6 ms·

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

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.

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.