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Why I quit my dream job at Ubisoft

598 points by Chico75 11y ago

dexwiz 11y ago
Good luck to him. Going Indie is a bold choice, especially after Steam Greenlight.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  This is an odd comment as Steam Greenlight is currently one of the main drivers of getting indie games exposure when it would be near impossible otherwise. Yes, Steam Greenlight has quality control issues, but it still has a purpose of getting games to the store without going through a publisher. The environment has been better-than-ever for indies, especially as increasing costs make AAA games harder than ever to make. (in 2015 alone, we have Rocket League, Ark: Survival Evolved, and Undertale)
  - Drakim 11y ago
    I guess the idea is that Steam Greenlight has grown the indie market and thus given him more competition.
    - Zikes 11y ago
      I don't think it's necessarily so zero-sum. The videogame market is continuously growing, and competitively-priced indie games can still be a big success.
      - adnzzzzZ 11y ago
        You don't even need to be a big success like the previously mentioned Undertale, Rocket League or Ark. For small teams there's an extremely viable middle ground between the game not selling anything and it going huge.
        vlunkr 11y ago
        Exactly, AAA games have to make back their multimillion dollar budgets, indies don't have that same pressure.
        Zikes 11y ago
        Gunpoint and Risk of Rain are really good low-budget games that fall into that middle ground category. I'm fairly certain each were made by a single developer, but have been very successful.
        vlunkr 11y ago
        Risk of Rain happens to be one of my favorite games! I'll have to check out Gunpoint.
        the_af 11y ago
        And if you like Gunpoint, don't forget Ronin, also indie and also made by a single dev (and with a general aesthetic similar to Gunpoint, but different gameplay).
  - Zikes 11y ago
    I agree. The initial impression is that Greenlight makes it too easy, flooding the market with a lot of junk that makes it hard for the gems to shine through, but I've only seen more indie successes on Steam since its inception. I think if a developer is relying only on Steam Greenlight to market their game then they'll likely have issues, but if they market in other ways then (if their game is worthwhile) they'll quickly build an audience.
    - tcfunk 11y ago
      I agree, and I think the flood of low-quality games has actually had the opposite effect that people were predicting. Rather than drowning out good games, it is becoming easier to tell which games have some love put into them. It reminds me of the movie Idiocracy[0]. What might have been a C game before Greenlight suddenly looks pretty damn good compared to all the F's floating around them. [0]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
  - chipsy 11y ago
    The environment is good overall, but marketing has become more complex for indies, since it's no longer directed through a platform owner - it has to go to an audience beyond "game players" to make a big impact. This has stymied a lot of developers who are new to marketing, but it also points the way forward.
endymi0n 11y ago
> Since my very beginnings at Ubisoft, I knew I wouldn’t spend the rest of my days here. I already dreamt of starting my own indie company. Well, then that was probably your dream job instead of Ubisoft.
- joss82 11y ago
  "Dream job" can also be understood as "a job people usually dream about".
  - stronglikedan 11y ago
    In the context of the article, and made clear in the first paragraph, it was definitely the author's dream job.
    - hguant 11y ago
      To be fair, dreams change. Sounds like the author's initial "oh shit I get to work on <big title>" morphed into "I want ownership of my work." They could also have meant game design/architecture was the dream, not necessarily working at Ubisoft in particular. You're right though, it's a bit unclear.
      - acveilleux 11y ago
        It sounds more like the romantic ideal of his dream turned into a very different reality and he realized that what he was seeking all along (ownership, significant contribution) just did not exist in AAA games.
        hsod 11y ago
        except he said "since the very beginning"
  - ebbv 11y ago
    The article title is "my dream job" so that doesn't apply. But I think the parent to your comment is not helpful. The whole point of the article is the author realizing that fact.
iolothebard 11y ago
Put the guitar on ebay/reverb. Or just send it to me! Best of luck :-)
chaostheory 11y ago
> No matter what’s your job, you don’t have a significant contribution on the game. You’re a drop in a glass of water, and as soon as you realize it, your ownership will evaporate in the sun. And without ownership, no motivation. A good description of a lot of big corp projects. Do people working on large open source projects eventually feel the same way?
- Retric 11y ago
  I have worked as a Tiny Cog before, but I still felt I was making several Users lives better by really thinking about there problems and then solving them. Yes, overall it's a tiny piece, but as soon as you start talking about solving minor problems for thousands of people that becomes significant in aggregate.
  - chaostheory 11y ago
    What did you work on?
    - Retric 11y ago
      Lot's of things for the DoD, FAA, etc. Which is a great way to feel like a tiny little cog in a great big machine.
- Swizec 11y ago
  I've worked on a largeish (10 to 15 devs, 2 PMs) opensource project before. I was paid to do so. Quit after about 9 months because I felt I had no impact on the overall thing and little say in what gets built. Every suggestion was a struggle of design by committee and every PR got scrutinized for even the most trivial thing. It was frustrating and it wasn't even that big a team/project.
  - notabot 11y ago
    Open source project with 2 PMs? That sounds very weird to me. In my mind that open source projects should be driven by community.
martimoose 11y ago
I don't work in the videogame industry, but I can totally relate. I work in a small website dev studio, and we interact with a lot of companies, both large (though not huge) and small. As soon as you get people working on a project that are too specialized, no matter the size of the team, you inevitably get conflicting concerns. I think it's very important for managers to understand what those concerns are to be able to take the right decision. I also think that even specialized people should have some knowledge of other specializations (e.g. designers that understand programming, and vice versa). On very large projects, this is impossible as there are just too many fields, but still I value very much "general knowledge" for that reason. Anyway, good luck Maxime in your endeavors.
MollyR 11y ago
Wow, cool stuff. I wish them the best. I often had dreams of doing the same thing, especially inspired by this guy http://www.konjak.org/ http://www.konjak.org/ . It seemed like overkill for me as I could never get a team together. Though with rise of VR, I've been looking into unity3d. How cool would it be to build your own world, then jump in and visit it.
this_user 11y ago
This phenomenon is not exclusive to game development. Lots of people want to work for large, prominent companies like Google or FB, dreaming of working on cool projects. But the reality usually turns out to be much less glamorous. Instead of being the guy who comes up with the next killer product or feature, you will likely end up as a small cog in a huge, well-oiled machine, optimising ads to increase some metric in the fifth decimal place.
- yodsanklai 11y ago
  but (I assume) you make more money than elsewhere with better working conditions, and a cool addition on your resume
  - frozenport 11y ago
    Nope. In C++ land, you can get the same 130k salary at a 30 person company, that builds hardware devices.
    - buckbova 11y ago
      A big part of salary is location, but there's plenty of 100k to 150k jobs out there. I never see anything over that advertised.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - swalsh 11y ago
      The base is the same, but the equity might be worth significantly more.
    - minwcnt5 11y ago
      Google/FB engineers make a heck of a lot more than 130k, that's pretty much base entry level before bonuses and equity grants.
      - 11y ago
jnaour 11y ago
Seems to be his first indie: http://openbargame.com/ http://openbargame.com/
- archagon 11y ago
  Oh hey, saw this on TouchArcade the other day. Was very impressed by the polish!
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  Looks very cool, but I'm bummed that it's not available yet - I'm afraid I'll forget about it in a week.
  - Raphmedia 11y ago
    If you have a bad memory, you should look into mail reminder services. You write something you want to be reminded of and they send you an email about it later on. Or simply a Google Calendar event.
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      Yeah, I ended up adding a Google Keep entry. This definitely seems like the case where collecting email would be appropriate - "Enter your email here to be reminded on the 28th", etc.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    https://youtu.be/o5w71lHw2Mw?t=4 https://youtu.be/o5w71lHw2Mw?t=4 O P E N B R A Hmmm, open bra?! Not sure if that is intended to be some sort of "lolwut" marketing effort but with the overlapping ribbons in the game perhaps they can sell advertising to a bra company! It would be a shame to ruin the lovely symmetry of the logo, not serious enough to alter (beyond maybe the typography). Looks like a lovely game though.
lhnz 11y ago
> "When your expertise is limited to, let’s say, art, level design, performances or whatever, you’ll eventually convince yourself that it’s the most important thing in the game." This is my experience, too. Without autonomy and ownership across a whole project it's very easy for people to get tunnel vision about what's valuable. This causes general harm to both the team and the outcome of its project. I'm not sure how to lessen the effect other than perhaps by making projects small enough that they can be worked on by just a few people and using this phase to establish a kernel of good ideas and team cohesion. Perhaps there might be another structure where the tools that are provided to the team are literally so good that the main project can be done by just a few people working on everything together. (Idealistic vision here.)
- bigchewy 11y ago
  I don't have the source handy but there is research showing that if you ask individuals on a successful project the % that they contributed, the total of the perceived contributions generally equals around 140%. I've wondered if simply pointing out this issue might help reduce the inflated sense of personal contribution
  - Rumudiez 11y ago
    Kind of similar to Gestalt theory... The whole is greater than merely the sum of its parts.
  - Marcus316 11y ago
    I wasn't able to find your particular point in my searching, but I did find a paper from 2000 that came to a similar conclusion[1] "This difference in perception has a potential of creating tension within the team and disrupting the cooperation, because there is a possibility that every single team member may feel to be undervalued by others and not receive his or her due." "The perception gap can be a threat to the team and its goals. Facing the gap requires interpersonal skills on the part of the team management and team members." [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=0778BDC8DBA5C04386CB70652FD1EB7F?doi=10.1.1.228.2618&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=077...
chris_wot 11y ago
I can well imagine this can occur in larger, non-games software development projects. I wonder if it is the same? I sort of suspect not. I am currently refactoring an (albeit important) part of the LibreOffice codebase - the VCL font subsystem. Mostly it's reading the code (in fact, 90% is reading and understanding the code), but it's kind of satisfying looking at how changes to the code make things better and... more elegant. Perhaps this is just an Open Source thing. Or maybe I'm unusual in that I like to focus on smaller modules and make them really good, then move on to the next thing.
lost_name 11y ago
I once worked as a consultant to help users implement some software. I moved on to the development of that software, knowing the dozens of areas that could be improved to make life easier for the users, and honestly with little effort (it's a web app, I did that before the consultancy stuff). At that point in time, that was my dream -- I wanted to help make people's lives a little bit easier, and the people I helped would be those who used our software. After around a year or so of implementing questionable features, I attempted to get approval for updates to old, well used features to improve them (stability and convenience focused, really), but was shot down. This wouldn't sell the software, because it worked well enough, and we needed more revenue more than retaining old customers. At that point I understood that after the software is sold the customer will be too ingrained into the product to leave without financial repercussions. A while later, we got bought out by Big Company, so that strategy apparently worked. BC doesn't give half a shit about anything we ever did, and we piled on the features release after release with little concern about anything else. I tried a couple times after the buyout to get approved for existing product improvements, but always got shot down. I continue to find it odd how the company can be so profit oriented, and yet so averse to improvements. I suppose I'm just wrong or don't actually understand. Either way, it makes it very hard to care about my work these days.
- martincmartin 11y ago
  If your customers are big companies, then there's another dynamic: the people who make decisions about the software are usually not the ones who use it. So a large part of their decision is driven by how the software is described on paper, i.e. by feature bullet points. You end up with lotus notes. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianwe...
  - cordite 11y ago
    9000% true. The end users usually just have to deal with it, and go whereever they get jobs.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
ninjakeyboard 11y ago
I went to business school instead of tech because I too dream of running the head of the ship one day. Tech will always be an interest but I thirst for freedom.
- cheetos 11y ago
  What's your definition of freedom? Freedom to make major business decisions or freedom from obligations and responsibilities? Running your own thing rarely means more free time than if you were working as a tech cog -- it often means much less free time.
  - ninjakeyboard 11y ago
    the former :) isn't the ability to make decisions, to steer and to lead a sort of freedom? it is to me. You're right though - I attended fi.co for example and they scare people away day 1 with the expectation that a business owner needs to bleed all of their lifeblood into the business.
    - jib 11y ago
      Not really, to me. There are (in my experience) very few companies where you have one genius spending most his time making decisions and a bunch of minions just implementing those genius decisions. If I was to estimate I would say that for every 1 hour you spend making big genius decisions, you spend 99 hours convincing people why those decisions are right, listening to why they are not right, listening to what you should be doing instead, writing reports or communications, listening to what issues people have...
gnulnx 11y ago
> No matter what’s your job, you don’t have a significant contribution on the game. You’re a drop in a glass of water, and as soon as you realize it, your ownership will evaporate in the sun. And without ownership, no motivation. This is why I left my 'dream job' of work working on a AAA MMORPG. I came on board early on as the first member of a 'NetOps' team, a senior linux systems administrator, which later split off and grew into a number of very large, very specialized teams. My loose definition of 'dream job' at that time was 'large scale' and 'video games'. Cool! It took a few years for me to redefine what a 'dream job' really meant, and being a drop in a bucket was not it, so I left and moved on (slowly) to freelancing, and haven't looked back.
oDot 11y ago
How does this compare to Valve? Maybe having no deadlines can ease the specialization issue
richerlariviere 11y ago
> The team spirit was sooo good! Our motto was “on est crinqués!”, which more or less translates to “we’re so hyped!”. During our play sessions, we were so excited we were screaming and shouting all over the place. I think it bothered colleagues working next to us, but hell, we had so much fun. I didn’t feel too guilty. Wow. IMO A dream job is a balance between having fun like you described and working on complex problems. I love how you have written this paragraph.
azraomega 11y ago
tl;dr - feeling no ownership doing somebody else's big projects, he quit.
ergothus 11y ago
This quote stood out to me: "On large scale projects, good communication is – simply put – just impossible. How do you get the right message to the right people? You can’t communicate everything to everyone, there’s just too much information. There are hundreds of decisions being taken every week. Inevitably, at some point, someone who should have been consulted before making a decision will be forgotten. This creates frustration over time." This is an issue I've wrestled with over the years - too small a company and your resources are limited, too large and progress mires, and it mires because of communication.
ckarmann 11y ago
Congratulations for pursuing your dreams! I also work at a big game company, not even on a game but on an internal technology: no player will ever see directly the result of my contribution. I still feel great about my work because of reasons not important here, but I totally understand what the author says. But feeling of being a little cog in the machine aside, some of what is said here is about failure of management: communication problems, useless meetings, bogus decision process, lack of visibility of who is impacted by a decision, etc. It's true that big projects are more difficult to manage than small ones, but in truth a bad management or bad coworker dynamics can destroy motivation in big or small companies alike. I have worked in a few startups and two indie game companies and all were plagued by mismanagement as much if not more than my other experiences at a bank and at a big cell-phone company. I may have been unlucky, but it may a simple truth about the programmer's job: working with other people is hard and team dynamics is very important.
the_common_man 11y ago
Fantastic write up. I know this feeling all too well. A bit related is when you work in big companies like Apple and Tesla. These guys have a "hero" at the top. There is nothing you can do but wait for that headline that talks about a feature you made and it was Elon Musk's doing or Job's amazing leadership. I have nothing against these two but it is very demotivating to work.
- chippy 11y ago
  You should usually get the praise internally from the boss and all your peers know it's down to you. But externally, and the public, you get nothing, and the boss gets all the praise.
  - the_common_man 11y ago
    Yes and that's soul crushing (to me). Especially if the boss makes no mention of you even in passing. The problem with BigCos is you can do nothing about this, other than climbing the ladder. I feel small companies have a nice mix, I know the developers of many startups by name and what they do because of the very fact that they can come out and talk about their work.
jarjoura 11y ago
So let me just throw this out there, we will always have to answer to someone. Whether it's our middle manager in a big organization, VCs telling us how fast we need to grow, or our demanding users because they are the only way to get revenue. All software written at this stage is small cogs on a much bigger platform written by teams of brilliant people over the last 30-40 years. I do think it's fair to say you want to work on actual interesting problems and being one of 20-40 people working on a game engine is probably very tedious. I imagine long code-review cycles since any tiny change could destabilize the entire system several layers up. Some people need big organization structure to produce their best work while some people need the freedom to have infinite WFH days answering to users to produce their own best.
- clock_tower 11y ago
  Get financial independence! If you can support yourself with your investments (I'm personally aiming for REITs, MLPs, and holding companies -- I want dividends, not capital gains), you can work on whatever problems you like, whether they pay or not.
mattmaroon 11y ago
I hope this does not happen to him, but wait until he releases a game (that might even be a really good one) and gets nowhere because 1,000 other people released a game that week. It's a tough industry now! You probably appreciate the indie side of it when you're in AAA, but I can tell you from experience you appreciate the AAA side of it when you're in an indie!
listic 11y ago
How large was the development team of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, at its peak? Is the overall budget known, as well? I wonder how big the really big nowadays is.
- ido 11y ago
  I don't know about ACS, but GTA5 had 1,000 people working on it at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Aut...
ransom1538 11y ago
Why to not work at a video game company: 0) Abuse. 1) Executives cut projects: a lot. The budgets are so insane for games executives need to constantly trim budgets and shift things around. It is common to walk over to an artists desk and inform them the art they have worked on for 2 years wont be used. I am convinced telling a wife her husband has passed is the same feeling. 2) The budgets have exploded. My last project for an iPhone game was well over 4million dollars. 3) Complexity is compounding. My last team (for a prototype) consisted of: AI guy, graphics/C++ guy(s), gameplay guy, Art TEAM (vector and raster) and project managers. The art pipelines alone will suck the budget dry. 4) Pay is low. Since you are starting fresh each project (see 5), your working knowledge of the system is similar to someone new. Promotions, salary increases, etc don't make any financial sense (see 1) unless you are a rockstar. The new kids walking in usually burn out and quit because they don't understand the massive shit show the industry is. EA's managers just grind people until they can't walk. Disney is a sweatshop. 5) NOTHING is reused. After your second project, you quickly realize the AI you created for fish has nothing todo with with your AI for a 3d shooter. The asset pipeline you created for a soccer game doesn't translate over to a racing game. Game companies are full of dead code repros. People try to create/use repeatable platforms, but then the game designer guy will walk by and say "Hey is that the newest unreal engine?". In games: Anything reused is quickly spotted as reused. This is why games that have a good series going do really well financially. GTA what like 15? 6) Success is low. After a few years into a project, someone will say: "But its not... fun". Welp, good luck fixing that. Or plan on having it rot in some terrible online store. 7) Rockstars. Executive: "OMG you wrote the AI for GTA2 in 1998??". Welp, this guy is now your boss. AND, because games are almost always a luck play - this "Rockstar" will teach you absolutely nothing. My takeaway: I have talked with guys in the game industry that have been in it 20+ years and asked WTF. Basically, lifers are like high school teachers. They are abused and underpaid: but they love what they do.
- ibejoeb 11y ago
  I've heard all of the horror stories about EA, but the author seems to have enjoyed the premise of the experience at Ubisoft, e.g., good camaraderie, a non-abusive environment. Sure, projects got canceled, but that happens in every industry, especially creative. Which one is the outlier, Ubisoft or EA? Is the whole games industry a mess, or is EA just exceptionally bad?
bronz 11y ago
Make sure to check out his upcoming game, Openbar. It looks really, really good.
cpsempek 11y ago
I do not get why people, it seems, often use the "...or, how I learned to stop worrying and..." in their blog post titles. Are they doing it as an homage to the film Dr. Strangelove (I'm not sure if that was the originator of this alternate/sub title phrase), or, are they doing it because it has become a meme among bloggers? If the latter, fine, at the worst they are unoriginal. If the former, then they haven't ever seen the movie, or, don't understand the movie and the absurdity of the title character nonetheless of "loving a bomb". Or, this phrase is common and I erroneously associate its origin with the film. In every case but the last, it irks me, but for no good reason ultimately.
- TillE 11y ago
  Yeah, lots of phrases get stripped of their interesting meaning as they become tired second-hand cliches. It's not unusual to see someone quoting a quote of a quote, completely unaware of the original source.
shmerl 11y ago
The problem of companies like Ubisoft is mass market approach. Big publishers prefer commercial mass market art to good art. In result, more interesting games come out from independent studios like inXile, Obsidian, CD Projekt Red and others. Not sure how it looks from insider's standpoint, but from gamer's standpoint, big publishers like Ubisoft and EA are plain boring and their games can be compared to pulp fiction and you don't expect to see masterpieces from them (coincidentally they are also most often plagued by DRM in contrast with games from independent studios).
emehrkay 11y ago
This was a great read. I worked at a large web agency once and did some pretty decent work. It is definitely rewarding to see people use something that you worked hard on and to see it on tv and in magazines, etc. But that yearn to do your own thing, blaze your own path is a feeling that I'm certain most people who work in creative fields go though. Sidenote: before he said that the small projects were cancelled, I assumed that they were Evolve (https://evolvegame.com/agegate/ https://evolvegame.com/agegate/) (I don't follow games close enough to know which studio makes which game). I'm curious as to how he was able to, I assume, bootstrap a game company for a year before releasing an iOS game.
workitout 11y ago
For me my dream job can be writing CRUD web software as long as people need it and appreciate my work.
dismal2 11y ago
Fulfillment through structured 40hr+ a week labor is an illusion
durpleDrank 11y ago
I used to work beside UBISOFT here in Montreal. I'd here them talk about videogames during lunch time and it was pitiful. It seemed like having colored hair and geek-chic was more important than actually knowing anything about videogames.
davedx 11y ago
I've worked for a couple of small games studios, and once for a big studio working on a AAA game. The headcount observations resonate.. I remember our teams growing, and growing, and growing, and each extra programmer detracted from the "community" feeling of being part of a studio, and added to the complexity of developing such a large code base with so many devs. Compare that to small studios, where you can really feel like part of a family. It's very different, and all these kinds of feelings are more intense than other IT companies I've worked at. (Probably partly because of the extra time you tend to spend there when working in the games industry...) Having said that -- some of my best friends were made when working at the big AAA studio! So it's not all bad.
Mendenhall 11y ago
We are all just cogs. What I learned is no matter what sized cog I am compared to others, just make sure my interaction with the other cogs is as smooth as possible. I take pride in doing good work no matter how small or large.
hacknat 11y ago
Late to the party and this doesn't address what the OP said directly, but the state of the video game industry actually makes me quite sad. The last AAA game I played was Oblivion, which I couldn't finish. I haven't really played a AAA game since, and have only played two video games all the way through since (Braid, and Monument Valley). When the OP talks about working on a project so big that no one person really "grocks" the whole thing I can relate, but I also want to say "it shows". IMO, the current state of AAA games is shit. I think the reason they are this way have to do with what the OP is complaining about, the originating vision of the game comes from Marketing not an artist, and no one person has vision for the game. Maybe video games just have too many resources at there disposal. I think I read somewhere that either Ocarina of Time or Mario 64 had double or triple the playable content of the released game and Miyamoto had a perfectionist eye for the game and was merciless in what made the cut. Resource constraints are a good thing, IMO, as it forces people to make a razor focused product that trims the fat mercilessly. Having unlimited resources is the enemy of good decision making, and it shows in the current state of video games (and film too). Games and movies are just too long/full these days.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
robertndc 11y ago
There are no dream jobs, just jobs or dreams: . Build your own company and you will finish accepting profit as flagship. . Find a job where you lead the direction and internal politics will make you adapt to a whole way against their life goals. . Make an open source project that no one will use.
nshung 11y ago
This reminds me of this TED talk.[1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Ppjpcho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Ppjpcho

598 points by Chico75 11y ago

dexwiz 11y ago

Good luck to him. Going Indie is a bold choice, especially after Steam Greenlight.

minimaxir 11y ago
This is an odd comment as Steam Greenlight is currently one of the main drivers of getting indie games exposure when it would be near impossible otherwise. Yes, Steam Greenlight has quality control issues, but it still has a purpose of getting games to the store without going through a publisher. The environment has been better-than-ever for indies, especially as increasing costs make AAA games harder than ever to make. (in 2015 alone, we have Rocket League, Ark: Survival Evolved, and Undertale)
- Drakim 11y ago
  I guess the idea is that Steam Greenlight has grown the indie market and thus given him more competition.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    I don't think it's necessarily so zero-sum. The videogame market is continuously growing, and competitively-priced indie games can still be a big success.
    - adnzzzzZ 11y ago
      You don't even need to be a big success like the previously mentioned Undertale, Rocket League or Ark. For small teams there's an extremely viable middle ground between the game not selling anything and it going huge.
      - vlunkr 11y ago
        Exactly, AAA games have to make back their multimillion dollar budgets, indies don't have that same pressure.
        Zikes 11y ago
        Gunpoint and Risk of Rain are really good low-budget games that fall into that middle ground category. I'm fairly certain each were made by a single developer, but have been very successful.
        vlunkr 11y ago
        Risk of Rain happens to be one of my favorite games! I'll have to check out Gunpoint.
        the_af 11y ago
        And if you like Gunpoint, don't forget Ronin, also indie and also made by a single dev (and with a general aesthetic similar to Gunpoint, but different gameplay).
- Zikes 11y ago
  I agree. The initial impression is that Greenlight makes it too easy, flooding the market with a lot of junk that makes it hard for the gems to shine through, but I've only seen more indie successes on Steam since its inception. I think if a developer is relying only on Steam Greenlight to market their game then they'll likely have issues, but if they market in other ways then (if their game is worthwhile) they'll quickly build an audience.
  - tcfunk 11y ago
    I agree, and I think the flood of low-quality games has actually had the opposite effect that people were predicting. Rather than drowning out good games, it is becoming easier to tell which games have some love put into them. It reminds me of the movie Idiocracy[0]. What might have been a C game before Greenlight suddenly looks pretty damn good compared to all the F's floating around them. [0]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
- chipsy 11y ago
  The environment is good overall, but marketing has become more complex for indies, since it's no longer directed through a platform owner - it has to go to an audience beyond "game players" to make a big impact. This has stymied a lot of developers who are new to marketing, but it also points the way forward.

endymi0n 11y ago

> Since my very beginnings at Ubisoft, I knew I wouldn’t spend the rest of my days here. I already dreamt of starting my own indie company. Well, then that was probably your dream job instead of Ubisoft.

joss82 11y ago
"Dream job" can also be understood as "a job people usually dream about".
- stronglikedan 11y ago
  In the context of the article, and made clear in the first paragraph, it was definitely the author's dream job.
  - hguant 11y ago
    To be fair, dreams change. Sounds like the author's initial "oh shit I get to work on <big title>" morphed into "I want ownership of my work." They could also have meant game design/architecture was the dream, not necessarily working at Ubisoft in particular. You're right though, it's a bit unclear.
    - acveilleux 11y ago
      It sounds more like the romantic ideal of his dream turned into a very different reality and he realized that what he was seeking all along (ownership, significant contribution) just did not exist in AAA games.
      - hsod 11y ago
        except he said "since the very beginning"
- ebbv 11y ago
  The article title is "my dream job" so that doesn't apply. But I think the parent to your comment is not helpful. The whole point of the article is the author realizing that fact.

iolothebard 11y ago

Put the guitar on ebay/reverb. Or just send it to me! Best of luck :-)

chaostheory 11y ago

> No matter what’s your job, you don’t have a significant contribution on the game. You’re a drop in a glass of water, and as soon as you realize it, your ownership will evaporate in the sun. And without ownership, no motivation. A good description of a lot of big corp projects. Do people working on large open source projects eventually feel the same way?

Retric 11y ago
I have worked as a Tiny Cog before, but I still felt I was making several Users lives better by really thinking about there problems and then solving them. Yes, overall it's a tiny piece, but as soon as you start talking about solving minor problems for thousands of people that becomes significant in aggregate.
- chaostheory 11y ago
  What did you work on?
  - Retric 11y ago
    Lot's of things for the DoD, FAA, etc. Which is a great way to feel like a tiny little cog in a great big machine.
Swizec 11y ago
I've worked on a largeish (10 to 15 devs, 2 PMs) opensource project before. I was paid to do so. Quit after about 9 months because I felt I had no impact on the overall thing and little say in what gets built. Every suggestion was a struggle of design by committee and every PR got scrutinized for even the most trivial thing. It was frustrating and it wasn't even that big a team/project.
- notabot 11y ago
  Open source project with 2 PMs? That sounds very weird to me. In my mind that open source projects should be driven by community.

martimoose 11y ago

I don't work in the videogame industry, but I can totally relate. I work in a small website dev studio, and we interact with a lot of companies, both large (though not huge) and small. As soon as you get people working on a project that are too specialized, no matter the size of the team, you inevitably get conflicting concerns. I think it's very important for managers to understand what those concerns are to be able to take the right decision. I also think that even specialized people should have some knowledge of other specializations (e.g. designers that understand programming, and vice versa). On very large projects, this is impossible as there are just too many fields, but still I value very much "general knowledge" for that reason. Anyway, good luck Maxime in your endeavors.

MollyR 11y ago

Wow, cool stuff. I wish them the best. I often had dreams of doing the same thing, especially inspired by this guy http://www.konjak.org/ http://www.konjak.org/ . It seemed like overkill for me as I could never get a team together. Though with rise of VR, I've been looking into unity3d. How cool would it be to build your own world, then jump in and visit it.

this_user 11y ago

This phenomenon is not exclusive to game development. Lots of people want to work for large, prominent companies like Google or FB, dreaming of working on cool projects. But the reality usually turns out to be much less glamorous. Instead of being the guy who comes up with the next killer product or feature, you will likely end up as a small cog in a huge, well-oiled machine, optimising ads to increase some metric in the fifth decimal place.

yodsanklai 11y ago
but (I assume) you make more money than elsewhere with better working conditions, and a cool addition on your resume
- frozenport 11y ago
  Nope. In C++ land, you can get the same 130k salary at a 30 person company, that builds hardware devices.
  - buckbova 11y ago
    A big part of salary is location, but there's plenty of 100k to 150k jobs out there. I never see anything over that advertised.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - swalsh 11y ago
    The base is the same, but the equity might be worth significantly more.
  - minwcnt5 11y ago
    Google/FB engineers make a heck of a lot more than 130k, that's pretty much base entry level before bonuses and equity grants.
    - 11y ago

jnaour 11y ago

Seems to be his first indie: http://openbargame.com/ http://openbargame.com/

archagon 11y ago
Oh hey, saw this on TouchArcade the other day. Was very impressed by the polish!
pavel_lishin 11y ago
Looks very cool, but I'm bummed that it's not available yet - I'm afraid I'll forget about it in a week.
- Raphmedia 11y ago
  If you have a bad memory, you should look into mail reminder services. You write something you want to be reminded of and they send you an email about it later on. Or simply a Google Calendar event.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    Yeah, I ended up adding a Google Keep entry. This definitely seems like the case where collecting email would be appropriate - "Enter your email here to be reminded on the 28th", etc.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  https://youtu.be/o5w71lHw2Mw?t=4 https://youtu.be/o5w71lHw2Mw?t=4 O P E N B R A Hmmm, open bra?! Not sure if that is intended to be some sort of "lolwut" marketing effort but with the overlapping ribbons in the game perhaps they can sell advertising to a bra company! It would be a shame to ruin the lovely symmetry of the logo, not serious enough to alter (beyond maybe the typography). Looks like a lovely game though.

lhnz 11y ago

> "When your expertise is limited to, let’s say, art, level design, performances or whatever, you’ll eventually convince yourself that it’s the most important thing in the game." This is my experience, too. Without autonomy and ownership across a whole project it's very easy for people to get tunnel vision about what's valuable. This causes general harm to both the team and the outcome of its project. I'm not sure how to lessen the effect other than perhaps by making projects small enough that they can be worked on by just a few people and using this phase to establish a kernel of good ideas and team cohesion. Perhaps there might be another structure where the tools that are provided to the team are literally so good that the main project can be done by just a few people working on everything together. (Idealistic vision here.)

bigchewy 11y ago
I don't have the source handy but there is research showing that if you ask individuals on a successful project the % that they contributed, the total of the perceived contributions generally equals around 140%. I've wondered if simply pointing out this issue might help reduce the inflated sense of personal contribution
- Rumudiez 11y ago
  Kind of similar to Gestalt theory... The whole is greater than merely the sum of its parts.
- Marcus316 11y ago
  I wasn't able to find your particular point in my searching, but I did find a paper from 2000 that came to a similar conclusion[1] "This difference in perception has a potential of creating tension within the team and disrupting the cooperation, because there is a possibility that every single team member may feel to be undervalued by others and not receive his or her due." "The perception gap can be a threat to the team and its goals. Facing the gap requires interpersonal skills on the part of the team management and team members." [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=0778BDC8DBA5C04386CB70652FD1EB7F?doi=10.1.1.228.2618&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=077...

chris_wot 11y ago

I can well imagine this can occur in larger, non-games software development projects. I wonder if it is the same? I sort of suspect not. I am currently refactoring an (albeit important) part of the LibreOffice codebase - the VCL font subsystem. Mostly it's reading the code (in fact, 90% is reading and understanding the code), but it's kind of satisfying looking at how changes to the code make things better and... more elegant. Perhaps this is just an Open Source thing. Or maybe I'm unusual in that I like to focus on smaller modules and make them really good, then move on to the next thing.

lost_name 11y ago

I once worked as a consultant to help users implement some software. I moved on to the development of that software, knowing the dozens of areas that could be improved to make life easier for the users, and honestly with little effort (it's a web app, I did that before the consultancy stuff). At that point in time, that was my dream -- I wanted to help make people's lives a little bit easier, and the people I helped would be those who used our software. After around a year or so of implementing questionable features, I attempted to get approval for updates to old, well used features to improve them (stability and convenience focused, really), but was shot down. This wouldn't sell the software, because it worked well enough, and we needed more revenue more than retaining old customers. At that point I understood that after the software is sold the customer will be too ingrained into the product to leave without financial repercussions. A while later, we got bought out by Big Company, so that strategy apparently worked. BC doesn't give half a shit about anything we ever did, and we piled on the features release after release with little concern about anything else. I tried a couple times after the buyout to get approved for existing product improvements, but always got shot down. I continue to find it odd how the company can be so profit oriented, and yet so averse to improvements. I suppose I'm just wrong or don't actually understand. Either way, it makes it very hard to care about my work these days.

martincmartin 11y ago
If your customers are big companies, then there's another dynamic: the people who make decisions about the software are usually not the ones who use it. So a large part of their decision is driven by how the software is described on paper, i.e. by feature bullet points. You end up with lotus notes. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianwe...
- cordite 11y ago
  9000% true. The end users usually just have to deal with it, and go whereever they get jobs.
- dredmorbius 11y ago

ninjakeyboard 11y ago

I went to business school instead of tech because I too dream of running the head of the ship one day. Tech will always be an interest but I thirst for freedom.

cheetos 11y ago
What's your definition of freedom? Freedom to make major business decisions or freedom from obligations and responsibilities? Running your own thing rarely means more free time than if you were working as a tech cog -- it often means much less free time.
- ninjakeyboard 11y ago
  the former :) isn't the ability to make decisions, to steer and to lead a sort of freedom? it is to me. You're right though - I attended fi.co for example and they scare people away day 1 with the expectation that a business owner needs to bleed all of their lifeblood into the business.
  - jib 11y ago
    Not really, to me. There are (in my experience) very few companies where you have one genius spending most his time making decisions and a bunch of minions just implementing those genius decisions. If I was to estimate I would say that for every 1 hour you spend making big genius decisions, you spend 99 hours convincing people why those decisions are right, listening to why they are not right, listening to what you should be doing instead, writing reports or communications, listening to what issues people have...

gnulnx 11y ago

> No matter what’s your job, you don’t have a significant contribution on the game. You’re a drop in a glass of water, and as soon as you realize it, your ownership will evaporate in the sun. And without ownership, no motivation. This is why I left my 'dream job' of work working on a AAA MMORPG. I came on board early on as the first member of a 'NetOps' team, a senior linux systems administrator, which later split off and grew into a number of very large, very specialized teams. My loose definition of 'dream job' at that time was 'large scale' and 'video games'. Cool! It took a few years for me to redefine what a 'dream job' really meant, and being a drop in a bucket was not it, so I left and moved on (slowly) to freelancing, and haven't looked back.

oDot 11y ago

How does this compare to Valve? Maybe having no deadlines can ease the specialization issue

richerlariviere 11y ago

> The team spirit was sooo good! Our motto was “on est crinqués!”, which more or less translates to “we’re so hyped!”. During our play sessions, we were so excited we were screaming and shouting all over the place. I think it bothered colleagues working next to us, but hell, we had so much fun. I didn’t feel too guilty. Wow. IMO A dream job is a balance between having fun like you described and working on complex problems. I love how you have written this paragraph.

azraomega 11y ago

tl;dr - feeling no ownership doing somebody else's big projects, he quit.

ergothus 11y ago

This quote stood out to me: "On large scale projects, good communication is – simply put – just impossible. How do you get the right message to the right people? You can’t communicate everything to everyone, there’s just too much information. There are hundreds of decisions being taken every week. Inevitably, at some point, someone who should have been consulted before making a decision will be forgotten. This creates frustration over time." This is an issue I've wrestled with over the years - too small a company and your resources are limited, too large and progress mires, and it mires because of communication.

ckarmann 11y ago

Congratulations for pursuing your dreams! I also work at a big game company, not even on a game but on an internal technology: no player will ever see directly the result of my contribution. I still feel great about my work because of reasons not important here, but I totally understand what the author says. But feeling of being a little cog in the machine aside, some of what is said here is about failure of management: communication problems, useless meetings, bogus decision process, lack of visibility of who is impacted by a decision, etc. It's true that big projects are more difficult to manage than small ones, but in truth a bad management or bad coworker dynamics can destroy motivation in big or small companies alike. I have worked in a few startups and two indie game companies and all were plagued by mismanagement as much if not more than my other experiences at a bank and at a big cell-phone company. I may have been unlucky, but it may a simple truth about the programmer's job: working with other people is hard and team dynamics is very important.

the_common_man 11y ago

Fantastic write up. I know this feeling all too well. A bit related is when you work in big companies like Apple and Tesla. These guys have a "hero" at the top. There is nothing you can do but wait for that headline that talks about a feature you made and it was Elon Musk's doing or Job's amazing leadership. I have nothing against these two but it is very demotivating to work.

chippy 11y ago
You should usually get the praise internally from the boss and all your peers know it's down to you. But externally, and the public, you get nothing, and the boss gets all the praise.
- the_common_man 11y ago
  Yes and that's soul crushing (to me). Especially if the boss makes no mention of you even in passing. The problem with BigCos is you can do nothing about this, other than climbing the ladder. I feel small companies have a nice mix, I know the developers of many startups by name and what they do because of the very fact that they can come out and talk about their work.

jarjoura 11y ago

So let me just throw this out there, we will always have to answer to someone. Whether it's our middle manager in a big organization, VCs telling us how fast we need to grow, or our demanding users because they are the only way to get revenue. All software written at this stage is small cogs on a much bigger platform written by teams of brilliant people over the last 30-40 years. I do think it's fair to say you want to work on actual interesting problems and being one of 20-40 people working on a game engine is probably very tedious. I imagine long code-review cycles since any tiny change could destabilize the entire system several layers up. Some people need big organization structure to produce their best work while some people need the freedom to have infinite WFH days answering to users to produce their own best.

clock_tower 11y ago
Get financial independence! If you can support yourself with your investments (I'm personally aiming for REITs, MLPs, and holding companies -- I want dividends, not capital gains), you can work on whatever problems you like, whether they pay or not.

mattmaroon 11y ago

I hope this does not happen to him, but wait until he releases a game (that might even be a really good one) and gets nowhere because 1,000 other people released a game that week. It's a tough industry now! You probably appreciate the indie side of it when you're in AAA, but I can tell you from experience you appreciate the AAA side of it when you're in an indie!

listic 11y ago

How large was the development team of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, at its peak? Is the overall budget known, as well? I wonder how big the really big nowadays is.

ido 11y ago
I don't know about ACS, but GTA5 had 1,000 people working on it at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Aut...

ransom1538 11y ago

Why to not work at a video game company: 0) Abuse. 1) Executives cut projects: a lot. The budgets are so insane for games executives need to constantly trim budgets and shift things around. It is common to walk over to an artists desk and inform them the art they have worked on for 2 years wont be used. I am convinced telling a wife her husband has passed is the same feeling. 2) The budgets have exploded. My last project for an iPhone game was well over 4million dollars. 3) Complexity is compounding. My last team (for a prototype) consisted of: AI guy, graphics/C++ guy(s), gameplay guy, Art TEAM (vector and raster) and project managers. The art pipelines alone will suck the budget dry. 4) Pay is low. Since you are starting fresh each project (see 5), your working knowledge of the system is similar to someone new. Promotions, salary increases, etc don't make any financial sense (see 1) unless you are a rockstar. The new kids walking in usually burn out and quit because they don't understand the massive shit show the industry is. EA's managers just grind people until they can't walk. Disney is a sweatshop. 5) NOTHING is reused. After your second project, you quickly realize the AI you created for fish has nothing todo with with your AI for a 3d shooter. The asset pipeline you created for a soccer game doesn't translate over to a racing game. Game companies are full of dead code repros. People try to create/use repeatable platforms, but then the game designer guy will walk by and say "Hey is that the newest unreal engine?". In games: Anything reused is quickly spotted as reused. This is why games that have a good series going do really well financially. GTA what like 15? 6) Success is low. After a few years into a project, someone will say: "But its not... fun". Welp, good luck fixing that. Or plan on having it rot in some terrible online store. 7) Rockstars. Executive: "OMG you wrote the AI for GTA2 in 1998??". Welp, this guy is now your boss. AND, because games are almost always a luck play - this "Rockstar" will teach you absolutely nothing. My takeaway: I have talked with guys in the game industry that have been in it 20+ years and asked WTF. Basically, lifers are like high school teachers. They are abused and underpaid: but they love what they do.

ibejoeb 11y ago
I've heard all of the horror stories about EA, but the author seems to have enjoyed the premise of the experience at Ubisoft, e.g., good camaraderie, a non-abusive environment. Sure, projects got canceled, but that happens in every industry, especially creative. Which one is the outlier, Ubisoft or EA? Is the whole games industry a mess, or is EA just exceptionally bad?

bronz 11y ago

Make sure to check out his upcoming game, Openbar. It looks really, really good.

cpsempek 11y ago

I do not get why people, it seems, often use the "...or, how I learned to stop worrying and..." in their blog post titles. Are they doing it as an homage to the film Dr. Strangelove (I'm not sure if that was the originator of this alternate/sub title phrase), or, are they doing it because it has become a meme among bloggers? If the latter, fine, at the worst they are unoriginal. If the former, then they haven't ever seen the movie, or, don't understand the movie and the absurdity of the title character nonetheless of "loving a bomb". Or, this phrase is common and I erroneously associate its origin with the film. In every case but the last, it irks me, but for no good reason ultimately.

TillE 11y ago
Yeah, lots of phrases get stripped of their interesting meaning as they become tired second-hand cliches. It's not unusual to see someone quoting a quote of a quote, completely unaware of the original source.

shmerl 11y ago

The problem of companies like Ubisoft is mass market approach. Big publishers prefer commercial mass market art to good art. In result, more interesting games come out from independent studios like inXile, Obsidian, CD Projekt Red and others. Not sure how it looks from insider's standpoint, but from gamer's standpoint, big publishers like Ubisoft and EA are plain boring and their games can be compared to pulp fiction and you don't expect to see masterpieces from them (coincidentally they are also most often plagued by DRM in contrast with games from independent studios).

emehrkay 11y ago

This was a great read. I worked at a large web agency once and did some pretty decent work. It is definitely rewarding to see people use something that you worked hard on and to see it on tv and in magazines, etc. But that yearn to do your own thing, blaze your own path is a feeling that I'm certain most people who work in creative fields go though. Sidenote: before he said that the small projects were cancelled, I assumed that they were Evolve (https://evolvegame.com/agegate/ https://evolvegame.com/agegate/) (I don't follow games close enough to know which studio makes which game). I'm curious as to how he was able to, I assume, bootstrap a game company for a year before releasing an iOS game.

workitout 11y ago

For me my dream job can be writing CRUD web software as long as people need it and appreciate my work.

dismal2 11y ago

Fulfillment through structured 40hr+ a week labor is an illusion

durpleDrank 11y ago

I used to work beside UBISOFT here in Montreal. I'd here them talk about videogames during lunch time and it was pitiful. It seemed like having colored hair and geek-chic was more important than actually knowing anything about videogames.

davedx 11y ago

I've worked for a couple of small games studios, and once for a big studio working on a AAA game. The headcount observations resonate.. I remember our teams growing, and growing, and growing, and each extra programmer detracted from the "community" feeling of being part of a studio, and added to the complexity of developing such a large code base with so many devs. Compare that to small studios, where you can really feel like part of a family. It's very different, and all these kinds of feelings are more intense than other IT companies I've worked at. (Probably partly because of the extra time you tend to spend there when working in the games industry...) Having said that -- some of my best friends were made when working at the big AAA studio! So it's not all bad.

Mendenhall 11y ago

We are all just cogs. What I learned is no matter what sized cog I am compared to others, just make sure my interaction with the other cogs is as smooth as possible. I take pride in doing good work no matter how small or large.

hacknat 11y ago

Late to the party and this doesn't address what the OP said directly, but the state of the video game industry actually makes me quite sad. The last AAA game I played was Oblivion, which I couldn't finish. I haven't really played a AAA game since, and have only played two video games all the way through since (Braid, and Monument Valley). When the OP talks about working on a project so big that no one person really "grocks" the whole thing I can relate, but I also want to say "it shows". IMO, the current state of AAA games is shit. I think the reason they are this way have to do with what the OP is complaining about, the originating vision of the game comes from Marketing not an artist, and no one person has vision for the game. Maybe video games just have too many resources at there disposal. I think I read somewhere that either Ocarina of Time or Mario 64 had double or triple the playable content of the released game and Miyamoto had a perfectionist eye for the game and was merciless in what made the cut. Resource constraints are a good thing, IMO, as it forces people to make a razor focused product that trims the fat mercilessly. Having unlimited resources is the enemy of good decision making, and it shows in the current state of video games (and film too). Games and movies are just too long/full these days.

deleted 11y ago

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robertndc 11y ago

There are no dream jobs, just jobs or dreams: . Build your own company and you will finish accepting profit as flagship. . Find a job where you lead the direction and internal politics will make you adapt to a whole way against their life goals. . Make an open source project that no one will use.

nshung 11y ago

This reminds me of this TED talk.[1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Ppjpcho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Ppjpcho