5 ms·

> I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to

• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Hades is a good game. You might enjoy it more than witcher 3. But it's multiple orders of magnitude smaller no matter how you cut it. If you want to build enormous games, you tend to need enormous effort.
  • wpietri 5y ago
    That may be true, but it doesn't justify worker exploitation and abuse. Unless you'd like to claim that is the only way any large project gets done in any industry. Which would be a bold claim indeed.
    • eru 5y ago
      What you call worker exploitation and abuse is reasonably well known about the game industry. Every one who gets into that industry either does so willingly, or otherwise with gross neglect. What happens between consenting adults ain't anybody else's business.
      • tsimionescu 5y ago
        Employers aren't adults, they are massively powerful corporations. Worker exploitation happens between one passionate programmer, artist, QA and a massive corporate organization that holds all the power and has no qualms about deceiving, badgering, shaming it's way I to what it wants.
        • eru 5y ago
          Eh, companies have reputations. And would-be employees can read up on companies before they sign up. Eg I love Amazon as a customer, but I wouldn't really accept a programming job with them.
          • FridgeSeal 5y ago
            That doesn’t make it at all acceptable for them to treat the people that work there the way they do. Doing so makes you at least complicit in that, and at most an active perpetuator of it.
            • eru 5y ago
              > Doing so makes you at least complicit in that, and at most an active perpetuator of it. Doing what? And who is 'you' in that sentence?
      • wpietri 5y ago
        Worker exploitation and abuse happens in many industries and was once the norm. It is in society's interests to prevent systematized exploitation of society's members. "Consenting adults" is a fine heuristic for what happens in a private bedroom between individuals with equal power. It does not apply to for-profit exploitation done by organizations with special legal privileges. Privileges they have only because we see commerce as generally beneficial and to be encouraged.
        • eru 5y ago
          > Worker exploitation and abuse happens in many industries and was once the norm. What do you mean by exploitation? When was it the norm and where?
          • wpietri 5y ago
            Sorry, there's no way I'm spoon-feeding you the whole history of labor. Maybe read Loomis's "A History of America in Ten Strikes" as a starting point. And then maybe Beckert's "Empire of Cotton" for the broader, systemic view.
• alexjurkiewicz 5y ago
  Hades is a much smaller game than either The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk. Scale makes things harder.
• Kranar 5y ago
  Supergiant Games is a wonderful studio and they do not have the same kind of crunch that is endemic to other studios. Having said that, I don't know that you can compare the development of a 2D game with a very constrained and linear progression to a massive open 3D world like Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. I love Transistor and Bastion, haven't tried Hades... they are great games and I look forward to whatever is next from them, but we're comparing a game that cost about 6 million dollars to make with a game that cost 400 million dollars. While I appreciate your point and even agree to a large degree with your point, the stakes are very different between these two products.
  • wly_cdgr 5y ago
    Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely a dramatically bigger game than Hades, but it also had 400+ people working on it for twice as long as the couple dozen Supergiant employees worked on Hades
    • jhanschoo 5y ago
      Which makes scheduling exponentially harder and mistakes costlier.
    • teruakohatu 5y ago
      A team of 400 people working on a project do not work at the same speed as 33 teams of 12 working on 33 different projects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
      • wly_cdgr 5y ago
        Yes, I am well aware. However they do occasionally manage to get more done than 20 people working on the same project would. Not always, admittedly
  • exdsq 5y ago
    Hades was a real surprise - I hadn't heard anything about it and was expecting something pretty average but it might actually be my game of the year.
• selimthegrim 5y ago
  Or even ZA/UM and Disco Elysium for that matter
• dleslie 5y ago
  > even having a pre release game in steam and incorporating community feedback. Ah, so they leveraged unpaid quality assurance and design labour in order to cut financial corners.
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  Tons of high quality games were created with a lot of crunching and squeezing (e.g. pretty much all ID games). People think too much about 9-5 or 4-day work but what is much more important is give developers the FREEDOM to create contents. Of course flexible work hours is part of the deal but more importantly you need a management that understands the business and refrain from imposing unreasonable deadlines or requirements. BTW I believe the best place for a game developer is something similar to ID before Activision. It's small and flexible, but not too small to develop big titles. Nowadays you might need some 50-100 developers for a big title but if you go over the number and/or go public the productivity and more importantly the focus is going to be lost.