31 ms·

Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers

321 points by snake117 9y ago

ashleyn 9y ago
I dunno what it is about the gaming industry relative to other software-related industries, but they have a horrid reputation for effectively treating employees as disposable. Not coincidentally, a lot of games end up having technical problems from the constant rush.
- georgeecollins 9y ago
  A lot of people want to work in games, so your junior people are easily replaced. Projects are episodic, and often do or die for small companies or even studios in larger companies. So the choice is perceived as maybe burning out a team or probably shutting down. Games are also one of those things where there is a big reward for being first and best, and little or no reward for being competent. Even though, as an audience you may not see it that way.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Games need a wide range of things some but not all of them get stuck in a crunch. You can have smaller well managed teams working reasonable schedules to get the core game play worked out then bolt on the AAA stuff once you have a winner. Crunch does have some advantages to the company, but it's also high risk.
    - vvanders 9y ago
      Crunch has zero advantages, period. We're not talking about a extra week of hard work here and there, it's months of sustained 80-100hr work weeks. You're so exhausted after just a few weeks that you make a ton of stupid fucking mistakes, which compounds the whole situation. If crunch worked you'd see it more widely across our industry, however it has the benefit of both burning out people and putting them in a state where their output is lower than it could be at sustained reasonable hours. Any asshole who thinks otherwise needs to be called out on it. Source: Ex-gamedev, where I watched crunch crater two different studios.
      - pm90 9y ago
        I guess it kinda depends on how your company does "crunch". I've been lucky in that in the crunches I've been involved in, although I've worked nights and weekends, we had a good division of responsibilities and guards against overworking. So while the team was through a multi-week crunch, I personally would be working only for a week and half stretch. But perhaps that is not what you mean by crunch. I guess my point is that occasionally it isn't bad to have a tight deadline and give it your everything to get it to work. If you do get it done, it feels mighty good. But I agree that it wouldn't be something I would like to do on a regular cadence.
        vvanders 9y ago
        A week and a half isn't crunch though, I'm talking about sustained long hours over a month or more(usually 4-6 months). Working a strong week is totally fine if followed by some recovery time. As long as it doesn't go longer than 2 weeks that's possible to do without destroying productivity, although you still run the risk of burning out your employees.
        JBlue42 9y ago
        I think the original idea of 'crunch' is that short period but games (and, in my experience, vfx) tend to just normalize that constant long hours (though they'll hire you saying that hours only get bad at peak times without mentioning that it's always a 'busy' time).
      - Retric 9y ago
        60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry. The difference is Google/software as a service, does not have the same kind of hard deadlines. But, when you start talking about major launches and boxed software or startups you really do see crunch. PS: By crunch I mean unsustainable pace leading up to a hard deadline.
        vvanders 9y ago
    - georgeecollins 9y ago
      On my third game I tried very hard to make a game with a generous schedule and no crunch. One thing that I discovered was that it was very hard to get members of the team to let things go. If you are passionate, their is always room for improvement. So you had to create deadlines that put pressure on people.
      - sp332 9y ago
        Sure, but that seems like the opposite. Creating a deadline as a reasonable limit on the amount of work put in is a lot different from demanding the same amount of work in an unreasonable time.
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        At that point, you exercise your power as boss and tell them to go home.
      - lliamander 9y ago
        Unless you align incentives correctly, you're not paying your developers to ship software, you're just paying them to write code. Setting a deadline is one way of aligning incentives (ship by this date or else...) and can work well so long as there is a good conversation around requirements, appropriate milestones are set, and developers are trusted to make good faith estimates. However, it is not the only way.
    - s73v3r_ 9y ago
      But the company doesn't really bear any of that risk. If something goes wrong, they just fire the staff, and start over. Upper management doesn't feel any pain.
- portofcall 9y ago
  People are willing to buy broken, exploitative games filled with monetization strategies, built by a committee of the damned. As long as it’s profitable to behave this way, and unregulated, companies making games will keep on being bad actors.
- RobLach 9y ago
  People romanticize working in games and are exploited for it. Once you realize the string allocator you’re coding isn’t much different than the one that other person working on enterprise software is making, but you’re getting paid 1/2 what they are and on deadlines dictated by a calendar based on $200 million worth of marketing decisions, you jump ship only to have your void filled by someone exactly like you a couple years more novice.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    I know someone whose entire reason for going into computer science was to become a game programmer and eventually hoping to be a game designer. Years after when he realized his career wasn’t what he thought it was he quit, and now he’s working as a security guard somewhere.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Yup, the pay thing is a double edged sword too because most studios are usually in high CoL locations. When I left the industry it was an instant 2x income increase. I went from paycheck to paycheck to being able to actually afford living in the Seattle area. I remember running the numbers on the hours I was working at my salary rate and realized that I would have been better off flipping burgers instead. It wasn't the breaking point but it definitely was a contributing factor.
    - mfoy_ 9y ago
      I don't think the double-edged sword is the metaphor you're looking for... in that, at least one edge is working for you. :p
  - e40 9y ago
    People romanticize working in games and are exploited for it. Ain't that the truth. Lots of young men (teenagers) aspire to be gamer programmers. When my son uttered those words, I immediately schooled him that it was one of the worst places on earth for a programmer to work. He got it.
- JabavuAdams 9y ago
  It's a terrible business model. It attracts creatives and addicts who can't help but work on games. Proceed from there...
- kabdib 9y ago
  Games are perceived to be date-driven hits. So there is a "magic date" you need to meet -- a major holiday, for instance, or a big industry event like E3 -- or your project is "toast". So you wind up with crunch time, and a lot of quality problems, and ship a bad, buggy product that gets bad reviews (but hey, you shipped by the magic date, so that made it all better, right?) Crunch time generally happens with consumer products; I've worked on these products practically my whole career, and it will burn you out unless you can find projects with enlightened management. I've also found that getting your own piece done solid, ahead of schedule, only means that you get dragged into the swamps and help out other teams with their issues -- you get to work on the really nasty bugs, the integrations with APIs designed by people too clever for their own damned good, you get to see the real sausage being made. I argue that shipping a good product late, with a smaller team [the tendency is to add a bunch of staffing to meet deadlines, and we all know how that story ends] will result in better reviews and sales, a team that has better ownership of the product, and much better retention. But try telling that to a Suit whose only skill is to order people around. [When I wrote my first game cartridge, I gave a detailed schedule of 150 days. It was October and marketing wanted the project to ship by Christmas, which left about two weeks for development. Even a clueless management stack knows that you can't compress work by that much, but it did take some effort to convince the marketroids that they couldn't just have 20 or 30 engineers sit down for a week and write the code. I did burnout hours for several months and finished up within a week of what I'd planned]. I regularly counsel "kids" not to get into the game industry early, and to concentrate on getting wide experience to a bunch of technologies, because game studios need more than just graphics and pretty lights. You can be a hero for doing a provisioning system, or a secure real-time networking layer, or a great storage system, and this stuff is just as necessary and as valuable as those flashy effects on the screen, just not as sexy or visible.
  - corysama 9y ago
    It’s not just holidays and E3 (and dodging releasing at th same time as the largest flagship titles). The main schedule constraint is that marketing spend must be paid months in advance for the purpose of reserving specific time windows. That spend is often equal or greater than the development budget. And, if you miss your time window, too fucking bad. You will have no marketing, no more money to buy in again and your game is now a flaming money hole. I once worked on a sequel to a semi-popular Xbox game that was tremendously better than the original in every way -except that it lacked marketing. It sold 10% of what the original did because no one noticed that it shipped. Shipping late is often not an option. Either ship on time or cancel the project near the end of development after 90% of the budget is spent. Layoffs and possible studio closure will certainly follow.
jdlyga 9y ago
The trick is working for companies doing 3D application development that's not related to games. I've never had a job where management treated us like this in almost a decade so far.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  It's valid to almost any other dev work apart from gaming. As long as you're in your job not purely for the passion but also plain old pragmatism, management is forced to treat you well - otherwise you just walk next door doing the same shit (ideally for 10-20% more). After university I was deciding which way to do (basically either cca backend Java vs cca game dev in C/C++). I took the more corporate Java way and couldn't be happier for last 14 years (within work-for-money restriction, my true happiness comes from stuff I do outside of work).
- ethbro 9y ago
  This is one thing I've never understood. For almost any skill set, there are multiple industries you could work in. And furthermore, the industry with the worst treatment of employees is likely not the best paying (given that bad treatment tends to stem from popularity / availability of naive new employees). So, if you don't like your work life... find a related industry!
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    Money and working conditions are factors in job satisfaction, but so is what you are doing. Some people really want to make games.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    But that's a pretty terrible suggestion. It should not be required to change industries to be treated with basic human dignity.
    - ethbro 9y ago
      Working conditions are a product of three variables: Employee supply * employer demand * legal regulations If supply and demand aren't going to change in your industry... expecting conditions to change is a long wait for a bus that's not coming.
itamarst 9y ago
The extra terrible thing is that this is completely counter-productive. E.g. see this takedown of crunch time by someone who works in the game industry: http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons But this is a problem outside the game industry too, though it sounds like they're even worse than usual. If you're a software engineer stuck in one of these jobs, you need to realize working fewer hours is good for you and your employer. More here: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/18/productive-programmer/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/18/productive-programme...
- vvanders 9y ago
  Yup, it's an endemic problem that has no sign of going away due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it on the nose to get into the industry. Ironically if you look at Gamasutra's yearly survey you see a huge cliff of experience right at the ~3 year mark as those people get burned out and the cycle repeats.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    I think for a lot of these people, they have never worked in any other company and maybe dont even realize work can be done another way. I’d love to ask an actual employee at one of these places: Do you realize crunch time is rare or nonexistent for most other companies? If so, do you stay where you are purely “because games?” I remember joining a particularly toxic company and mentoring one of the junior guys there. It was his first and only job out of school, and he thought work was simply supposed to be toxic—like this was normal.
    - vvanders 9y ago
      Sadly I think it's just that they're young and don't have a lot of responsibilities yet so it's easier to take on the brunt of it. I know before I went into the industry it was at a point where crunch was widely known. Heck, some people bragged about it like a badge of honor/rite of passage. A lot of it was maturing and realizing that there are more important things in life then giving every waking hour to a company that may throw you out on the door as soon as the title is shipped(or even sooner). I mentioned it a little further down the thread but I saw 3 different divorces at the last studio I worked at, largely due to spouses just not being there for each other due to the long hours.
horsecaptin 9y ago
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. I'm starting to think that game developers enjoy their toxic work environment until they finally realize that it is taking a toll. By then, they find that they're often stuck / lack the confidence to move on.
- sp332 9y ago
  They definitely move on, or at least drop out. But there are always more to replace them, so the company doesn't feel a lot of pressure to change.
  - nailer 9y ago
    Fashion industry is similar: so many inexperienced twenty year olds would do the job for free. So conditions are poor and people get paid a pittance. Why have one experienced person when you could get 10 x 22 year olds?
- horsecaptin 9y ago
  Whoops, I meant: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I pulled a Dubya!
  - rglovejoy 9y ago
    "Won't get fooled again."
dotsh 9y ago
This is what I call a full of shit company. People will stab you in a back to work for those but when they are there they start to realise how rotten it is. Then it's too late for them as they are getting into the Stockholm syndrome. Afraid to go, being pushed around because they do not believe they can do something better somewhere else and such CEOs take advantage of the situation to use them as much as possible and throw them away like a used condom. I hate this and it is not worth wasting life working for such companies or such people even for one day.
lkrubner 9y ago
We need more of this kind of honest writing. In the tech world, we tend to use euphemisms to talk about this kind of destructive behavior. Go to a Meetup full of VCs and they say stuff like "Oh, that startup died because of team dysfunction." Well, okay, but what does team dysfunction actually look like? How ugly does it get? Why does it happen? Self-sabotage is remarkably common. We all know the failure rate of startups is very high. The estimates I've read vary, but they are all in the range of 80% to 90%. And clearly, much of the failure comes from suicide, not homicide. That is, the startup isn't out maneuvered by a giant like Google, but rather, it fails because of its own internal flaws. The essay "Why do entrepreneurs engage in self-sabotage" is on this theme: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-do-entrepreneurs-engage-in-self-sabotage http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-do-entrepreneurs-en...
personjerry 9y ago
Isn't this what happened to Kerbal Space Program too?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bg4 9y ago
Toxic management costs all shops its best developers. Why are they not considered a direct threat to ROI?
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  Cause most management still considers developers to be interchangeable.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  The toxic managers know how to negotiate politics and bureaucracy. http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...
  - bg4 9y ago
    Thanks for this article.
cryptonector 9y ago
Toxicity also loses gamers.
gtirloni 9y ago
> For others, the inevitable outcome of what sources familiar with the company describe as years of a culture that promoted constant overwork, toxic management, and ~creative stagnation~ Having never worked in the game industry, I have a very naive view of what is the day-to-day of game developers. Being inherently creative work, what would creative stagnation look like in this case?
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  It's somewhat described in the article. Sleep deprived/overworked people have less creative energy (all sorts of productivity studies prove this over and over again). Poorly managed people watching their flanks for toxic attacks at their ideas allow themselves less creative freedom.
  - meheleventyone 9y ago
    Also stuff like having someone else habitually take credit is less than inspiring to bring forward your best work.
- ropeadopepope 9y ago
  The inability or unwillingness to come up with new ideas. You wind up recycling old ideas and avoid trying anything new. An old criticism of telltale games is that if you've played one of their games you've played them all.
diego_moita 9y ago
Sorry but the way this article describes this Kevin Bruner and its' "toxic management" sounds very close to how people describe Steve Jobs: egocentric, abusive and a micro-manager. What distinguishes a toxic manager from a leader, then? Edit: a phrase from the article: "This was one of the biggest issues with him as a CEO: he was pretty convinced that his taste was everyone’s taste."
- knuththetruth 9y ago
  For whatever reason, he was able to inspire and retain talented people. He probably was just as awful, but something else offset that, which Bruner demonstrably lacked.
- ropeadopepope 9y ago
  Charisma.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Success.
- jarsin 9y ago
  PR
- fsloth 9y ago
  Steve Jobs the manager went through several iterations. The terminal model was an opinionated manager who listened, respected and promoted those who could argue against him. Yes, was probably horrible in many ways. It's sad his asshole image clouds everything that was good in his management side and people thinj they need to act like assholes to emulate him. The asshole part was a pathology, not a feature, but perhaps an inseparable part of him as a person.
  - 14113 9y ago
    > and promoted those who could argue against him. I've worked with managers like this, and although it might work for some, it was hell for me. Having to constantly argue to defend your ideas is draining, soul destroying, depressing, and lead to me burning out multiple times. Discussing and critiquing ideas should not involve force from either the idea's champion, nor who they are pitching it to. If, at the end of the day, you're evaluating ideas based on the force by which they're presented all you end up with is ideas that support being presented and defended forcefully - not deftly, nor intelligently.
milankragujevic 9y ago
Hmm, I expected this to be about Squad, the makers of Kerbal Space Program...
Cyberdog 9y ago
Between reading the link title and the page loading, I had a little fun guessing which studio it was going to be about. EA? Konami? Ubisoft? Nope, I was wrong. But there are just so many possibilities… Thank goodness we're in something of a golden age of indie gaming. If you want to vote with your wallet against all these toxic AAA charnel houses, you have plenty of other quality choices to waste your time with. By the way, no gamers take game awards shows seriously.
dandersh 9y ago
In my experience demands for working > 40 hours, nights, weekends, etc. almost always comes from management and planning failures. What makes this scenario occur so often is that the business side wields too much power when it comes to culture, estimates, technical decision making, etc. For them you solve a problem by throwing more time at it and passing responsibility when possible (along with a few extra meetings, for good measure). Not only does this approach work poorly for development, but they are often the "final stop" in the product lifecycle, thus making it impossible to avoid taking responsibility, even for others work (like, say, for incomplete or nonexistent requirements). Perhaps worst of all is that surviving these crunches makes things worse as the wrong lessons are learned and the process continues to repeat itself as those who push for change become disgruntled and leave. Personally I've noticed a correlation between the pushing of "team culture" and toxic environments like this. The most egregious example of this was when it was suggested that I work unpaid on the weekend to "complete the sprint work as a TEAM."
- sdrothrock 9y ago
  > Personally I've noticed a correlation between the pushing of "team culture" and toxic environments like this. The most egregious example of this was when it was suggested that I work unpaid on the weekend to "complete the sprint work as a TEAM." The military has known for a very long time that [group] loyalty is absolutely necessary to get people to do things that they wouldn't normally do (for better or for worse), whether it's working extra hard, putting in more hours than usual, treating other groups as enemies, or even, yes, killing other people. The Stanford Prison experiment was a pretty good example of this in a bad way. This quote from Australian Defense Corps training also shows an understanding of this principle: "Willingness to apply lethal force requires . . . sufficient bonding within the team to override each individual’s natural human resistance to kill. The toughness and bonding required increases the closer the contact with the enemy." [1] So I wouldn't be surprised if team building exercises etc. were encouraged not only because of the actual productive results, but also because it's at least implicitly known to raise the boundaries of what individuals are willing to do. [1] McGurk; et al. (2006). 'Joining the ranks: The role of indoctrination in transforming civilians to service members', (in 'Military life: The psychology of serving in peace and combat [vol. 2]'). Westport: Praeger Security International. -- snagged from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/853218/in_boot_camp_recruits_to_the_military_are/dvux36v/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/853218/in_bo... Edit: Even being aware of these kinds of tactics doesn't do much to help as the tactics (and stress and lack of sleep) themselves wear down your resistance to them and affect your ability to make decent decisions.
LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
Nothing is going to change, there are to many stars in to many programers eyes, when they here games-industry. They literally can afford to burn the best talent, knowing it grows on tree for cheap for them. Its the same thing why model agents can harass or molest young woman, while they literally allmost starve to death to be in a industry they can only work in for 15 years and will never earn more then the basics to live. These actors are irrational, and there is a cornucopia providing new ones. Best idea to dry this swamp is for other industries who lack talent- to provide a dual path- meaning- if you come to work for us, we will teach you also the tools of the game-design trade- and provide you with a chance to parallel realize the game of your dream in a sabatical.
- kakarot 9y ago
  Creating a modern full-fledged "game of your dreams", even if not AAA, can take years if not decades when you're going alone. People join development studios so that they actually have the chance of finishing a project in a reasonable timeframe and so that they can focus on one or two disciplines.
  - LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
    You are totally right- it takes decades. But lets face it - in a company- there are two or three people doing the game-design, the others usually get not even a chance to contribute. They are put into a silo, connected to a part of the pipeline and start crunching until the ilusion wears off. Even if you get a chance to realize a idea- in a modern title, the fear of risk, sees to any new concept that it is marginalized. So even if it takes years, i think by now, its far more realistic to produce a title as a indy dev or open source dev by now. Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light; I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
question_that 9y ago
It's legal to work an employee 20 hours per day in California?
GFischer 9y ago
Insecure managers are a plague and I'm very glad I'm no longer working under one. "A real leader is thrilled when team members achieve great things. A mere manager is threatened."
k__ 9y ago
Isn't this normal and the reason for the rise of indie games? People want do make games, but they don't want to be crunched into oblivion, so they leave theae studios, go indie and do their own stuff...
ePierre 9y ago
French newspapers Mediapart and Canard PC have teamed up and released a bunch of articles about the video game industry and its toxic practices. The articles are available online [1] but they're in French and some of them are behind a paywall. The situation got to the point where a labor union for video games creators, « Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo » (STJV) [2], was created in France last year. There are currently around 70 members (out of 5000+ video game related employees in France). A strike is currently on-going in Eugen Systems [3], a French studio author of RTS games like Steel Division. [1] https://www.canardpc.com/online/crunch-investigation https://www.canardpc.com/online/crunch-investigation (French) [2] https://www.stjv.fr/en/ https://www.stjv.fr/en/ (English) [3] https://www.stjv.fr/en/2018/03/already-more-than-3-weeks-on-strike-at-eugen-systems/ https://www.stjv.fr/en/2018/03/already-more-than-3-weeks-on-... (English)
e3b0c 9y ago
I think this has something to do with the so-called Parkinson's law, where an organization tends to "corrupt" when it is growing its headcount if its top leader is not aware of it. I used to work for a startup which has a 'flexible' working time culture too. It was not that bad until the company grew its size to an extent that the middle management layer was established. Then all the shit exactly like what a typical Parkinson's law story happened. Edit: https://www.economist.com/node/14116121 https://www.economist.com/node/14116121
mmjaa 9y ago
I've floated around the Game industry as a developer, and I have to say its one of the most toxic management industries I've seen. Too many times I've seen folks who just don't qualify, running developer teams like its some sort of feudal village .. the inclination towards prejudice and bigotry is just too damned high. I wonder why it is that this industry in particular has such a problem with toxic management? My personal theory is that its because games are fundamentally a total decadence, and decadence just brings out the worst in humans ..
theshrike79 9y ago
I work 37.5 hours a week, maybe a bit more if I want to bank some hours for a vacation. Of that, maybe 30 hours is actual productive work. Dunno who thought that a software designer can actually produce useful stuff for 90 hours a week.

321 points by snake117 9y ago

I dunno what it is about the gaming industry relative to other software-related industries, but they have a horrid reputation for effectively treating employees as disposable. Not coincidentally, a lot of games end up having technical problems from the constant rush.

georgeecollins 9y ago
A lot of people want to work in games, so your junior people are easily replaced. Projects are episodic, and often do or die for small companies or even studios in larger companies. So the choice is perceived as maybe burning out a team or probably shutting down. Games are also one of those things where there is a big reward for being first and best, and little or no reward for being competent. Even though, as an audience you may not see it that way.
- Retric 9y ago
  Games need a wide range of things some but not all of them get stuck in a crunch. You can have smaller well managed teams working reasonable schedules to get the core game play worked out then bolt on the AAA stuff once you have a winner. Crunch does have some advantages to the company, but it's also high risk.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Crunch has zero advantages, period. We're not talking about a extra week of hard work here and there, it's months of sustained 80-100hr work weeks. You're so exhausted after just a few weeks that you make a ton of stupid fucking mistakes, which compounds the whole situation. If crunch worked you'd see it more widely across our industry, however it has the benefit of both burning out people and putting them in a state where their output is lower than it could be at sustained reasonable hours. Any asshole who thinks otherwise needs to be called out on it. Source: Ex-gamedev, where I watched crunch crater two different studios.
    - pm90 9y ago
      I guess it kinda depends on how your company does "crunch". I've been lucky in that in the crunches I've been involved in, although I've worked nights and weekends, we had a good division of responsibilities and guards against overworking. So while the team was through a multi-week crunch, I personally would be working only for a week and half stretch. But perhaps that is not what you mean by crunch. I guess my point is that occasionally it isn't bad to have a tight deadline and give it your everything to get it to work. If you do get it done, it feels mighty good. But I agree that it wouldn't be something I would like to do on a regular cadence.
      - vvanders 9y ago
        A week and a half isn't crunch though, I'm talking about sustained long hours over a month or more(usually 4-6 months). Working a strong week is totally fine if followed by some recovery time. As long as it doesn't go longer than 2 weeks that's possible to do without destroying productivity, although you still run the risk of burning out your employees.
        JBlue42 9y ago
        I think the original idea of 'crunch' is that short period but games (and, in my experience, vfx) tend to just normalize that constant long hours (though they'll hire you saying that hours only get bad at peak times without mentioning that it's always a 'busy' time).
    - Retric 9y ago
      60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry. The difference is Google/software as a service, does not have the same kind of hard deadlines. But, when you start talking about major launches and boxed software or startups you really do see crunch. PS: By crunch I mean unsustainable pace leading up to a hard deadline.
      - vvanders 9y ago
  - georgeecollins 9y ago
    On my third game I tried very hard to make a game with a generous schedule and no crunch. One thing that I discovered was that it was very hard to get members of the team to let things go. If you are passionate, their is always room for improvement. So you had to create deadlines that put pressure on people.
    - sp332 9y ago
      Sure, but that seems like the opposite. Creating a deadline as a reasonable limit on the amount of work put in is a lot different from demanding the same amount of work in an unreasonable time.
    - s73v3r_ 9y ago
      At that point, you exercise your power as boss and tell them to go home.
    - lliamander 9y ago
      Unless you align incentives correctly, you're not paying your developers to ship software, you're just paying them to write code. Setting a deadline is one way of aligning incentives (ship by this date or else...) and can work well so long as there is a good conversation around requirements, appropriate milestones are set, and developers are trusted to make good faith estimates. However, it is not the only way.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    But the company doesn't really bear any of that risk. If something goes wrong, they just fire the staff, and start over. Upper management doesn't feel any pain.
portofcall 9y ago
People are willing to buy broken, exploitative games filled with monetization strategies, built by a committee of the damned. As long as it’s profitable to behave this way, and unregulated, companies making games will keep on being bad actors.
RobLach 9y ago
People romanticize working in games and are exploited for it. Once you realize the string allocator you’re coding isn’t much different than the one that other person working on enterprise software is making, but you’re getting paid 1/2 what they are and on deadlines dictated by a calendar based on $200 million worth of marketing decisions, you jump ship only to have your void filled by someone exactly like you a couple years more novice.
- matte_black 9y ago
  I know someone whose entire reason for going into computer science was to become a game programmer and eventually hoping to be a game designer. Years after when he realized his career wasn’t what he thought it was he quit, and now he’s working as a security guard somewhere.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Yup, the pay thing is a double edged sword too because most studios are usually in high CoL locations. When I left the industry it was an instant 2x income increase. I went from paycheck to paycheck to being able to actually afford living in the Seattle area. I remember running the numbers on the hours I was working at my salary rate and realized that I would have been better off flipping burgers instead. It wasn't the breaking point but it definitely was a contributing factor.
  - mfoy_ 9y ago
    I don't think the double-edged sword is the metaphor you're looking for... in that, at least one edge is working for you. :p
- e40 9y ago
  People romanticize working in games and are exploited for it. Ain't that the truth. Lots of young men (teenagers) aspire to be gamer programmers. When my son uttered those words, I immediately schooled him that it was one of the worst places on earth for a programmer to work. He got it.
JabavuAdams 9y ago
It's a terrible business model. It attracts creatives and addicts who can't help but work on games. Proceed from there...
kabdib 9y ago
Games are perceived to be date-driven hits. So there is a "magic date" you need to meet -- a major holiday, for instance, or a big industry event like E3 -- or your project is "toast". So you wind up with crunch time, and a lot of quality problems, and ship a bad, buggy product that gets bad reviews (but hey, you shipped by the magic date, so that made it all better, right?) Crunch time generally happens with consumer products; I've worked on these products practically my whole career, and it will burn you out unless you can find projects with enlightened management. I've also found that getting your own piece done solid, ahead of schedule, only means that you get dragged into the swamps and help out other teams with their issues -- you get to work on the really nasty bugs, the integrations with APIs designed by people too clever for their own damned good, you get to see the real sausage being made. I argue that shipping a good product late, with a smaller team [the tendency is to add a bunch of staffing to meet deadlines, and we all know how that story ends] will result in better reviews and sales, a team that has better ownership of the product, and much better retention. But try telling that to a Suit whose only skill is to order people around. [When I wrote my first game cartridge, I gave a detailed schedule of 150 days. It was October and marketing wanted the project to ship by Christmas, which left about two weeks for development. Even a clueless management stack knows that you can't compress work by that much, but it did take some effort to convince the marketroids that they couldn't just have 20 or 30 engineers sit down for a week and write the code. I did burnout hours for several months and finished up within a week of what I'd planned]. I regularly counsel "kids" not to get into the game industry early, and to concentrate on getting wide experience to a bunch of technologies, because game studios need more than just graphics and pretty lights. You can be a hero for doing a provisioning system, or a secure real-time networking layer, or a great storage system, and this stuff is just as necessary and as valuable as those flashy effects on the screen, just not as sexy or visible.
- corysama 9y ago
  It’s not just holidays and E3 (and dodging releasing at th same time as the largest flagship titles). The main schedule constraint is that marketing spend must be paid months in advance for the purpose of reserving specific time windows. That spend is often equal or greater than the development budget. And, if you miss your time window, too fucking bad. You will have no marketing, no more money to buy in again and your game is now a flaming money hole. I once worked on a sequel to a semi-popular Xbox game that was tremendously better than the original in every way -except that it lacked marketing. It sold 10% of what the original did because no one noticed that it shipped. Shipping late is often not an option. Either ship on time or cancel the project near the end of development after 90% of the budget is spent. Layoffs and possible studio closure will certainly follow.

jdlyga 9y ago

The trick is working for companies doing 3D application development that's not related to games. I've never had a job where management treated us like this in almost a decade so far.

saiya-jin 9y ago
It's valid to almost any other dev work apart from gaming. As long as you're in your job not purely for the passion but also plain old pragmatism, management is forced to treat you well - otherwise you just walk next door doing the same shit (ideally for 10-20% more). After university I was deciding which way to do (basically either cca backend Java vs cca game dev in C/C++). I took the more corporate Java way and couldn't be happier for last 14 years (within work-for-money restriction, my true happiness comes from stuff I do outside of work).
ethbro 9y ago
This is one thing I've never understood. For almost any skill set, there are multiple industries you could work in. And furthermore, the industry with the worst treatment of employees is likely not the best paying (given that bad treatment tends to stem from popularity / availability of naive new employees). So, if you don't like your work life... find a related industry!
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  Money and working conditions are factors in job satisfaction, but so is what you are doing. Some people really want to make games.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  But that's a pretty terrible suggestion. It should not be required to change industries to be treated with basic human dignity.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Working conditions are a product of three variables: Employee supply * employer demand * legal regulations If supply and demand aren't going to change in your industry... expecting conditions to change is a long wait for a bus that's not coming.

itamarst 9y ago

The extra terrible thing is that this is completely counter-productive. E.g. see this takedown of crunch time by someone who works in the game industry: http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons But this is a problem outside the game industry too, though it sounds like they're even worse than usual. If you're a software engineer stuck in one of these jobs, you need to realize working fewer hours is good for you and your employer. More here: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/18/productive-programmer/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/18/productive-programme...

vvanders 9y ago
Yup, it's an endemic problem that has no sign of going away due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it on the nose to get into the industry. Ironically if you look at Gamasutra's yearly survey you see a huge cliff of experience right at the ~3 year mark as those people get burned out and the cycle repeats.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  I think for a lot of these people, they have never worked in any other company and maybe dont even realize work can be done another way. I’d love to ask an actual employee at one of these places: Do you realize crunch time is rare or nonexistent for most other companies? If so, do you stay where you are purely “because games?” I remember joining a particularly toxic company and mentoring one of the junior guys there. It was his first and only job out of school, and he thought work was simply supposed to be toxic—like this was normal.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Sadly I think it's just that they're young and don't have a lot of responsibilities yet so it's easier to take on the brunt of it. I know before I went into the industry it was at a point where crunch was widely known. Heck, some people bragged about it like a badge of honor/rite of passage. A lot of it was maturing and realizing that there are more important things in life then giving every waking hour to a company that may throw you out on the door as soon as the title is shipped(or even sooner). I mentioned it a little further down the thread but I saw 3 different divorces at the last studio I worked at, largely due to spouses just not being there for each other due to the long hours.

horsecaptin 9y ago

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. I'm starting to think that game developers enjoy their toxic work environment until they finally realize that it is taking a toll. By then, they find that they're often stuck / lack the confidence to move on.

sp332 9y ago
They definitely move on, or at least drop out. But there are always more to replace them, so the company doesn't feel a lot of pressure to change.
- nailer 9y ago
  Fashion industry is similar: so many inexperienced twenty year olds would do the job for free. So conditions are poor and people get paid a pittance. Why have one experienced person when you could get 10 x 22 year olds?
horsecaptin 9y ago
Whoops, I meant: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I pulled a Dubya!
- rglovejoy 9y ago
  "Won't get fooled again."

dotsh 9y ago

This is what I call a full of shit company. People will stab you in a back to work for those but when they are there they start to realise how rotten it is. Then it's too late for them as they are getting into the Stockholm syndrome. Afraid to go, being pushed around because they do not believe they can do something better somewhere else and such CEOs take advantage of the situation to use them as much as possible and throw them away like a used condom. I hate this and it is not worth wasting life working for such companies or such people even for one day.

lkrubner 9y ago

We need more of this kind of honest writing. In the tech world, we tend to use euphemisms to talk about this kind of destructive behavior. Go to a Meetup full of VCs and they say stuff like "Oh, that startup died because of team dysfunction." Well, okay, but what does team dysfunction actually look like? How ugly does it get? Why does it happen? Self-sabotage is remarkably common. We all know the failure rate of startups is very high. The estimates I've read vary, but they are all in the range of 80% to 90%. And clearly, much of the failure comes from suicide, not homicide. That is, the startup isn't out maneuvered by a giant like Google, but rather, it fails because of its own internal flaws. The essay "Why do entrepreneurs engage in self-sabotage" is on this theme: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-do-entrepreneurs-engage-in-self-sabotage http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-do-entrepreneurs-en...

personjerry 9y ago

Isn't this what happened to Kerbal Space Program too?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

bg4 9y ago

Toxic management costs all shops its best developers. Why are they not considered a direct threat to ROI?

s73v3r_ 9y ago
Cause most management still considers developers to be interchangeable.
humanrebar 9y ago
The toxic managers know how to negotiate politics and bureaucracy. http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...
- bg4 9y ago
  Thanks for this article.

cryptonector 9y ago

Toxicity also loses gamers.

gtirloni 9y ago

> For others, the inevitable outcome of what sources familiar with the company describe as years of a culture that promoted constant overwork, toxic management, and ~creative stagnation~ Having never worked in the game industry, I have a very naive view of what is the day-to-day of game developers. Being inherently creative work, what would creative stagnation look like in this case?

WorldMaker 9y ago
It's somewhat described in the article. Sleep deprived/overworked people have less creative energy (all sorts of productivity studies prove this over and over again). Poorly managed people watching their flanks for toxic attacks at their ideas allow themselves less creative freedom.
- meheleventyone 9y ago
  Also stuff like having someone else habitually take credit is less than inspiring to bring forward your best work.
ropeadopepope 9y ago
The inability or unwillingness to come up with new ideas. You wind up recycling old ideas and avoid trying anything new. An old criticism of telltale games is that if you've played one of their games you've played them all.

diego_moita 9y ago

Sorry but the way this article describes this Kevin Bruner and its' "toxic management" sounds very close to how people describe Steve Jobs: egocentric, abusive and a micro-manager. What distinguishes a toxic manager from a leader, then? Edit: a phrase from the article: "This was one of the biggest issues with him as a CEO: he was pretty convinced that his taste was everyone’s taste."

knuththetruth 9y ago
For whatever reason, he was able to inspire and retain talented people. He probably was just as awful, but something else offset that, which Bruner demonstrably lacked.
ropeadopepope 9y ago
Charisma.
mcguire 9y ago
Success.
jarsin 9y ago
PR
fsloth 9y ago
Steve Jobs the manager went through several iterations. The terminal model was an opinionated manager who listened, respected and promoted those who could argue against him. Yes, was probably horrible in many ways. It's sad his asshole image clouds everything that was good in his management side and people thinj they need to act like assholes to emulate him. The asshole part was a pathology, not a feature, but perhaps an inseparable part of him as a person.
- 14113 9y ago
  > and promoted those who could argue against him. I've worked with managers like this, and although it might work for some, it was hell for me. Having to constantly argue to defend your ideas is draining, soul destroying, depressing, and lead to me burning out multiple times. Discussing and critiquing ideas should not involve force from either the idea's champion, nor who they are pitching it to. If, at the end of the day, you're evaluating ideas based on the force by which they're presented all you end up with is ideas that support being presented and defended forcefully - not deftly, nor intelligently.

milankragujevic 9y ago

Hmm, I expected this to be about Squad, the makers of Kerbal Space Program...

Cyberdog 9y ago

Between reading the link title and the page loading, I had a little fun guessing which studio it was going to be about. EA? Konami? Ubisoft? Nope, I was wrong. But there are just so many possibilities… Thank goodness we're in something of a golden age of indie gaming. If you want to vote with your wallet against all these toxic AAA charnel houses, you have plenty of other quality choices to waste your time with. By the way, no gamers take game awards shows seriously.

dandersh 9y ago

In my experience demands for working > 40 hours, nights, weekends, etc. almost always comes from management and planning failures. What makes this scenario occur so often is that the business side wields too much power when it comes to culture, estimates, technical decision making, etc. For them you solve a problem by throwing more time at it and passing responsibility when possible (along with a few extra meetings, for good measure). Not only does this approach work poorly for development, but they are often the "final stop" in the product lifecycle, thus making it impossible to avoid taking responsibility, even for others work (like, say, for incomplete or nonexistent requirements). Perhaps worst of all is that surviving these crunches makes things worse as the wrong lessons are learned and the process continues to repeat itself as those who push for change become disgruntled and leave. Personally I've noticed a correlation between the pushing of "team culture" and toxic environments like this. The most egregious example of this was when it was suggested that I work unpaid on the weekend to "complete the sprint work as a TEAM."

sdrothrock 9y ago
> Personally I've noticed a correlation between the pushing of "team culture" and toxic environments like this. The most egregious example of this was when it was suggested that I work unpaid on the weekend to "complete the sprint work as a TEAM." The military has known for a very long time that [group] loyalty is absolutely necessary to get people to do things that they wouldn't normally do (for better or for worse), whether it's working extra hard, putting in more hours than usual, treating other groups as enemies, or even, yes, killing other people. The Stanford Prison experiment was a pretty good example of this in a bad way. This quote from Australian Defense Corps training also shows an understanding of this principle: "Willingness to apply lethal force requires . . . sufficient bonding within the team to override each individual’s natural human resistance to kill. The toughness and bonding required increases the closer the contact with the enemy." [1] So I wouldn't be surprised if team building exercises etc. were encouraged not only because of the actual productive results, but also because it's at least implicitly known to raise the boundaries of what individuals are willing to do. [1] McGurk; et al. (2006). 'Joining the ranks: The role of indoctrination in transforming civilians to service members', (in 'Military life: The psychology of serving in peace and combat [vol. 2]'). Westport: Praeger Security International. -- snagged from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/853218/in_boot_camp_recruits_to_the_military_are/dvux36v/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/853218/in_bo... Edit: Even being aware of these kinds of tactics doesn't do much to help as the tactics (and stress and lack of sleep) themselves wear down your resistance to them and affect your ability to make decent decisions.

LifeLiverTransp 9y ago

Nothing is going to change, there are to many stars in to many programers eyes, when they here games-industry. They literally can afford to burn the best talent, knowing it grows on tree for cheap for them. Its the same thing why model agents can harass or molest young woman, while they literally allmost starve to death to be in a industry they can only work in for 15 years and will never earn more then the basics to live. These actors are irrational, and there is a cornucopia providing new ones. Best idea to dry this swamp is for other industries who lack talent- to provide a dual path- meaning- if you come to work for us, we will teach you also the tools of the game-design trade- and provide you with a chance to parallel realize the game of your dream in a sabatical.

kakarot 9y ago
Creating a modern full-fledged "game of your dreams", even if not AAA, can take years if not decades when you're going alone. People join development studios so that they actually have the chance of finishing a project in a reasonable timeframe and so that they can focus on one or two disciplines.
- LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
  You are totally right- it takes decades. But lets face it - in a company- there are two or three people doing the game-design, the others usually get not even a chance to contribute. They are put into a silo, connected to a part of the pipeline and start crunching until the ilusion wears off. Even if you get a chance to realize a idea- in a modern title, the fear of risk, sees to any new concept that it is marginalized. So even if it takes years, i think by now, its far more realistic to produce a title as a indy dev or open source dev by now. Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light; I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

question_that 9y ago

It's legal to work an employee 20 hours per day in California?

GFischer 9y ago

Insecure managers are a plague and I'm very glad I'm no longer working under one. "A real leader is thrilled when team members achieve great things. A mere manager is threatened."

k__ 9y ago

Isn't this normal and the reason for the rise of indie games? People want do make games, but they don't want to be crunched into oblivion, so they leave theae studios, go indie and do their own stuff...

ePierre 9y ago

French newspapers Mediapart and Canard PC have teamed up and released a bunch of articles about the video game industry and its toxic practices. The articles are available online [1] but they're in French and some of them are behind a paywall. The situation got to the point where a labor union for video games creators, « Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo » (STJV) [2], was created in France last year. There are currently around 70 members (out of 5000+ video game related employees in France). A strike is currently on-going in Eugen Systems [3], a French studio author of RTS games like Steel Division. [1] https://www.canardpc.com/online/crunch-investigation https://www.canardpc.com/online/crunch-investigation (French) [2] https://www.stjv.fr/en/ https://www.stjv.fr/en/ (English) [3] https://www.stjv.fr/en/2018/03/already-more-than-3-weeks-on-strike-at-eugen-systems/ https://www.stjv.fr/en/2018/03/already-more-than-3-weeks-on-... (English)

e3b0c 9y ago

I think this has something to do with the so-called Parkinson's law, where an organization tends to "corrupt" when it is growing its headcount if its top leader is not aware of it. I used to work for a startup which has a 'flexible' working time culture too. It was not that bad until the company grew its size to an extent that the middle management layer was established. Then all the shit exactly like what a typical Parkinson's law story happened. Edit: https://www.economist.com/node/14116121 https://www.economist.com/node/14116121

mmjaa 9y ago

I've floated around the Game industry as a developer, and I have to say its one of the most toxic management industries I've seen. Too many times I've seen folks who just don't qualify, running developer teams like its some sort of feudal village .. the inclination towards prejudice and bigotry is just too damned high. I wonder why it is that this industry in particular has such a problem with toxic management? My personal theory is that its because games are fundamentally a total decadence, and decadence just brings out the worst in humans ..

theshrike79 9y ago

I work 37.5 hours a week, maybe a bit more if I want to bank some hours for a vacation. Of that, maybe 30 hours is actual productive work. Dunno who thought that a software designer can actually produce useful stuff for 90 hours a week.