or something, going on and on how much he had to work and wasn't compensated for it, etc.

SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
I love Masters Of Doom, it's one of my favourite books (make of that what you will). But I guess the main difference is that the id guys were pushing boundaries and working themselves to the bone on something they truly loved and felt passionate about. It was self-imposed and unlike the hordes of faceless developers working in sweatshop conditions to churn out the latest CoD or whatever, they actually received a huge amount of credit (and the fame and fortune that goes with it) for their hard work. I agree, there's definitely this romanticised image of game development in the developer community. It's something I always aspired to get into but the sacrifices don't seem to be worth the rewards, at least in my case.
- AimHere 11y ago
  That's a bad example. I'm sure the CoD developers generally think they're making some of the best games ever, and they have the sales figures and the plaudits to prove it. Gamers like to sneer at CoD, but I'm certain there's a lot of care and enthusiasm that goes into each iteration. It just gets sneered at harder than a lot of games, because it's perhaps overpopular for what it is. The people making uber-cynical cash-milkers at Zynga or King, or those German shovelware job-simulator games with Microsoft-style trade dress are likely far more likely to fit your description than some blockbusting AAA bestseller like CoD.
- port6667 11y ago
  I love it too, read it every few years. Great book.
- 11y ago