5 ms·

While I can't comment on the conditions under which the original Halo trilogy was developed in, reading Blood, Sweat and Pixels [1] really gave a great glimpse

While I can't comment on the conditions under which the original Halo trilogy was developed in, reading Blood, Sweat and Pixels [1] really gave a great glimpse into the shit-show that was happening behind the scenes during Destiny's development and why the end result was so ... disappointing. Matter of fact that entire book was a greatest hits collection of dysfunctional work environments, it really gave me perspective on what life is like as a dev in other domains (game industry). [1] https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062651235/blood-sweat-and-pixels/ https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062651235/blood-sweat-and-...

ethbro 8y ago
For curiosity's sake, do any professional game developers have stories of working at a place that wasn't a shit show? Is that just the industry? Or are we just hearing about the worst cases?
- nikdaheratik 8y ago
  Been reading through the full book of this guy who designed alot of the dungeons in World of Warcraft. He's realistic about alot of the challenges they faced but overall had a good experience with the project. Site: https://whenitsready.com/wowdiary/ https://whenitsready.com/wowdiary/
  - plorkyeran 8y ago
    His description of Blizzard makes it sound like a nightmarish hellhole to me. I get being so passionate about what you're working on that you love your job in spite of all the problems, but he seems to view the problems as being somehow necessary for the parts he loves.
    - PakG1 8y ago
      People in abusive relationships tend to justify the people who abuse them.
- sergiotapia 8y ago
  How Dead Space's Scariest Scene Almost Killed the Game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3iqq49Ew8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3iqq49Ew8 Disregard the clickbait title. Cofounder Glen Schofield talks about how they resolved all bad bugs 2 weeks ahead of schedule and came out with one of the most innovative titles in the past 20 years.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  You tend to hear the worst cases. For all the bad rep EA gets, like any big company a lot depends on your team and manager. I worked two separate 3-4 year stints on central tech teams and never had forced overtime (although there was some pressure / expectation at times) and things were reasonably sane. My time at Relic was also fairly positive with some long hours but mostly self imposed. Game development is generally complex and has some special challenges but given those constraints isn't always worse than many typical software projects.
  - maximilianburke 8y ago
    I can vouch for this. (Hi, Matt!) I spent 17 years at EA among a number of teams and found the most challenging parts were the BigCo related issues; things like cultural mismatches between groups that have been ordered together, or politics. The working hours were standard for the most part, occasionally there would be a fire to put out but all the management I had was fair about compensating for any extra hours.
    - vvanders 8y ago
      Working under a studio published by EA was very much the opposite experience. It was crunch till you drop, don't dare put the studio logo in the game or you'll be fired, shit-show rodeo from beginning to end. Coworkers I had from other parts(Nascar, NFS/EA Seattle, etc) all had similar stories and of course there's the infamous easpouse.
      - thirdsun 8y ago
        In case anyone else needs to lookup the term easpouse, I assume it relates to this post: https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
      - jungler 8y ago
        My direct experience is that the third parties doing work-for-hire gigs tend to get the worst of it, because they're disposable. When the publisher owns the studio there's some fiefdom management that takes place that allows the bosses to protect their employees in a sort of empire-building strategy. When it's a contract, oftentimes the studio management is suckered into taking a deal they can't deliver on. The publisher subsequently squeezes them dry, then buys up the remains of the dead husk to ship something for cheap and perhaps scoop up the best employees. A successful third-party more or less has to play hardball from the get-go and find a way to block this strategy. The publishers have a weaker hand to play today, since it's easy to go to market with minimal marketing and distribution spend, but that has the side effect of making it more common to see tiny studios that run a sweatshop churning out bad products.
- usefulcat 8y ago
  I worked for EA many years ago (on a game, not tech/tools) and while I wouldn't call it a shit show (I liked the people for the most part, for example), that experience is definitely the reason why I have never even considered working for another game company. Absolutely ridiculous hours, every year. Everyone else just seemed to act like it was normal, even people who had young kids. At the time it seemed crazy. With many years of hindsight, it still seems crazy.
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    Hunting for jobs in the Austin area or remote this year I got 4 offers, one was from EA, which was 20% less than the top 2 offers, 15% less than the 3rd best offer. So you get a bit less pay for your trouble too :D Unless you make your OWN game and it is a big hit, but that is VERY hard right now.
    - usefulcat 8y ago
      Yes, that was my experience as well. In my case I think it was a minor pay increase compared to my previous job, but a significant portion of that total compensation came in the form of an annual bonus (so from my perspective it was as though they were basically withholding a big chunk of my income each year).
      - ethbro 8y ago
        That does seem to be a feature in the game industry -- a lot riding on bonuses (and often the contract terms defining their payout). And when you have compensation terms without being empowered to influence them... burnout. Capricious bonus terms with a large public company always felt slimy to me. It seems a pretty large conflict of interest. In contrast to: 'We agree on what my work is worth, if I don't do the work as expected then you fire me.'
- gambiting 8y ago
  I'm working in the industry at one of the largest publishers on AAA title and I have pretty much just positive things to say. Both about the working environment and the projects we work on. I think it's definitely the case that the worst cases are the most publicised and not many people write about the good ones.
  - dijit 8y ago
    Ohai gambiting. I know we work for the same company and I generally agree that our company is one of the better ones. Which is not to say that there's no shit being flung around. But our company is not known for being loved by gamers. I wonder if terrible working conditions is somehow related to creating better games. Horrible thought though.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      Hi dijit :-) I know what you mean....on one hand, it's great that the conditions here are pretty good(I pretty much never work more than 40 hours/week, overtime is extremely rare, at least for us programmers), but on the other hand.....I don't know. I don't want to say that working more would lead to better games - I honestly don't believe that the problems with our games could be solved if we suddenly started doing 80 hour weeks and work all weekends. I think at least some of them stem from how we approach building games in terms of design and production planning(at least for the AAA titles) instead of the fact that people here generally have good work-life balance. And yes, of course there is some shit being flung around like you said, but (at least for me) nothing approaching the horror stories I hear from other places. Maybe we're just lucky - our company has loads of studios all over the globe, after all.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        It does seem like good games are won and lost in pre-production. Which is unfortunate, given so much of the team gets staffed after those decisions are made (as I understand it).
- s3cur3 8y ago
  I work on the very small team that develops the X-Plane flight simulator. We’re kind of on the periphery of game dev, but I can assure you, work is not crazy for us. I was responsible for rewriting the UI more or less from scratch for the most recent major version, and at the height of “crunch time” leading up to the release, I worked maybe 50 hours a week... and most of that was voluntary, because, though I had the option to cut features to make the deadline, I really wanted to get stuff in.
phaus 8y ago
I just finished this book. It wasn't a bad book, but after Masters of Doom it seemed pretty mediocre. Every story was about something interesting, but they were all pretty shallow. At the end, regardless of the actual outcome, they pretended it was a massive victory where the devs pulled off the impossible. In some cases it was accurate, in other cases the companies were financially successful, but didn't quite capture the magic of previous games.

ethbro 8y ago

For curiosity's sake, do any professional game developers have stories of working at a place that wasn't a shit show? Is that just the industry? Or are we just hearing about the worst cases?

nikdaheratik 8y ago
Been reading through the full book of this guy who designed alot of the dungeons in World of Warcraft. He's realistic about alot of the challenges they faced but overall had a good experience with the project. Site: https://whenitsready.com/wowdiary/ https://whenitsready.com/wowdiary/
- plorkyeran 8y ago
  His description of Blizzard makes it sound like a nightmarish hellhole to me. I get being so passionate about what you're working on that you love your job in spite of all the problems, but he seems to view the problems as being somehow necessary for the parts he loves.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    People in abusive relationships tend to justify the people who abuse them.
sergiotapia 8y ago
How Dead Space's Scariest Scene Almost Killed the Game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3iqq49Ew8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3iqq49Ew8 Disregard the clickbait title. Cofounder Glen Schofield talks about how they resolved all bad bugs 2 weeks ahead of schedule and came out with one of the most innovative titles in the past 20 years.
mattnewport 8y ago
You tend to hear the worst cases. For all the bad rep EA gets, like any big company a lot depends on your team and manager. I worked two separate 3-4 year stints on central tech teams and never had forced overtime (although there was some pressure / expectation at times) and things were reasonably sane. My time at Relic was also fairly positive with some long hours but mostly self imposed. Game development is generally complex and has some special challenges but given those constraints isn't always worse than many typical software projects.
- maximilianburke 8y ago
  I can vouch for this. (Hi, Matt!) I spent 17 years at EA among a number of teams and found the most challenging parts were the BigCo related issues; things like cultural mismatches between groups that have been ordered together, or politics. The working hours were standard for the most part, occasionally there would be a fire to put out but all the management I had was fair about compensating for any extra hours.
  - vvanders 8y ago
    Working under a studio published by EA was very much the opposite experience. It was crunch till you drop, don't dare put the studio logo in the game or you'll be fired, shit-show rodeo from beginning to end. Coworkers I had from other parts(Nascar, NFS/EA Seattle, etc) all had similar stories and of course there's the infamous easpouse.
    - thirdsun 8y ago
      In case anyone else needs to lookup the term easpouse, I assume it relates to this post: https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
    - jungler 8y ago
      My direct experience is that the third parties doing work-for-hire gigs tend to get the worst of it, because they're disposable. When the publisher owns the studio there's some fiefdom management that takes place that allows the bosses to protect their employees in a sort of empire-building strategy. When it's a contract, oftentimes the studio management is suckered into taking a deal they can't deliver on. The publisher subsequently squeezes them dry, then buys up the remains of the dead husk to ship something for cheap and perhaps scoop up the best employees. A successful third-party more or less has to play hardball from the get-go and find a way to block this strategy. The publishers have a weaker hand to play today, since it's easy to go to market with minimal marketing and distribution spend, but that has the side effect of making it more common to see tiny studios that run a sweatshop churning out bad products.
usefulcat 8y ago
I worked for EA many years ago (on a game, not tech/tools) and while I wouldn't call it a shit show (I liked the people for the most part, for example), that experience is definitely the reason why I have never even considered working for another game company. Absolutely ridiculous hours, every year. Everyone else just seemed to act like it was normal, even people who had young kids. At the time it seemed crazy. With many years of hindsight, it still seems crazy.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  Hunting for jobs in the Austin area or remote this year I got 4 offers, one was from EA, which was 20% less than the top 2 offers, 15% less than the 3rd best offer. So you get a bit less pay for your trouble too :D Unless you make your OWN game and it is a big hit, but that is VERY hard right now.
  - usefulcat 8y ago
    Yes, that was my experience as well. In my case I think it was a minor pay increase compared to my previous job, but a significant portion of that total compensation came in the form of an annual bonus (so from my perspective it was as though they were basically withholding a big chunk of my income each year).
    - ethbro 8y ago
      That does seem to be a feature in the game industry -- a lot riding on bonuses (and often the contract terms defining their payout). And when you have compensation terms without being empowered to influence them... burnout. Capricious bonus terms with a large public company always felt slimy to me. It seems a pretty large conflict of interest. In contrast to: 'We agree on what my work is worth, if I don't do the work as expected then you fire me.'
gambiting 8y ago
I'm working in the industry at one of the largest publishers on AAA title and I have pretty much just positive things to say. Both about the working environment and the projects we work on. I think it's definitely the case that the worst cases are the most publicised and not many people write about the good ones.
- dijit 8y ago
  Ohai gambiting. I know we work for the same company and I generally agree that our company is one of the better ones. Which is not to say that there's no shit being flung around. But our company is not known for being loved by gamers. I wonder if terrible working conditions is somehow related to creating better games. Horrible thought though.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    Hi dijit :-) I know what you mean....on one hand, it's great that the conditions here are pretty good(I pretty much never work more than 40 hours/week, overtime is extremely rare, at least for us programmers), but on the other hand.....I don't know. I don't want to say that working more would lead to better games - I honestly don't believe that the problems with our games could be solved if we suddenly started doing 80 hour weeks and work all weekends. I think at least some of them stem from how we approach building games in terms of design and production planning(at least for the AAA titles) instead of the fact that people here generally have good work-life balance. And yes, of course there is some shit being flung around like you said, but (at least for me) nothing approaching the horror stories I hear from other places. Maybe we're just lucky - our company has loads of studios all over the globe, after all.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      It does seem like good games are won and lost in pre-production. Which is unfortunate, given so much of the team gets staffed after those decisions are made (as I understand it).
s3cur3 8y ago
I work on the very small team that develops the X-Plane flight simulator. We’re kind of on the periphery of game dev, but I can assure you, work is not crazy for us. I was responsible for rewriting the UI more or less from scratch for the most recent major version, and at the height of “crunch time” leading up to the release, I worked maybe 50 hours a week... and most of that was voluntary, because, though I had the option to cut features to make the deadline, I really wanted to get stuff in.

phaus 8y ago

I just finished this book. It wasn't a bad book, but after Masters of Doom it seemed pretty mediocre. Every story was about something interesting, but they were all pretty shallow. At the end, regardless of the actual outcome, they pretended it was a massive victory where the devs pulled off the impossible. In some cases it was accurate, in other cases the companies were financially successful, but didn't quite capture the magic of previous games.