19 ms·

In the Videogame Industry, Hiring People Is a Last Resort

214 points by somerandomness 9y ago

DroidX86 9y ago
Anybody have a full article link?
- spacelizard 9y ago
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  - aargh_aargh 9y ago
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- fru2013 9y ago
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dmoy 9y ago
I don't get it. They seem to imply there's more done by contractors than not, with "Network of contractors" and "Lean core of in-house", but in both examples given (rocket league, blizzard), full time outnumber contractors 2:1 or 3:1?
- sidlls 9y ago
  It's wasn't uncommon several years ago at one studio I know of to have core components of multiple titles maintained by permanent in-house staff and much of the feature development done by contractors. They had a ratio almost inverted from what you describe (approximately contractor:perm::3:2).
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    N=1 and five years ago but I worked on a console title where the feature development was 3 contractors/1 perm (me who didn't realize contracting was a much better deal) and five perm who supported us when needed. There was also a project that was outsourced entirely to a separate studio that our management fired for non performance and I had to revive the build from a hard drive with the last build and assets so the perm team could take over - so all sorts of permutations possible.
- midnightclubbed 9y ago
  I agree, the article reads like they had an idea for a story and tried to fit the facts around it. The heaviest use of contractors in the games industry is, as they imply in the article, in test. Typically you'll have a small core test group in-house to handle test during development and then a much bigger outsourced group you'll ramp up prior to release. In a large multiplayer game you may want 100s of testers on hand at any one time, but only for a few days at a time. Outsourcing gives you that. Depending on the game you may be content heavy in which case may use outside contractors (or outside studios) to help with the mass of work but that seems to have dropped off as a practice in recent years. Using Chinese and Indian art outsourcing studios was big 10 years ago. More recently the big players have moved to a model where each of their development studios has a game (or two) in development with a core team working only on that game and a content team who will work on whichever studio needs their help (typically the next game for release). If you are not 'outsourcing' the entire game development you'll typically want most of the core staff in the same location and full-time. Design, code, technical art and art direction all have to work very closely together. Not something you can easily split around the world or assign to short-term contractors. Psyonix did outsource their console versions to another studio (likely comprised of full-time employees), which is common with smaller companies who would rather not have to ramp-up their engineering staff for console support. It also saves Psyonix the large capital expense of purchasing development kits.
  - dmoy 9y ago
    Ok thanks, what you described sounds much more realistic and in line with what I've heard from family members who did video game testing than the narrative the article was talking about.
zubat 9y ago
This isn't anything new to how the business is structured. Note the elision of the 50+ employees in-house: even if it's one artist and one programmer, you really need them to be full-timers to run the main production cycle, or at minimum longer-term contractors who have time to ramp up. Otherwise you get too many bottlenecks. Outsourcing ports, localization, and audio was done almost from the beginning. (Go look up how Rob Hubbard wrote the soundtrack to Commando on C64 for one example) That said, the trend definitely continues to lean towards a small core team that can put the pieces together, and then external teams who can leverage a longer term specialization, lowering management risks on both ends by reducing the "seasonal layoff" dynamic of game launches.
olivermarks 9y ago
Some of the most cynical middle and senior manager types I've ever met were hiding in the woodwork at Sony Playstation. Invisible if there was any danger to them and not supporting the people doing challenging work, and taking credit and ownership anytime anything was successful. Not a good HR model for the wellbeing of 'free agents'
stevenwoo 9y ago
Video game studios often go cheap on things besides contractors, my experience from the inside is that the majority of voice talent is used outside the usual Hollywood system because they don't want to pay close to a union actor's competitive wages, and forget royalties for people who are not Hollywood famous. For instance, this is part of the reason Bill Roper is the voice of a lot of Warcraft 1 characters - they didn't want to pay professionals, and he was already there. I haven't been on the inside in a while but we might have one musician on a AAA title and he/she would compose all the music and they might also do all the foley work because musicians you might have heard of would probably laugh at the wages and would demand royalties. Obviously part of the issue is making video games can be a crap shoot where a game with original IP is just as often a failure as a success so it can be hard to justify spending money on an unknown entity, and royalties don't exist except for bigger successes for the most part.
- ido 9y ago
  It is in fact a lot more often a failure than a success.
- golergka 9y ago
  I remember how Nival paid $5k for ALL music and sounds in Heroes of Might and Magic V. It was mid-2000 Russia, but still, software developers were already paid $40-50k (annually gross, which is a very untypical way to measure salary in Russia, so your mileage may vary because of opaque net/gross conversion).
  - iMerNibor 9y ago
    I don't really see an issue if they got paid in accordance to the hourly work they put in - I mean devs don't get royalities, right?
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      In the 90's got checks in six figures every year for games I was a primary developer for that were hits in the years those games were hits. I got five figure checks for games that were hits for the studio that the most I can claim I did was play test. Of course at the same studio I worked on games that were never released.
spacelizard 9y ago
This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors. Contractors get burned by spending a lot of time bidding on the wrong projects. These problems will continue to get worse as the stakes rise, as there will be even less time to make decisions properly. The project management debt they mention doesn't go away, it increases exponentially. The article suggests industry shifts more towards project-based economies as they progress, but I think this is wrong. The examples of Hollywood and video gaming are both outliers, because both of these industries have put up huge resistance to lengthened product cycles. In part they perceive it as reducing competition. And it's true, but personally I am starting to wonder what all this competition is actually getting us. Prices for customers are dropping, however we seem to get a lot of sequels and recycled content in the name of cost-cutting, and then a lot of extraneous fighting over who gets to release what on what platform just to push royalty charges up. And what do we have to show for it? A lifetime of fickle and perpetually unhappy customers? Please make it stop. The only solace that I have is that a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race. This won't end, but we will start to see more consolidation as the industry continues to mature.
- dilemma 9y ago
  I think contract work is common in these industries because most work is project based and often different in essence. A comedy and a thriller likely needs different creative talent. It's also very much based on personal networks, so a producer or director may bring with them a core of people.
- stickfigure 9y ago
  a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race Only a handful of AAA games are in the "HW arms race". By sheer numbers, the overwhelming vast majority of games sold are casual games downloaded on mobile devices. The game industry is driven by people's short attention spans. It doesn't matter how fast you upgrade the technology, people get bored of playing the same game in the same way they get bored of watching the same movie even if you upgrade it to super-purple-ray-3D-smellivision. You already know the plot.
aanm1988 9y ago
> Consulting firm Accenture PLC, one of the world’s largest outsourced labor providers, calls it the “liquid workforce,” which can be turned on and off like a faucet. A faucet of 10k H-1B visas a year making an average salary of just 81k.
- robjan 9y ago
  Is that really "just"? It's still a lot more than the average worker.
  - aanm1988 9y ago
    Depends. How much would they be paying employees if they weren't able to use these outsourcing companies?
    - EduardoBautista 9y ago
      Probably less since they can just outsource to other countries.
  - s73ver 9y ago
    Average tech worker? Cause that's the only comparison that matters.
- stuaxo 9y ago
  Something about that part of the video made me feel a bit uneasy.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Hahahaha. There's a lot of money to be made cleaning up the messes these liquid workforces leave.
  - douche 9y ago
    Indeed. I owe my job to a failed outsourcing attempt.
grogenaut 9y ago
The article says 89 employees. A game studio in Seattle I worked at had 77 FTEs and we made AAA sony games. We'd contract up ton 120 or so in house pre-launch and of course hired mocap studios and other project shops. But I'm actually surprised Phoronix has that many employees. Anyway this is actually a pretty large size for a game studio. More numbers from studios building much larger (RL is more about balance and in game items than story or world building): Bungie had around 550 (heavily staffed up) before Destiny came out. Zipper had 250 before they shut down. Naughty dog I think had around 150 before they spun up LoU, I recall them around 250 now.
- mappu 9y ago
  >I'm actually surprised Phoronix has that many employees. Psyonix
alxmdev 9y ago
A while back I was chatting with an engineer who worked on the network code and infrastructure for a popular simulation game. After all the heavy lifting was done, he and others were promptly fired and replaced by contractors. The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a paycheck, yet he was literally replaced like a cog the minute a spreadsheet called for it. So much for wanting talented and loyal employees. It must be too easy to forget that all these business decisions affect real human beings, not empty automatons.
- TheGRS 9y ago
  Strange if that's the norm now too, some of the best games of the 90's seemed to all come out of dedicated teams who just loved their craft. In fact most of my favorite games I could probably point to a development team that worked well together and cared about their projects and stuck together after a release. Its too bad, I like Rocket League's simple premise and execution (it basically builds off of some mods I used to play in Unreal Tournament 2004). If they brought some of the dedicated contractors on full time for their next project and fostered a great culture I'm sure it would help much more than the short-term gains they'll get by their current practice.
  - org3432 9y ago
    I've worked with many contracting companies in gaming, not always, but it's not uncommon for contractors to produce higher quality work than employees and normally are more productive. I think employees tend to think that culture is what they're there for instead of producing IP, that's very common in gaming and perhaps one of the reasons execs need to bolster productivity with contractors.
    - richforrester 9y ago
      I see where you're coming from but; > The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a paycheck ... so it's kinda sad when productivity isn't the reason.
    - 9y ago
stickfigure 9y ago
This article is dreadful. Here's an alternative view: Talented software engineers are sick of 80-hour-week grinds as underpaid salary employees in an industry where nine out of ten products fail. By working contract/hourly, they get actual money in liu of their name in a credits list that nobody reads - even in the unlikely event their product ships.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Are you saying salaried employees don't get paid if the game tanks? I'm not sure what you're going for here.
  - robryan 9y ago
    They get paid a full time wage, likely no overtime. The parent comment is saying that at least contractors should get paid for every hour worked.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    I work in the games industry. If a contractor works 80 hours a week, they can bill for 80 hours a week. If an employee works unpaid overtime then at least part of it is in hopes for a nice bonus once the game comes out(apart from you know, the satisfaction of working on a game). So in that way, an employee can do loads of extra work and if the game tanks they won't see any extra money.
  - snovv_crash 9y ago
    Salaried employees don't get paid overtime.
    - daemin 9y ago
      This depends on the company. Where I work now we do get paid for overtime, but we have to organise it with our managers and producers first, and it has to be for a good reason. At the moment we are not in "crunch" so we only do overtime if we think we need to.
Avalyst 9y ago
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- mwcmitchell 9y ago
  thank you!
z3t4 9y ago
good games never gets old. they will last throug many generations. technology might change though. but as a single developer its a huge step to hire someone.
henrik_w 9y ago
The example in this article is for game development. I've been thinking about this for SW development in general, and to me there seem to be two strong reasons why it makes more sense to have permanent employees than contractors: - SW is never done. Any successful application is continually developed, so there are always more work to be done on the application. - Knowledge gained. The longer you work on a product, the more you learn about it, the source code and the domain. With permanent employees, the knowledge is retained (until they quit), but with contractors the knowledge is lost more quickly. https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/22/software-development-and-the-gig-economy/ https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/22/software-development-and-...
- k__ 9y ago
  Most companies I met are after employees and not contractors. Big corps because they want to form the people so they become exactly as they want them. Small start-ups probably because they can't sell a company without employees? On the other hand I know a few devs of bought start-ups that had hard times because the buyer only wanted a few of the devs and only those they considered good, not the "bystanders". Also, managers want more control and employees can be scared with the prospect of losing their job, because they value stability. As a contractor I'm always aware of losing a project, people don't have any budget left or it is simply finished and I need to go on, so if a manager wants to give me a hard time, I simply wrap things up and go to another company.
bane 9y ago
The videogame industry is in bad need of a more developed studio system like what's used in the movie industry. It exists to a point, but it's usually a large developer establishing short-term studios to capture geographically located talent (or converting acquisitions into short-term studios to squeeze the last bit of talent out of a geographic area). Too many videogame industry jobs are 1-off, lasting only so long as their part in the production of a single game exists. In essence, they work for the game. This is also true of the movie industry in many cases, but more often than not, work is farmed out to a variety of small production companies who each bring a few bits to the table. In a movie, the lighting guy works a steady-ish job for a lighting company, the cameras are rented from an equipment company, many of the actors will work for a couple agencies and so on. The production company hires out and assembles these pieces, which are often union supported, and makes a movie. It's not too many people who work for the movie. Once the movie shuts down production, the lighting guy goes back and asks his company where his next gig is, the actors have their agency working for them, the cameras go back into rentable inventory and so on. This spreads risk out and keeps the industry from going through huge hiring/firing cycles. The video game industry hasn't really matured to this point. You get a job working for EA Games East or wherever, get assigned to work on "Dog Touch Magic 2 - iOS" do your work, and if you're lucky will get asked to work on "Dog Touch Magic 3" or whatever. If you don't work for a studio directly, you're probably freelancing. But there's very little middle ground like in the film industry. There's no real equivalent of say "I need 3d modelers for this game, let's get 2 or 3 contractors from Modelhaus Inc." bring them on for 4 months to make some models and then return them to their company to be hired out again. Instead EA Games East will have staff modelers or some freelancers, and their jobs may last beyond the game or task they're assigned to. It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't done it yet.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  > It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't done it yet. Game industry veteran here. It's not surprising to me at all. Large dev studios don't want unions. They've been able to capitalize on an endless sea of starry eyed young devs willing to work 60+ hour weeks for months on end for half the salary they could make in other software fields until they get burned out, just so they can say they worked on the 10th sequel of a game they loved as a kid, or tell their friends 'I worked on this game you can download here!' and it doesn't look like the supply of that has gone down at all. Meanwhile, individual software developers not in the midst of a company death march and are probably doing the Indie thing and tend to see themselves as lone wolves and thus don't make much effort to organize with their other developers. There's associations like IGDA (International Game Developers Association), but in my interactions with them, I haven't seen them organize anything more than social activities with some veteran from the game industry to give a talk.
otachack 9y ago
I haven't read the article but I do have my two cents to add toward the subject of game development hiring. Going into college I had the dream of eventually working at Blizzard or some other big video game company. However, I ran into articles about studios of beloved games hitting misfortune (Sierra, Westwood Studios, etc.) from either bankruptcy or being bought out by bigger game companies. I also read articles on how former big studio employees were being dumped at the end of projects. You can see Hideo Kojima as a latest example. There is, however, a silver lining. All, if not most, of the tools for developing software are out there to use for free or with doable licensing which usually rely on sales of the developed game. Unity, Unreal being big, powerful game engine examples while Gamemaker or even straightup IO libraries like SDL being on the other side of the spectrum. With these tools, coupled with various distribution methods like GoG, Steam, eShop, itch.io, or just straight binary hosting, indie developers have been killing it in the video game space when it comes to creativity and originality. There is the problem of the door for entry being a bit too open and so you tend to see a lot of vaporware, clones, bad games, or even alpha/beta games that seem to just stagnate due to feature creep or other misfortunes. But there are gems being put out that even surpass the crap AAA companies put out. I see former workers of big companies ditch or get laid off from their former employer to start their own gig or join one. It's exciting to see what they come up with and which ones succeed.
mungoid 9y ago
What makes this so frustrating for game developers looking for work (or people wanting to get into the field) is that it is really difficult to find the names of those contract companies. Most dont even think to look for something like this. People usually think "Oh i love that companies games so im gonna apply there." Only to never hear back, because they contract. I have years of professional game development and simulation work under my belt and I find it one of the most difficult fields to actually get in to. I always end up just doing the usual software development while still aspiring to actually get a job as a game developer. IMO this is a slippery slope for game companies
- lj3 9y ago
  > it is really difficult to find the names of those contract companies. I worked in games for 3 years and we worked with a few contractors. I noticed a few bizarre things about the contractors we used. We never worked with the same contractor for two different games in a row. Every contractor we used we heard of through word of mouth. They were all small (2-20 people) and most of the time they had no to little online presence. The most effective avenue for getting jobs seemed to be handing your business card out at GDC to as many people as you can. As far as I can see, if you want to be a game contractor, you're better off starting one on your own than trying to get hired by a contracting company. Find a game artist who's also just starting out, launch a shitty game or two to show that you can, then hand your card out at GDC.
  - mungoid 9y ago
    Yep, exactly! I was in pretty much in the same boat as you, and almost every project we got or worked on ended up coming from other contracting companies that were in over their head. I think that right there is the biggest issue of contracting companies, because their sales people and account managers will over-promise, get the contract signed and then the PM's and developers will have to work extra hours to make up for it. Leading to rushed, poor quality software. And ultimately they get absolutely no credit for the work because the company that hired them claims the credit. I actually left that company last year to get out of the chaos and do my own freelancing, but that even led into the exact same issues. Since I'm not a super-mega-rockstar freelancer, if i wanted to make ends meet financially, I would have to over-promise to bring in enough work. But now, it is just me so I have to work 12 hours a day anyway to make clients happy. Honestly I think aspiring game devs would be better off just making and sell games they enjoy until they can bring in enough money to sustain them. Possibly even making a hit game that starts their own company. Hopefully one that does not contract out work ;-)
exelius 9y ago
The video game industry is the new movie industry -- except nobody is unionized. The film industry is notorious for this crap as well; look at the Sausage Party controversy for a recent example. Honestly, a programmer on a video game is not much different than a camera operator, a film editor or a VFX engineer. Sure, you need quality work in those areas to have a good product, but great work in these areas can still be submarined by a terrible concept (ahem ScarJo's Ghost in the Shell). And really, can you blame them? Revenues are largely based on the work of the producer (marketing / promotion), the director (overall tone / quality) and the acting talent (big names = box office draws); the folks behind the scenes get screwed over (or they would if they didn't have unions ensuring some long-term consequences for producers acting in bad faith).
- mwcmitchell 9y ago
  what happened in the case of Sausage Party?
  - searine 9y ago
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georgewsinger 9y ago
Why does this happen in the gaming industry but not other computing industries (or is it happening there also?)?
- ben010783 9y ago
  It is more extreme in the gaming industry because you need so much staff to make a game, and then the needs change drastically after the game is released. From the article: > Layoffs often hit after a game was released, which was hardest on workers who were let go and damaged morale for those who stayed. “It was like ‘Welcome to the family!’ ” he recalls. “Then we released the game, and it was ‘See you later!’ ” Outsourcing became a solution to the hire-and-fire cycle, says Mr. Hartsman.
- pram 9y ago
  Enterprise software, unlike most video games, has a very long life if it has enough support contracts. These are usually easy jobs that pay pretty well at companies like Oracle. Of course these jobs have their own unique existential dread... theres no paradise (but you can certainly relax more)
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Games depend on sales and they're extremely complex, so they take a very long time to build. You don't know if the game is going to sell well before you make it. They're just like movies in this respect; it's a "hits business", and only a few companies last very long under such arrangements. Additionally, people are desperate to be employed by a game company, so the competition for stable/permanent employment is fierce. Most software developers are employed to write custom software for internal use by their employer, which is expected to last for years and will generally receive a lot of continuing investment. Almost every company of substantial size has such a project, so there are plenty of stable employment opportunities. If the company doesn't want to use its old software anymore, they keep their employees onboard because they have useful knowledge about the business and what does/does not work from the prior package. None of this is really relevant or true of game companies.
Proven 9y ago
In which industry it isn't? The only entity which ignores economics is the government. Apart from them I would expect others to behave rationally.
dandare 9y ago
Dear employees, please do not be loyal to your employers. You can be loyal to your boss if he deserves it but your employer is not a natural person, it is a legal person and as such it can not be loyal back to you. If the situation requires you will be made redundant or replaced or moved - or promoted. There is a contract between you that defines what you owe to each other and if you are loyal beyond that you are essentially giving your money to some shareholder on the other side of the world. When dealing with a legal person always act in your own interest.
- kemiller2002 9y ago
  My boss actually "beats" this into people. He explains repeatedly that the company has no loyalty to you, and that you must have some sort of a life outside of work and extra work is giving more to the company than what you are paid for. I saw him threaten to fire someone for working overtime once, because he can't fix the staffing problem until the company feels the pain of having a staffing problem.
  - throwaway9475 9y ago
    It's different if you get paid for overtime, though (usually time and a half). Companies threaten action against people working overtime because then the company has to pay more and that's a Bad Thing (TM), (even though the employees are providing way more value to the company than the company is providing to them), not because people want a staffing problem to make the company "wake up" or something. My mother doesn't work overtime out of the goodness of her heart, she just scrapes by and wants to be able to retire at a reasonable age.
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      At least in the US, 99% of developers are "exempt" and make the same pay if they work 10 hours or 100 hours. Overtime = "free" labor you can extract from your employees.
    - kemiller2002 9y ago
      Yeah, I should note we're all salaried. None of us get more money for working extra hours.
pascalxus 9y ago
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- mikelyons 9y ago
  wsj is commonly known to be an evil organization now.
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ocschwar 9y ago
Remember, folks: "follow your passion" only works if your passion is taking care of your family.
- Kenji 9y ago
  Or when you are the sole owner of the fruit of your passion, instead of stupidly giving it away.
kelvin0 9y ago
Ex-VideoGame dev Here (console mostly). Let's not forget the barrier to entry for shipping video games is going down drastically (except for AAA where it keeps getting more expensive!). So, the big publishers are shipping AAA games with margins that are getting thinner and require careful balancing acts to make those releases profitable. Players expect better Gfx, Sound, Music, VR/AR, Multiplayer and vast open world universes, these things are not cheap ... As an alternative path, many 'indies' are able to make it on their own and it's possible to work as a contractor and indie dev. Tools like Unity and Unreal and the plethora of mobile gaming plaforms are very accessible to almost anyone with basic technical knowledge. With 17 years experience as a Dev, I can tell you the most talented, creative and smart devs/progs/engineers I have met are in the Video games industry, I haven't been in any other industry where it gets even close to that.
- flamedoge 9y ago
  Cost of programming is going down, with all the new game engines... It's definitely becoming easier and most work is becoming gluing things together. Plus you can literally flip switch to enable graphical features..
georgeecollins 9y ago
This is the way film production has been for decades. The problem with games is that there isn't a union to protect credits or establish work rules. If there was, I would only work as a contractor.
jscipione 9y ago
In every industry hiring people is a last resort, that's why Trickle Down Economics doesn't work.
gumby 9y ago
as opposed to? I find it ironic that they compare to the movie industry, another one riven with dreadful pathologies.
RedStarComrade 9y ago
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Anybody have a full article link?

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dmoy 9y ago

I don't get it. They seem to imply there's more done by contractors than not, with "Network of contractors" and "Lean core of in-house", but in both examples given (rocket league, blizzard), full time outnumber contractors 2:1 or 3:1?

sidlls 9y ago
It's wasn't uncommon several years ago at one studio I know of to have core components of multiple titles maintained by permanent in-house staff and much of the feature development done by contractors. They had a ratio almost inverted from what you describe (approximately contractor:perm::3:2).
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  N=1 and five years ago but I worked on a console title where the feature development was 3 contractors/1 perm (me who didn't realize contracting was a much better deal) and five perm who supported us when needed. There was also a project that was outsourced entirely to a separate studio that our management fired for non performance and I had to revive the build from a hard drive with the last build and assets so the perm team could take over - so all sorts of permutations possible.
midnightclubbed 9y ago
I agree, the article reads like they had an idea for a story and tried to fit the facts around it. The heaviest use of contractors in the games industry is, as they imply in the article, in test. Typically you'll have a small core test group in-house to handle test during development and then a much bigger outsourced group you'll ramp up prior to release. In a large multiplayer game you may want 100s of testers on hand at any one time, but only for a few days at a time. Outsourcing gives you that. Depending on the game you may be content heavy in which case may use outside contractors (or outside studios) to help with the mass of work but that seems to have dropped off as a practice in recent years. Using Chinese and Indian art outsourcing studios was big 10 years ago. More recently the big players have moved to a model where each of their development studios has a game (or two) in development with a core team working only on that game and a content team who will work on whichever studio needs their help (typically the next game for release). If you are not 'outsourcing' the entire game development you'll typically want most of the core staff in the same location and full-time. Design, code, technical art and art direction all have to work very closely together. Not something you can easily split around the world or assign to short-term contractors. Psyonix did outsource their console versions to another studio (likely comprised of full-time employees), which is common with smaller companies who would rather not have to ramp-up their engineering staff for console support. It also saves Psyonix the large capital expense of purchasing development kits.
- dmoy 9y ago
  Ok thanks, what you described sounds much more realistic and in line with what I've heard from family members who did video game testing than the narrative the article was talking about.

zubat 9y ago

This isn't anything new to how the business is structured. Note the elision of the 50+ employees in-house: even if it's one artist and one programmer, you really need them to be full-timers to run the main production cycle, or at minimum longer-term contractors who have time to ramp up. Otherwise you get too many bottlenecks. Outsourcing ports, localization, and audio was done almost from the beginning. (Go look up how Rob Hubbard wrote the soundtrack to Commando on C64 for one example) That said, the trend definitely continues to lean towards a small core team that can put the pieces together, and then external teams who can leverage a longer term specialization, lowering management risks on both ends by reducing the "seasonal layoff" dynamic of game launches.

olivermarks 9y ago

Some of the most cynical middle and senior manager types I've ever met were hiding in the woodwork at Sony Playstation. Invisible if there was any danger to them and not supporting the people doing challenging work, and taking credit and ownership anytime anything was successful. Not a good HR model for the wellbeing of 'free agents'

stevenwoo 9y ago

Video game studios often go cheap on things besides contractors, my experience from the inside is that the majority of voice talent is used outside the usual Hollywood system because they don't want to pay close to a union actor's competitive wages, and forget royalties for people who are not Hollywood famous. For instance, this is part of the reason Bill Roper is the voice of a lot of Warcraft 1 characters - they didn't want to pay professionals, and he was already there. I haven't been on the inside in a while but we might have one musician on a AAA title and he/she would compose all the music and they might also do all the foley work because musicians you might have heard of would probably laugh at the wages and would demand royalties. Obviously part of the issue is making video games can be a crap shoot where a game with original IP is just as often a failure as a success so it can be hard to justify spending money on an unknown entity, and royalties don't exist except for bigger successes for the most part.

ido 9y ago
It is in fact a lot more often a failure than a success.
golergka 9y ago
I remember how Nival paid $5k for ALL music and sounds in Heroes of Might and Magic V. It was mid-2000 Russia, but still, software developers were already paid $40-50k (annually gross, which is a very untypical way to measure salary in Russia, so your mileage may vary because of opaque net/gross conversion).
- iMerNibor 9y ago
  I don't really see an issue if they got paid in accordance to the hourly work they put in - I mean devs don't get royalities, right?
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    In the 90's got checks in six figures every year for games I was a primary developer for that were hits in the years those games were hits. I got five figure checks for games that were hits for the studio that the most I can claim I did was play test. Of course at the same studio I worked on games that were never released.

spacelizard 9y ago

This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors. Contractors get burned by spending a lot of time bidding on the wrong projects. These problems will continue to get worse as the stakes rise, as there will be even less time to make decisions properly. The project management debt they mention doesn't go away, it increases exponentially. The article suggests industry shifts more towards project-based economies as they progress, but I think this is wrong. The examples of Hollywood and video gaming are both outliers, because both of these industries have put up huge resistance to lengthened product cycles. In part they perceive it as reducing competition. And it's true, but personally I am starting to wonder what all this competition is actually getting us. Prices for customers are dropping, however we seem to get a lot of sequels and recycled content in the name of cost-cutting, and then a lot of extraneous fighting over who gets to release what on what platform just to push royalty charges up. And what do we have to show for it? A lifetime of fickle and perpetually unhappy customers? Please make it stop. The only solace that I have is that a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race. This won't end, but we will start to see more consolidation as the industry continues to mature.

dilemma 9y ago
I think contract work is common in these industries because most work is project based and often different in essence. A comedy and a thriller likely needs different creative talent. It's also very much based on personal networks, so a producer or director may bring with them a core of people.
stickfigure 9y ago
a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race Only a handful of AAA games are in the "HW arms race". By sheer numbers, the overwhelming vast majority of games sold are casual games downloaded on mobile devices. The game industry is driven by people's short attention spans. It doesn't matter how fast you upgrade the technology, people get bored of playing the same game in the same way they get bored of watching the same movie even if you upgrade it to super-purple-ray-3D-smellivision. You already know the plot.

aanm1988 9y ago

> Consulting firm Accenture PLC, one of the world’s largest outsourced labor providers, calls it the “liquid workforce,” which can be turned on and off like a faucet. A faucet of 10k H-1B visas a year making an average salary of just 81k.

robjan 9y ago
Is that really "just"? It's still a lot more than the average worker.
- aanm1988 9y ago
  Depends. How much would they be paying employees if they weren't able to use these outsourcing companies?
  - EduardoBautista 9y ago
    Probably less since they can just outsource to other countries.
- s73ver 9y ago
  Average tech worker? Cause that's the only comparison that matters.
stuaxo 9y ago
Something about that part of the video made me feel a bit uneasy.
gozur88 9y ago
Hahahaha. There's a lot of money to be made cleaning up the messes these liquid workforces leave.
- douche 9y ago
  Indeed. I owe my job to a failed outsourcing attempt.

grogenaut 9y ago

The article says 89 employees. A game studio in Seattle I worked at had 77 FTEs and we made AAA sony games. We'd contract up ton 120 or so in house pre-launch and of course hired mocap studios and other project shops. But I'm actually surprised Phoronix has that many employees. Anyway this is actually a pretty large size for a game studio. More numbers from studios building much larger (RL is more about balance and in game items than story or world building): Bungie had around 550 (heavily staffed up) before Destiny came out. Zipper had 250 before they shut down. Naughty dog I think had around 150 before they spun up LoU, I recall them around 250 now.

mappu 9y ago
>I'm actually surprised Phoronix has that many employees. Psyonix

alxmdev 9y ago

A while back I was chatting with an engineer who worked on the network code and infrastructure for a popular simulation game. After all the heavy lifting was done, he and others were promptly fired and replaced by contractors. The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a paycheck, yet he was literally replaced like a cog the minute a spreadsheet called for it. So much for wanting talented and loyal employees. It must be too easy to forget that all these business decisions affect real human beings, not empty automatons.

TheGRS 9y ago
Strange if that's the norm now too, some of the best games of the 90's seemed to all come out of dedicated teams who just loved their craft. In fact most of my favorite games I could probably point to a development team that worked well together and cared about their projects and stuck together after a release. Its too bad, I like Rocket League's simple premise and execution (it basically builds off of some mods I used to play in Unreal Tournament 2004). If they brought some of the dedicated contractors on full time for their next project and fostered a great culture I'm sure it would help much more than the short-term gains they'll get by their current practice.
- org3432 9y ago
  I've worked with many contracting companies in gaming, not always, but it's not uncommon for contractors to produce higher quality work than employees and normally are more productive. I think employees tend to think that culture is what they're there for instead of producing IP, that's very common in gaming and perhaps one of the reasons execs need to bolster productivity with contractors.
  - richforrester 9y ago
    I see where you're coming from but; > The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a paycheck ... so it's kinda sad when productivity isn't the reason.
  - 9y ago

stickfigure 9y ago

This article is dreadful. Here's an alternative view: Talented software engineers are sick of 80-hour-week grinds as underpaid salary employees in an industry where nine out of ten products fail. By working contract/hourly, they get actual money in liu of their name in a credits list that nobody reads - even in the unlikely event their product ships.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
Are you saying salaried employees don't get paid if the game tanks? I'm not sure what you're going for here.
- robryan 9y ago
  They get paid a full time wage, likely no overtime. The parent comment is saying that at least contractors should get paid for every hour worked.
- gambiting 9y ago
  I work in the games industry. If a contractor works 80 hours a week, they can bill for 80 hours a week. If an employee works unpaid overtime then at least part of it is in hopes for a nice bonus once the game comes out(apart from you know, the satisfaction of working on a game). So in that way, an employee can do loads of extra work and if the game tanks they won't see any extra money.
- snovv_crash 9y ago
  Salaried employees don't get paid overtime.
  - daemin 9y ago
    This depends on the company. Where I work now we do get paid for overtime, but we have to organise it with our managers and producers first, and it has to be for a good reason. At the moment we are not in "crunch" so we only do overtime if we think we need to.

Avalyst 9y ago

Paywalled article

rodionos 9y ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a-dollar75-billion-industry-is-powering-down-on-employees/ar-BBzF4sg https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a-dollar75-billi... - copy on msn

mwcmitchell 9y ago
thank you!

z3t4 9y ago

good games never gets old. they will last throug many generations. technology might change though. but as a single developer its a huge step to hire someone.

henrik_w 9y ago

The example in this article is for game development. I've been thinking about this for SW development in general, and to me there seem to be two strong reasons why it makes more sense to have permanent employees than contractors: - SW is never done. Any successful application is continually developed, so there are always more work to be done on the application. - Knowledge gained. The longer you work on a product, the more you learn about it, the source code and the domain. With permanent employees, the knowledge is retained (until they quit), but with contractors the knowledge is lost more quickly. https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/22/software-development-and-the-gig-economy/ https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/22/software-development-and-...

k__ 9y ago
Most companies I met are after employees and not contractors. Big corps because they want to form the people so they become exactly as they want them. Small start-ups probably because they can't sell a company without employees? On the other hand I know a few devs of bought start-ups that had hard times because the buyer only wanted a few of the devs and only those they considered good, not the "bystanders". Also, managers want more control and employees can be scared with the prospect of losing their job, because they value stability. As a contractor I'm always aware of losing a project, people don't have any budget left or it is simply finished and I need to go on, so if a manager wants to give me a hard time, I simply wrap things up and go to another company.

bane 9y ago

The videogame industry is in bad need of a more developed studio system like what's used in the movie industry. It exists to a point, but it's usually a large developer establishing short-term studios to capture geographically located talent (or converting acquisitions into short-term studios to squeeze the last bit of talent out of a geographic area). Too many videogame industry jobs are 1-off, lasting only so long as their part in the production of a single game exists. In essence, they work for the game. This is also true of the movie industry in many cases, but more often than not, work is farmed out to a variety of small production companies who each bring a few bits to the table. In a movie, the lighting guy works a steady-ish job for a lighting company, the cameras are rented from an equipment company, many of the actors will work for a couple agencies and so on. The production company hires out and assembles these pieces, which are often union supported, and makes a movie. It's not too many people who work for the movie. Once the movie shuts down production, the lighting guy goes back and asks his company where his next gig is, the actors have their agency working for them, the cameras go back into rentable inventory and so on. This spreads risk out and keeps the industry from going through huge hiring/firing cycles. The video game industry hasn't really matured to this point. You get a job working for EA Games East or wherever, get assigned to work on "Dog Touch Magic 2 - iOS" do your work, and if you're lucky will get asked to work on "Dog Touch Magic 3" or whatever. If you don't work for a studio directly, you're probably freelancing. But there's very little middle ground like in the film industry. There's no real equivalent of say "I need 3d modelers for this game, let's get 2 or 3 contractors from Modelhaus Inc." bring them on for 4 months to make some models and then return them to their company to be hired out again. Instead EA Games East will have staff modelers or some freelancers, and their jobs may last beyond the game or task they're assigned to. It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't done it yet.

cableshaft 9y ago
> It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't done it yet. Game industry veteran here. It's not surprising to me at all. Large dev studios don't want unions. They've been able to capitalize on an endless sea of starry eyed young devs willing to work 60+ hour weeks for months on end for half the salary they could make in other software fields until they get burned out, just so they can say they worked on the 10th sequel of a game they loved as a kid, or tell their friends 'I worked on this game you can download here!' and it doesn't look like the supply of that has gone down at all. Meanwhile, individual software developers not in the midst of a company death march and are probably doing the Indie thing and tend to see themselves as lone wolves and thus don't make much effort to organize with their other developers. There's associations like IGDA (International Game Developers Association), but in my interactions with them, I haven't seen them organize anything more than social activities with some veteran from the game industry to give a talk.

otachack 9y ago

I haven't read the article but I do have my two cents to add toward the subject of game development hiring. Going into college I had the dream of eventually working at Blizzard or some other big video game company. However, I ran into articles about studios of beloved games hitting misfortune (Sierra, Westwood Studios, etc.) from either bankruptcy or being bought out by bigger game companies. I also read articles on how former big studio employees were being dumped at the end of projects. You can see Hideo Kojima as a latest example. There is, however, a silver lining. All, if not most, of the tools for developing software are out there to use for free or with doable licensing which usually rely on sales of the developed game. Unity, Unreal being big, powerful game engine examples while Gamemaker or even straightup IO libraries like SDL being on the other side of the spectrum. With these tools, coupled with various distribution methods like GoG, Steam, eShop, itch.io, or just straight binary hosting, indie developers have been killing it in the video game space when it comes to creativity and originality. There is the problem of the door for entry being a bit too open and so you tend to see a lot of vaporware, clones, bad games, or even alpha/beta games that seem to just stagnate due to feature creep or other misfortunes. But there are gems being put out that even surpass the crap AAA companies put out. I see former workers of big companies ditch or get laid off from their former employer to start their own gig or join one. It's exciting to see what they come up with and which ones succeed.

mungoid 9y ago

What makes this so frustrating for game developers looking for work (or people wanting to get into the field) is that it is really difficult to find the names of those contract companies. Most dont even think to look for something like this. People usually think "Oh i love that companies games so im gonna apply there." Only to never hear back, because they contract. I have years of professional game development and simulation work under my belt and I find it one of the most difficult fields to actually get in to. I always end up just doing the usual software development while still aspiring to actually get a job as a game developer. IMO this is a slippery slope for game companies

lj3 9y ago
> it is really difficult to find the names of those contract companies. I worked in games for 3 years and we worked with a few contractors. I noticed a few bizarre things about the contractors we used. We never worked with the same contractor for two different games in a row. Every contractor we used we heard of through word of mouth. They were all small (2-20 people) and most of the time they had no to little online presence. The most effective avenue for getting jobs seemed to be handing your business card out at GDC to as many people as you can. As far as I can see, if you want to be a game contractor, you're better off starting one on your own than trying to get hired by a contracting company. Find a game artist who's also just starting out, launch a shitty game or two to show that you can, then hand your card out at GDC.
- mungoid 9y ago
  Yep, exactly! I was in pretty much in the same boat as you, and almost every project we got or worked on ended up coming from other contracting companies that were in over their head. I think that right there is the biggest issue of contracting companies, because their sales people and account managers will over-promise, get the contract signed and then the PM's and developers will have to work extra hours to make up for it. Leading to rushed, poor quality software. And ultimately they get absolutely no credit for the work because the company that hired them claims the credit. I actually left that company last year to get out of the chaos and do my own freelancing, but that even led into the exact same issues. Since I'm not a super-mega-rockstar freelancer, if i wanted to make ends meet financially, I would have to over-promise to bring in enough work. But now, it is just me so I have to work 12 hours a day anyway to make clients happy. Honestly I think aspiring game devs would be better off just making and sell games they enjoy until they can bring in enough money to sustain them. Possibly even making a hit game that starts their own company. Hopefully one that does not contract out work ;-)

exelius 9y ago

The video game industry is the new movie industry -- except nobody is unionized. The film industry is notorious for this crap as well; look at the Sausage Party controversy for a recent example. Honestly, a programmer on a video game is not much different than a camera operator, a film editor or a VFX engineer. Sure, you need quality work in those areas to have a good product, but great work in these areas can still be submarined by a terrible concept (ahem ScarJo's Ghost in the Shell). And really, can you blame them? Revenues are largely based on the work of the producer (marketing / promotion), the director (overall tone / quality) and the acting talent (big names = box office draws); the folks behind the scenes get screwed over (or they would if they didn't have unions ensuring some long-term consequences for producers acting in bad faith).

mwcmitchell 9y ago
what happened in the case of Sausage Party?
- searine 9y ago
  http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/vancouver-union-files-complaint-behalf-sausage-party-artists-unpaid-overtime-allegations-142666.html http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/vancouver-union-fil...

georgewsinger 9y ago

Why does this happen in the gaming industry but not other computing industries (or is it happening there also?)?

ben010783 9y ago
It is more extreme in the gaming industry because you need so much staff to make a game, and then the needs change drastically after the game is released. From the article: > Layoffs often hit after a game was released, which was hardest on workers who were let go and damaged morale for those who stayed. “It was like ‘Welcome to the family!’ ” he recalls. “Then we released the game, and it was ‘See you later!’ ” Outsourcing became a solution to the hire-and-fire cycle, says Mr. Hartsman.
pram 9y ago
Enterprise software, unlike most video games, has a very long life if it has enough support contracts. These are usually easy jobs that pay pretty well at companies like Oracle. Of course these jobs have their own unique existential dread... theres no paradise (but you can certainly relax more)
cookiecaper 9y ago
Games depend on sales and they're extremely complex, so they take a very long time to build. You don't know if the game is going to sell well before you make it. They're just like movies in this respect; it's a "hits business", and only a few companies last very long under such arrangements. Additionally, people are desperate to be employed by a game company, so the competition for stable/permanent employment is fierce. Most software developers are employed to write custom software for internal use by their employer, which is expected to last for years and will generally receive a lot of continuing investment. Almost every company of substantial size has such a project, so there are plenty of stable employment opportunities. If the company doesn't want to use its old software anymore, they keep their employees onboard because they have useful knowledge about the business and what does/does not work from the prior package. None of this is really relevant or true of game companies.

Proven 9y ago

In which industry it isn't? The only entity which ignores economics is the government. Apart from them I would expect others to behave rationally.

dandare 9y ago

Dear employees, please do not be loyal to your employers. You can be loyal to your boss if he deserves it but your employer is not a natural person, it is a legal person and as such it can not be loyal back to you. If the situation requires you will be made redundant or replaced or moved - or promoted. There is a contract between you that defines what you owe to each other and if you are loyal beyond that you are essentially giving your money to some shareholder on the other side of the world. When dealing with a legal person always act in your own interest.

kemiller2002 9y ago
My boss actually "beats" this into people. He explains repeatedly that the company has no loyalty to you, and that you must have some sort of a life outside of work and extra work is giving more to the company than what you are paid for. I saw him threaten to fire someone for working overtime once, because he can't fix the staffing problem until the company feels the pain of having a staffing problem.
- throwaway9475 9y ago
  It's different if you get paid for overtime, though (usually time and a half). Companies threaten action against people working overtime because then the company has to pay more and that's a Bad Thing (TM), (even though the employees are providing way more value to the company than the company is providing to them), not because people want a staffing problem to make the company "wake up" or something. My mother doesn't work overtime out of the goodness of her heart, she just scrapes by and wants to be able to retire at a reasonable age.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    At least in the US, 99% of developers are "exempt" and make the same pay if they work 10 hours or 100 hours. Overtime = "free" labor you can extract from your employees.
  - kemiller2002 9y ago
    Yeah, I should note we're all salaried. None of us get more money for working extra hours.

pascalxus 9y ago

99$ to see 1 Article! wsj.com, you need to get to know your customers better. Complete Fail!

mikelyons 9y ago
wsj is commonly known to be an evil organization now.
- EduardoBautista 9y ago
  Why? I am a satisfied subscriber. The quality of their reporting is one of the best in the world.
EduardoBautista 9y ago
If you are a customer you shouldn't need to pay. And it's not for 1 article.

ocschwar 9y ago

Remember, folks: "follow your passion" only works if your passion is taking care of your family.

Kenji 9y ago
Or when you are the sole owner of the fruit of your passion, instead of stupidly giving it away.

kelvin0 9y ago

Ex-VideoGame dev Here (console mostly). Let's not forget the barrier to entry for shipping video games is going down drastically (except for AAA where it keeps getting more expensive!). So, the big publishers are shipping AAA games with margins that are getting thinner and require careful balancing acts to make those releases profitable. Players expect better Gfx, Sound, Music, VR/AR, Multiplayer and vast open world universes, these things are not cheap ... As an alternative path, many 'indies' are able to make it on their own and it's possible to work as a contractor and indie dev. Tools like Unity and Unreal and the plethora of mobile gaming plaforms are very accessible to almost anyone with basic technical knowledge. With 17 years experience as a Dev, I can tell you the most talented, creative and smart devs/progs/engineers I have met are in the Video games industry, I haven't been in any other industry where it gets even close to that.

flamedoge 9y ago
Cost of programming is going down, with all the new game engines... It's definitely becoming easier and most work is becoming gluing things together. Plus you can literally flip switch to enable graphical features..

georgeecollins 9y ago

This is the way film production has been for decades. The problem with games is that there isn't a union to protect credits or establish work rules. If there was, I would only work as a contractor.

jscipione 9y ago

In every industry hiring people is a last resort, that's why Trickle Down Economics doesn't work.

gumby 9y ago

as opposed to? I find it ironic that they compare to the movie industry, another one riven with dreadful pathologies.

RedStarComrade 9y ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a-dollar75-billion-industry-is-powering-down-on-employees/ar-BBzF4sg https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a-dollar75-billi... Article without the paywall.