11 ms·

It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company, but very few companies actually value them a

It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company, but very few companies actually value them accordingly. This is especially true in the gaming industry. Most companies start with great talent, but then more and more middle management comes in. Managers hire more managers so they can become senior managers. Non functional bloat starts coming in the form of sales, marketing, “strategy and ops” etc. Not saying they don’t add value, but they get hired and rewarded way more than the value they add and ultimately drown the company.

rileymat2 5y ago
How are you measuring value added? A great product with no sales adds very little value.
- ecf 5y ago
  A great product sells itself.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    This is just not true.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Given extremes of "a great product sells itself" vs "well-marketed vaporware is successful," the former is more true.
    - reificator 5y ago
      > > A great product sells itself. > This is just not true. Minecraft is the best selling game of all time[0] and while it's been marketed more since Microsoft purchased it, the first million sales happened within 7 months of charging for the game. Just over a year after commercial release it hit 10 million sales. This was not a period of Minecraft marketing. Most sales were due to people simply seeing others (friends, YouTubers) playing the game and wanting to try it themselves. [0]: Wikipedia claims 238 million sales, vs GTA V in second place with 155 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
      - friedman23 5y ago
        Notch was posting about his game on 4chan and on various places on the internet. It didn't just go viral out of nowhere. He also gave it away for free until he started charging for it so calling those downloads sales is disingenuous. Anyway sure, maybe there are apps that instantly go viral with minimal marketing but if you build an amazing tool, put it on the internet and don't talk about it to anyone I guarantee you it will get 0 sales.
        rileymat2 5y ago
        It should be noted, Minecraft is an incredible outlier in a lot of ways.
  - z3t4 5y ago
    You could start giving away gold for free, but noone will come unless you tell at least one guy about it, but likely he will not believe you. So you need to tell several people, maybe hundreds if it's not easily accessed. But likely you just have a great product, and you are not willing to give it away for free, so it will take much more to attract people! And there is also timing, if for example Google or Facebook would launch today (in their original form) they would have a very hard time acquiring users.
- willis936 5y ago
  And marketing with no product has no value.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  That argument works both ways though. What are they marketing and selling when all the devs leave?
  - rileymat2 5y ago
    Yeah, I am a developer, I believe I add value, but the question is about a pretty bold statement to other roles.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
      I read the OP as the situation when other departments balloon and more resources are not spent on dev. I’ve been there before: I reported to more managers than devs. And the company just tried to sell the same thing in new ways because they were incapable of making things better or building something new.
ethbr0 5y ago
... and inevitably, the C-suite is replaced by people with a management or finance background, and no game creation experience, who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has been the story of game studios since forever.
- vkou 5y ago
  > ...who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has been the story of game studios since forever. Has it? Everyone loves to dunk on EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Blizzard-Activision, etc, for producing mountains of AAA shovelware[1], but the big players in the industry seem to undergo a pretty normal rate of growth, death, and merger for large companies. It's entirely possible (Likely, even!) that under better management[2], they'd be more successful, but I wouldn't say that gaming firms are driven into the ground by managers any more frequently than they are in any other industry. There's certainly a high rate of bankruptcy and death in small and medium-sized gaming companies, but I feel that has more to do with the incredibly speculative and inconsistent nature of cashflow, and the high cost of securing funding in the industry. [1] Given that people have been dunking on these firms for that reason for the past decade, they sure are taking a long time to be driven into the ground... [2] The bar for 'better management' is pretty damn low for some of the firms I've mentioned.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I'd argue that modern day EUSB etc. are what we see, precisely because they've eaten the corpses of the referenced failures. EA today isn't EA of the late-80s / early-90s. It's essentially something named "EA" that managed to smartly buy assets of failed companies. The funding difficulties and cyclical nature of revenue is real, but I guess that's why you see a similar model evolve in movie production. Take a look through the developers during the early part of EA's history (for example): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games:_1983%E2%80%931999 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_game... There were none that I could find that hadn't gone through this exact pattern: (1) be bought by larger publisher, (2) lose key creative talent, (3) close as an entity and have remaining employees folded into larger corporate teams. You'd think if average "big game publisher-developer" management were beneficial to developers, you wouldn't get subsequent failure so reliably.
jonathankoren 5y ago
I always figured the gaming industry gets away with its treatment of workers because there's always a new crop of naïve people whose dream is to make games, so they can burn them out, and then just toss them away, and then suck in the new crop. Other sectors can't get away with it as easily because no one says, "It's been dream since childhood to make auto insurance more profitable."
- ethbr0 5y ago
  This is what seems toxic about the entire "enterprise" (i.e. not indie) video game industry. It's figuratively (and sometimes literally) the equivalent of someone cruising college bars looking for folks "willing to be paid for a few private pictures." Take someone with hopes, dreams, aspiration, pay them the minimum you can get away with (that due to their stage of life seems like a lot), dress up the entire experience with pomp and fun and free snacks, tell them how they're going to change the world, extract every ounce of profit you can from them, at the expense of their life, health, and career, and then dump them by the side of the road and GOTO 10. It's a fundamentally exploitive business, and it shows in the salaries (especially vs work volume expectations). At least MAMAA pay sufficiently well that it's a mutually beneficial deal to employee and employer.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Exploitation is prevalent in the indie sphere as well. Lots of people with little leadership or business experience pulling all sorts of shady stuff and paying worse.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      I guess my perspective on the indie sphere is "well, that's what happens with random people." IMHO we should all expect a 50+ headcount company to be better though. Like, have a business model that doesn't require screwing people over & have functional HR.
      - jonathankoren 5y ago
marginalia_nu 5y ago
It's probably not quite that black and white. You need business smarts too if you want to succeed. Ion Storm is a good example as it was everything contemporary Ubisoft is not. It was a very developer-run shop that out of one office produced critically acclaimed Deus Ex, but at the same time produced flop-of-the-ages Daikatana. It's a tricky balancing act. You can definitely have too much business influence over the creative process. Ubisoft would never produce a flop like Daikatana, but neither would it produce a gem like Deus Ex.
- speeder 5y ago
  https://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/imagine-wedding-designer https://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/imagine-wedding-designer disagrees with you :P Ubisoft is actually good at making crap games. For example they bought a Brazillian studio that was often contracted to do some cool hunting games. Then they forced the studio to pump low-score after low-score NDS games (Wedding Designer was one of them), there was tons of executive meddling, then they said the studio that was crap and closed it down. Thing is, at the time it was literally the best studio in Brazil, and this incident caused some damage to Brazillian games industry :(
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Ubisoft crap is another kind of crap compared to Daikatana crap. Ubisoft essentially produces shovelware, from their flagship AAA-titles down to their obscure NDS titles. It's all sure bets with low creative risk, which makes every sense if you are primarily pandering to shareholders.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  Some extra context: those two games were made by entirely different teams. Daikatana was built by John Romero's team, and Deus Ex was made by Warren Spector's team. I don't think there was much collaboration or even communication between the teams. Romero just bankrolled Spector, who happened to have quite a bit more experience, and was likely much better suited to the director role.
polote 5y ago
> It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company Clearly not true, especially in b2b enterprise where you can sell even if you don't have a product
- viraptor 5y ago
  That's called running a scam and that's not really comparable...
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    There are loads of criminals, but only the dumb ones are in jail
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I always thought this was an overhyped myth until I watched a relatively innovation-oriented enterprise purchase a database company... So many hilariously bad powerpoint slides, so much money on the table. When we were instructed to use it, we discovered that the "database" (really just a custom prolog engine + storage container) couldn't support paginated queries. Would have to fetch millions of rows on the server, then pick only the 20 we were interested in to send to the front-end. Most of the dev team spent the next few months doing little but dreaming up powerpoint presentations we could use to get millions, as every schema change required recompiling the entire db from source, so we had lots of sitting around time until management figured out how badly they screwed up.
  - cipheredStones 5y ago
    That's incredible. Did they just... not involve any actual developers in evaluating the product of the company they were about to buy?
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    That sounds a little worse than the first database engine I wrote.
- 5y ago
MattGaiser 5y ago
Enough people seem to want to work on gaming, even under the extreme conditions, for devs to not be very valuable in that context. Passions projects as a job can be very expensive.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  While there are lots of people trying to break into the industry, the real question is how good are they? Building games is hard work. It's just an anecdote, but one dev told me at the studio he worked on, his project had 22 engineers assigned, but just 3 devs ultimately contributed 90% of the code written. And while those 3 devs were very skilled developers, he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers. They've all since moved on to greener pastures doing work outside the industry making substantially more money.
  - oarabbus_ 5y ago
    >he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers Well, sounds like they were more like 7x engineers /s
    - jabl 5y ago
      Or maybe the other 19 were 0.1x engineers? ;)
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      Actually since it was the gaming industry, they were probably 4X engineers. Which would also explain whey they went to a different industry, because that genre frequently seems to be on the brink of dying out.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    Oh yeah, 10x engineers. The kind of people who create an hostile and exclusionary club where only they can move around the mental maze they created. Personally I just call them 'complexity bubbles' and just like the real estate bubbles it's never those responsible who suffer the consequences.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Not saying they don’t add value, but they get hired and rewarded way more than the value they add and ultimately drown the company I thought similarly when I was younger, but then I became a manager and realized it’s not so black and white. Going back to IC developer (for a while) was a surprising relief from the stresses of managing people. I know some companies let managers run wild and make devs do all the work, but most successful tech companies actually have very high demands of managers. A decent manager will be good at hiding all of the behind-the-scenes issues from the team, but I didn’t truly understand the volume of problems managers quietly deal with until I was in the role.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  as someone who is considering switching to a management role, what has been your experience as a prior developer, and now coming back, do you feel like you have lost any "edge" being an IC? Also what new perspectives have carried over? I think I'm hoping to get basic team building and management skills to one day start a business, my preference is to be by myself struggling with technical problems, but I see the value in the management skill set
- Shorel 5y ago
  True, but I don't think it's the same for second and third level managers. Basically, you as a manager do all the hard work. The boss of your boss... he can do some hard work, or he can just rely on you and the other direct managers, and simply get the benefits.
  - linspace 5y ago
    I think management simply has way more variance, and maybe, I'm not sure, more expected returns.
  - spenczar5 5y ago
    Have you been a manager of managers? This sounds like the same problem the GP described (the problems are invisible until you are in the role). An upper level management job can be very stressful. You have very little visibility into progress or issues, but are responsible for setting direction and making decisions with many consequences. If you get involved, you’re called a micromanager. If you don’t, you’re out of touch. Cross-organizational pushes become harder, with more inertia, and more perverse incentives dragging things down. You spend all your time debugging the mess of an organization, not on the things that brought you to the industry. It can be a very stressful, unpleasant job. I am not trying to claim it’s harder, or that the pay is proportionate or whatever. But the idea that they can rely on the work of others, coast by, and get the benefits is not at all true from what I have seen. I worked mostly in startups and FAANG, maybe other sectors are different.
pengaru 5y ago
https://mipmip.org/tidbits/boat-race.html https://mipmip.org/tidbits/boat-race.html
it_does_follow 5y ago
> very few companies actually value them accordingly This is something that has definitely gone through waves a few time during my life time. In particular I remember the early startup era (~2010) developers were treated very well (though I don't think they were ever treated that great in the games industry). Ironically they weren't paid as ridiculously as today, but they tended to play a much larger role in the company, and their time was treated as very valuable. Back then startups would be a team of engineers, a designer, a marketer with all of the product vision coming from CEO or maybe as very senior product role (typically cofounder). The contemporary world filled with PMs would have seemed (and still does to some of us) foreign to anyone at the time. The truth is industry tends to despise a "monopoly on talent", and so we've seen the bureaucratization of the industry. The rise of boot camps has worked to devalued the skills of a talented engineer (though it might be harder now than before to hire talent), interviews are formalized into a robotic screening processes, and the current structure of teams, largely driven by PMs/product owners, has radically devalued the input form engineers in the way the product is developed. If you have been in the industry less that 10 years you'd be surprised how much say engineers used to get in at the start of the most recent tech boom, as well as how different the hiring process was. In 2011 the two biggest signals for interviews were a strong github page and especially OSS contribution. Passionate, curious software engineers were the most sought after people and they were considered very much a part of the leadership of a company, driving it's culture and success. Today engineers have been more or less reduced to hot-swappable drones across the industry.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Interesting post. I think what happened was that there used to be an idea that good tech was an important competitive advantage. Therefore, highly competent developers were listened to. But the industry came to realize that it's not better tech that wins, but underhanded, addictive, and deceptive tech. Engineers in my experience aren't motivated to use their engineering power to deceive, so if your goal is to use software to monetize users by violating their privacy, you need someone else at the helm of that ship.
- syntheweave 5y ago
  I think the industry has foiled itself recently through sheer scale. The number of niche roles has exploded and with it, so too the depth of the software stack. The good talent in any subsection ends up going deeper than they can be trained or evaluated for. The rest tread water and add noise to the pipeline. As a result there is an increasing sense of nobody knowing what's going on and compensation being poorly correlated with talent, meaning many orgs can't handle their technical challenges and don't know it until it blows up. The actual solution would be to be suspicious of software as an end and relinquish more control of it to the open-source commons so that they can optimize their core business. But that can't happen if your core business is "being a platform," and as we know, platforms are where the big profits lie anyway. So it's going to go on like this until we cycle out of the current software stacks and move into ones with different social arrangements at their core.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
This is a major problem with the “one guy is in charge” model of running a business. All these employees care about how the company treats people but this one guy is willing to be a jerk and not apologize and now all these employees have little recourse but to quit. Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote them as needed. Instead we get the mess that is Ubisoft.
- hnaccount141 5y ago
  I've always wondered why worker co-ops aren't more common in software. It seems like the industry would be particularly well-suited for it.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    The two primary motivations for building a startup are money and independence/freedom. Why would someone with that priority go and constrain themselves with the whims of others?
    - akomtu 5y ago
      Dont forget ego: "why would I give control over _my_ idea, over _my_ company that _I_ created to simpletons without ideas, without ability or will to execute?" This ego is also why software devs are allergic to unions.
    - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
      Depends on your definition of startup but a lot of people want to solve a problem that is important to them and they are smart enough to set their ego aside and recognize that they will produce a better solution if they collaborate with others and ensure those people have an equal stake.
  - SequoiaHope 5y ago
    Silicon Valley has deep roots in individualist capitalism. You don’t get big US government contracts to design transistors in the 1950’s and 1960’s if you’re a worker cooperative. Silicon Valley was created under McCarthyism and anti-communism which also opposes labor rights movements. Since the 1980’s worker cooperatives have not been very popular in the USA, but they do seem like they would present an antidote to the worker-abusing poverty-wage paying mega corps we have today.
fxtentacle 5y ago
Large game companies make a significant percentage of their revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely people with an addiction control problem. Most developers want to make games like they would want to play them. That means no grinding, no pay to win, no taking advantage of your players. But if you run your studio that way, you're way less profitable than the competition which is managed by greedy sharks and fully "monetizes" (=exploits) anyone who's willing to touch microtransactions. For stock market companies, having competitive numbers is a big deal or else you'll pay through the nose for borrowing the $200 mio that a AAA game will cost. In short, "the market" makes sure that game companies become exploitative, and true believers leave to fund their own indie studio. But that means I disagree with you that senior management adds no value. They do precisely what they were hired for, which is to make sure the studio has a good stock price and, hence, enough money to finance future games. It's just that most developers hate em, and for good reason.
- rkk3 5y ago
  > Large game companies make a significant percentage of their revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely people with an addiction control problem. Yes but those companies are freemium or in-app purchases "games" which is AFAIK a completely different model than Ubisoft which sells $60 games once like FarCry or Assassins Creed.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Not completely different... The newer installments in both of those games have substantial levels of in-app purchases. To an increasing extent, the $60 purchase price for a AAA game is being subsidized by continuing aesthetic purchases, loot boxes, content subscriptions, and opportunities to buy gameplay capability.
vvanders 5y ago
From my experience there's a bit more dynamics in there. In particular the publishing agreements(I've been privy to a few) are structured in ways that the developer takes a substantial amount of risk and very rarely gains the reward of a breakout hit. Things like the first royalty doesn't come in until all development + marketing costs(which can be as much as dev) are paid back. Caps on payouts for companies or individual employees, etc. The structure is much closer to what you see in the recording industry contracts , there's even been cases in the past of publishers denying milestone payments during peak burn to put the company into bankruptcy to gain the IP + source and then re-hire the dev-team back at 70% salary. Combine that with an robust supply of fresh faces trying to "break-in" it's not really a surprise the industry is the way it is. If you're on the dev side of the industry you've got quite a few options to exit, if you're in art there's less options since a lot of adjacent industries have similar conditions(I've heard from past co-workers that the animation industry is even more brutal). It's really a shame since there's some really fun technical problems to be solved and a lot of creativity but that ultimately gets exploited into the state it is today. It could be a better industry but it isn't. For those that want to build games I usually recommend doing it as a side project, there's a high probability that you can work on a genre you like(I never did during my time in industry) and you aren't subject to the state of the industry.
mschuster91 5y ago
> This is especially true in the gaming industry. Most companies start with great talent, but then more and more middle management comes in. Managers hire more managers so they can become senior managers. Non functional bloat starts coming in the form of sales, marketing, “strategy and ops” etc. Once again, I have to refer to the excellent work "Bullshit Jobs"...
Waterluvian 5y ago
I’m not hyper capitalist but I do think that employees will be valued as much as they need to be. This unprecedented exodus will illustrate that: they will either be replaced with or without raising compensation and working conditions. We’ll have to wait and see.
ayngg 5y ago
It is almost the natural progression I would say. Steve Jobs talked about it with regards to Xerox in a famous interview where technology gets you to a dominant position, but marketing monetizes that position so there will be a natural progression in leadership favoring marketers who become responsible for much of the growth after a certain point over developers. Just looking at video games, the most profitable games now aren't AAA games with super immersive graphics, worlds, stories and so on, it is the mobile gacha games with simple graphics and simple mechanics that are basically predatory in how they are able to ingrain and establish themselves into a routine while they siphon money away from a certain demographic of their user base. These days AAA games are mostly AAA in their cost to produce, few are innovative, or produce better gameplay or tell better stories than what is being made by smaller indie studios. Most are just pretty to look at if you have a beefy video card that can crank the settings up.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Well the most successful gacha game is a AAA game with a pretty nice story, a very large and detailed world, fairly complex mechanics, etc..., So it's clear those things still have a lot of value.
sirspacey 5y ago
That’s what I’m curious about - what does it look like to build a company for & run by engineers? I used to think middle management was the thing to eliminate. But then I learned - middle managements’ job is to protect their team from disconnected leadership. I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but I’m committed to finding out how to create a great place for engineers and their creativity. My co-founder & I created a company just to do that. Mostly it’s about avoiding inputs that drive exploitive management. We don’t take outside capital, we fire clients if they don’t treat our engineers well, just shedding anything that seems to be or proves to be exploitive. We’re already finding out just how much it matters - the people we hire are having the most fun they’ve ever had. The money we make is fine, but not really the point. cover salaries, do cool stuff.
- gnahckire 5y ago
  Last I checked Valve is a game company with a pretty flat org structure. They have their own problems but, last I checked most people like working there.
nine_zeros 5y ago
I know there will be a lot of comments about how "A good manager can do wonders". No one denies this. The problem is that the industry is rife with bad managers who only care about themselves instead of the actual producers of output. Truly surprising to see how many managers overestimate their role so much without producing any value. Managers should be paid less than ICs and should really only be assistants to ICs (especially if ICs are syncing with product, marketing and doing all non engineering work anyway). The manager is only a paper pusher at this point.
manigandham 5y ago
> "more than the value they add" This sounds like a very biased perspective. Sales and marketing is not "non functional bloat" - it's actually far more important because if you don't have sales then you don't have a business. There have been countless companies with brilliant engineers that no longer exist because they couldn't actually bring a product to market. Also managing people is incredibly difficult and easy to ignore if you've never done it.
golergka 5y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't see who in their right mind could look at the current developer labour market and say that companies don't value them (us). Even in gamedev, where I worked most of my life (but not anymore) salaries are not *that* lower and crunchtime is not *that* more prevalent.
drewcoo 5y ago
I don't think anyone is embarrassed. If they are, they don't seem to act like it.

rileymat2 5y ago

How are you measuring value added? A great product with no sales adds very little value.

ecf 5y ago
A great product sells itself.
- friedman23 5y ago
  This is just not true.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Given extremes of "a great product sells itself" vs "well-marketed vaporware is successful," the former is more true.
  - reificator 5y ago
    > > A great product sells itself. > This is just not true. Minecraft is the best selling game of all time[0] and while it's been marketed more since Microsoft purchased it, the first million sales happened within 7 months of charging for the game. Just over a year after commercial release it hit 10 million sales. This was not a period of Minecraft marketing. Most sales were due to people simply seeing others (friends, YouTubers) playing the game and wanting to try it themselves. [0]: Wikipedia claims 238 million sales, vs GTA V in second place with 155 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
    - friedman23 5y ago
      Notch was posting about his game on 4chan and on various places on the internet. It didn't just go viral out of nowhere. He also gave it away for free until he started charging for it so calling those downloads sales is disingenuous. Anyway sure, maybe there are apps that instantly go viral with minimal marketing but if you build an amazing tool, put it on the internet and don't talk about it to anyone I guarantee you it will get 0 sales.
      - rileymat2 5y ago
        It should be noted, Minecraft is an incredible outlier in a lot of ways.
- z3t4 5y ago
  You could start giving away gold for free, but noone will come unless you tell at least one guy about it, but likely he will not believe you. So you need to tell several people, maybe hundreds if it's not easily accessed. But likely you just have a great product, and you are not willing to give it away for free, so it will take much more to attract people! And there is also timing, if for example Google or Facebook would launch today (in their original form) they would have a very hard time acquiring users.
willis936 5y ago
And marketing with no product has no value.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
That argument works both ways though. What are they marketing and selling when all the devs leave?
- rileymat2 5y ago
  Yeah, I am a developer, I believe I add value, but the question is about a pretty bold statement to other roles.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    I read the OP as the situation when other departments balloon and more resources are not spent on dev. I’ve been there before: I reported to more managers than devs. And the company just tried to sell the same thing in new ways because they were incapable of making things better or building something new.

ethbr0 5y ago

... and inevitably, the C-suite is replaced by people with a management or finance background, and no game creation experience, who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has been the story of game studios since forever.

vkou 5y ago
> ...who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has been the story of game studios since forever. Has it? Everyone loves to dunk on EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Blizzard-Activision, etc, for producing mountains of AAA shovelware[1], but the big players in the industry seem to undergo a pretty normal rate of growth, death, and merger for large companies. It's entirely possible (Likely, even!) that under better management[2], they'd be more successful, but I wouldn't say that gaming firms are driven into the ground by managers any more frequently than they are in any other industry. There's certainly a high rate of bankruptcy and death in small and medium-sized gaming companies, but I feel that has more to do with the incredibly speculative and inconsistent nature of cashflow, and the high cost of securing funding in the industry. [1] Given that people have been dunking on these firms for that reason for the past decade, they sure are taking a long time to be driven into the ground... [2] The bar for 'better management' is pretty damn low for some of the firms I've mentioned.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I'd argue that modern day EUSB etc. are what we see, precisely because they've eaten the corpses of the referenced failures. EA today isn't EA of the late-80s / early-90s. It's essentially something named "EA" that managed to smartly buy assets of failed companies. The funding difficulties and cyclical nature of revenue is real, but I guess that's why you see a similar model evolve in movie production. Take a look through the developers during the early part of EA's history (for example): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games:_1983%E2%80%931999 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_game... There were none that I could find that hadn't gone through this exact pattern: (1) be bought by larger publisher, (2) lose key creative talent, (3) close as an entity and have remaining employees folded into larger corporate teams. You'd think if average "big game publisher-developer" management were beneficial to developers, you wouldn't get subsequent failure so reliably.

jonathankoren 5y ago

I always figured the gaming industry gets away with its treatment of workers because there's always a new crop of naïve people whose dream is to make games, so they can burn them out, and then just toss them away, and then suck in the new crop. Other sectors can't get away with it as easily because no one says, "It's been dream since childhood to make auto insurance more profitable."

ethbr0 5y ago
This is what seems toxic about the entire "enterprise" (i.e. not indie) video game industry. It's figuratively (and sometimes literally) the equivalent of someone cruising college bars looking for folks "willing to be paid for a few private pictures." Take someone with hopes, dreams, aspiration, pay them the minimum you can get away with (that due to their stage of life seems like a lot), dress up the entire experience with pomp and fun and free snacks, tell them how they're going to change the world, extract every ounce of profit you can from them, at the expense of their life, health, and career, and then dump them by the side of the road and GOTO 10. It's a fundamentally exploitive business, and it shows in the salaries (especially vs work volume expectations). At least MAMAA pay sufficiently well that it's a mutually beneficial deal to employee and employer.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Exploitation is prevalent in the indie sphere as well. Lots of people with little leadership or business experience pulling all sorts of shady stuff and paying worse.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I guess my perspective on the indie sphere is "well, that's what happens with random people." IMHO we should all expect a 50+ headcount company to be better though. Like, have a business model that doesn't require screwing people over & have functional HR.
    - jonathankoren 5y ago

marginalia_nu 5y ago

It's probably not quite that black and white. You need business smarts too if you want to succeed. Ion Storm is a good example as it was everything contemporary Ubisoft is not. It was a very developer-run shop that out of one office produced critically acclaimed Deus Ex, but at the same time produced flop-of-the-ages Daikatana. It's a tricky balancing act. You can definitely have too much business influence over the creative process. Ubisoft would never produce a flop like Daikatana, but neither would it produce a gem like Deus Ex.

speeder 5y ago
https://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/imagine-wedding-designer https://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/imagine-wedding-designer disagrees with you :P Ubisoft is actually good at making crap games. For example they bought a Brazillian studio that was often contracted to do some cool hunting games. Then they forced the studio to pump low-score after low-score NDS games (Wedding Designer was one of them), there was tons of executive meddling, then they said the studio that was crap and closed it down. Thing is, at the time it was literally the best studio in Brazil, and this incident caused some damage to Brazillian games industry :(
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Ubisoft crap is another kind of crap compared to Daikatana crap. Ubisoft essentially produces shovelware, from their flagship AAA-titles down to their obscure NDS titles. It's all sure bets with low creative risk, which makes every sense if you are primarily pandering to shareholders.
Trasmatta 5y ago
Some extra context: those two games were made by entirely different teams. Daikatana was built by John Romero's team, and Deus Ex was made by Warren Spector's team. I don't think there was much collaboration or even communication between the teams. Romero just bankrolled Spector, who happened to have quite a bit more experience, and was likely much better suited to the director role.

polote 5y ago

> It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company Clearly not true, especially in b2b enterprise where you can sell even if you don't have a product

viraptor 5y ago
That's called running a scam and that's not really comparable...
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  There are loads of criminals, but only the dumb ones are in jail
zdragnar 5y ago
I always thought this was an overhyped myth until I watched a relatively innovation-oriented enterprise purchase a database company... So many hilariously bad powerpoint slides, so much money on the table. When we were instructed to use it, we discovered that the "database" (really just a custom prolog engine + storage container) couldn't support paginated queries. Would have to fetch millions of rows on the server, then pick only the 20 we were interested in to send to the front-end. Most of the dev team spent the next few months doing little but dreaming up powerpoint presentations we could use to get millions, as every schema change required recompiling the entire db from source, so we had lots of sitting around time until management figured out how badly they screwed up.
- cipheredStones 5y ago
  That's incredible. Did they just... not involve any actual developers in evaluating the product of the company they were about to buy?
- datavirtue 5y ago
  That sounds a little worse than the first database engine I wrote.
5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

Enough people seem to want to work on gaming, even under the extreme conditions, for devs to not be very valuable in that context. Passions projects as a job can be very expensive.

spamizbad 5y ago
While there are lots of people trying to break into the industry, the real question is how good are they? Building games is hard work. It's just an anecdote, but one dev told me at the studio he worked on, his project had 22 engineers assigned, but just 3 devs ultimately contributed 90% of the code written. And while those 3 devs were very skilled developers, he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers. They've all since moved on to greener pastures doing work outside the industry making substantially more money.
- oarabbus_ 5y ago
  >he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers Well, sounds like they were more like 7x engineers /s
  - jabl 5y ago
    Or maybe the other 19 were 0.1x engineers? ;)
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Actually since it was the gaming industry, they were probably 4X engineers. Which would also explain whey they went to a different industry, because that genre frequently seems to be on the brink of dying out.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  Oh yeah, 10x engineers. The kind of people who create an hostile and exclusionary club where only they can move around the mental maze they created. Personally I just call them 'complexity bubbles' and just like the real estate bubbles it's never those responsible who suffer the consequences.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Not saying they don’t add value, but they get hired and rewarded way more than the value they add and ultimately drown the company I thought similarly when I was younger, but then I became a manager and realized it’s not so black and white. Going back to IC developer (for a while) was a surprising relief from the stresses of managing people. I know some companies let managers run wild and make devs do all the work, but most successful tech companies actually have very high demands of managers. A decent manager will be good at hiding all of the behind-the-scenes issues from the team, but I didn’t truly understand the volume of problems managers quietly deal with until I was in the role.

gmadsen 5y ago
as someone who is considering switching to a management role, what has been your experience as a prior developer, and now coming back, do you feel like you have lost any "edge" being an IC? Also what new perspectives have carried over? I think I'm hoping to get basic team building and management skills to one day start a business, my preference is to be by myself struggling with technical problems, but I see the value in the management skill set
Shorel 5y ago
True, but I don't think it's the same for second and third level managers. Basically, you as a manager do all the hard work. The boss of your boss... he can do some hard work, or he can just rely on you and the other direct managers, and simply get the benefits.
- linspace 5y ago
  I think management simply has way more variance, and maybe, I'm not sure, more expected returns.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  Have you been a manager of managers? This sounds like the same problem the GP described (the problems are invisible until you are in the role). An upper level management job can be very stressful. You have very little visibility into progress or issues, but are responsible for setting direction and making decisions with many consequences. If you get involved, you’re called a micromanager. If you don’t, you’re out of touch. Cross-organizational pushes become harder, with more inertia, and more perverse incentives dragging things down. You spend all your time debugging the mess of an organization, not on the things that brought you to the industry. It can be a very stressful, unpleasant job. I am not trying to claim it’s harder, or that the pay is proportionate or whatever. But the idea that they can rely on the work of others, coast by, and get the benefits is not at all true from what I have seen. I worked mostly in startups and FAANG, maybe other sectors are different.

pengaru 5y ago

https://mipmip.org/tidbits/boat-race.html https://mipmip.org/tidbits/boat-race.html

it_does_follow 5y ago

> very few companies actually value them accordingly This is something that has definitely gone through waves a few time during my life time. In particular I remember the early startup era (~2010) developers were treated very well (though I don't think they were ever treated that great in the games industry). Ironically they weren't paid as ridiculously as today, but they tended to play a much larger role in the company, and their time was treated as very valuable. Back then startups would be a team of engineers, a designer, a marketer with all of the product vision coming from CEO or maybe as very senior product role (typically cofounder). The contemporary world filled with PMs would have seemed (and still does to some of us) foreign to anyone at the time. The truth is industry tends to despise a "monopoly on talent", and so we've seen the bureaucratization of the industry. The rise of boot camps has worked to devalued the skills of a talented engineer (though it might be harder now than before to hire talent), interviews are formalized into a robotic screening processes, and the current structure of teams, largely driven by PMs/product owners, has radically devalued the input form engineers in the way the product is developed. If you have been in the industry less that 10 years you'd be surprised how much say engineers used to get in at the start of the most recent tech boom, as well as how different the hiring process was. In 2011 the two biggest signals for interviews were a strong github page and especially OSS contribution. Passionate, curious software engineers were the most sought after people and they were considered very much a part of the leadership of a company, driving it's culture and success. Today engineers have been more or less reduced to hot-swappable drones across the industry.

ModernMech 5y ago
Interesting post. I think what happened was that there used to be an idea that good tech was an important competitive advantage. Therefore, highly competent developers were listened to. But the industry came to realize that it's not better tech that wins, but underhanded, addictive, and deceptive tech. Engineers in my experience aren't motivated to use their engineering power to deceive, so if your goal is to use software to monetize users by violating their privacy, you need someone else at the helm of that ship.
syntheweave 5y ago
I think the industry has foiled itself recently through sheer scale. The number of niche roles has exploded and with it, so too the depth of the software stack. The good talent in any subsection ends up going deeper than they can be trained or evaluated for. The rest tread water and add noise to the pipeline. As a result there is an increasing sense of nobody knowing what's going on and compensation being poorly correlated with talent, meaning many orgs can't handle their technical challenges and don't know it until it blows up. The actual solution would be to be suspicious of software as an end and relinquish more control of it to the open-source commons so that they can optimize their core business. But that can't happen if your core business is "being a platform," and as we know, platforms are where the big profits lie anyway. So it's going to go on like this until we cycle out of the current software stacks and move into ones with different social arrangements at their core.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

This is a major problem with the “one guy is in charge” model of running a business. All these employees care about how the company treats people but this one guy is willing to be a jerk and not apologize and now all these employees have little recourse but to quit. Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote them as needed. Instead we get the mess that is Ubisoft.

hnaccount141 5y ago
I've always wondered why worker co-ops aren't more common in software. It seems like the industry would be particularly well-suited for it.
- friedman23 5y ago
  The two primary motivations for building a startup are money and independence/freedom. Why would someone with that priority go and constrain themselves with the whims of others?
  - akomtu 5y ago
    Dont forget ego: "why would I give control over _my_ idea, over _my_ company that _I_ created to simpletons without ideas, without ability or will to execute?" This ego is also why software devs are allergic to unions.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    Depends on your definition of startup but a lot of people want to solve a problem that is important to them and they are smart enough to set their ego aside and recognize that they will produce a better solution if they collaborate with others and ensure those people have an equal stake.
- SequoiaHope 5y ago
  Silicon Valley has deep roots in individualist capitalism. You don’t get big US government contracts to design transistors in the 1950’s and 1960’s if you’re a worker cooperative. Silicon Valley was created under McCarthyism and anti-communism which also opposes labor rights movements. Since the 1980’s worker cooperatives have not been very popular in the USA, but they do seem like they would present an antidote to the worker-abusing poverty-wage paying mega corps we have today.

fxtentacle 5y ago

Large game companies make a significant percentage of their revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely people with an addiction control problem. Most developers want to make games like they would want to play them. That means no grinding, no pay to win, no taking advantage of your players. But if you run your studio that way, you're way less profitable than the competition which is managed by greedy sharks and fully "monetizes" (=exploits) anyone who's willing to touch microtransactions. For stock market companies, having competitive numbers is a big deal or else you'll pay through the nose for borrowing the $200 mio that a AAA game will cost. In short, "the market" makes sure that game companies become exploitative, and true believers leave to fund their own indie studio. But that means I disagree with you that senior management adds no value. They do precisely what they were hired for, which is to make sure the studio has a good stock price and, hence, enough money to finance future games. It's just that most developers hate em, and for good reason.

rkk3 5y ago
> Large game companies make a significant percentage of their revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely people with an addiction control problem. Yes but those companies are freemium or in-app purchases "games" which is AFAIK a completely different model than Ubisoft which sells $60 games once like FarCry or Assassins Creed.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Not completely different... The newer installments in both of those games have substantial levels of in-app purchases. To an increasing extent, the $60 purchase price for a AAA game is being subsidized by continuing aesthetic purchases, loot boxes, content subscriptions, and opportunities to buy gameplay capability.

vvanders 5y ago

From my experience there's a bit more dynamics in there. In particular the publishing agreements(I've been privy to a few) are structured in ways that the developer takes a substantial amount of risk and very rarely gains the reward of a breakout hit. Things like the first royalty doesn't come in until all development + marketing costs(which can be as much as dev) are paid back. Caps on payouts for companies or individual employees, etc. The structure is much closer to what you see in the recording industry contracts , there's even been cases in the past of publishers denying milestone payments during peak burn to put the company into bankruptcy to gain the IP + source and then re-hire the dev-team back at 70% salary. Combine that with an robust supply of fresh faces trying to "break-in" it's not really a surprise the industry is the way it is. If you're on the dev side of the industry you've got quite a few options to exit, if you're in art there's less options since a lot of adjacent industries have similar conditions(I've heard from past co-workers that the animation industry is even more brutal). It's really a shame since there's some really fun technical problems to be solved and a lot of creativity but that ultimately gets exploited into the state it is today. It could be a better industry but it isn't. For those that want to build games I usually recommend doing it as a side project, there's a high probability that you can work on a genre you like(I never did during my time in industry) and you aren't subject to the state of the industry.

mschuster91 5y ago

> This is especially true in the gaming industry. Most companies start with great talent, but then more and more middle management comes in. Managers hire more managers so they can become senior managers. Non functional bloat starts coming in the form of sales, marketing, “strategy and ops” etc. Once again, I have to refer to the excellent work "Bullshit Jobs"...

Waterluvian 5y ago

I’m not hyper capitalist but I do think that employees will be valued as much as they need to be. This unprecedented exodus will illustrate that: they will either be replaced with or without raising compensation and working conditions. We’ll have to wait and see.

ayngg 5y ago

It is almost the natural progression I would say. Steve Jobs talked about it with regards to Xerox in a famous interview where technology gets you to a dominant position, but marketing monetizes that position so there will be a natural progression in leadership favoring marketers who become responsible for much of the growth after a certain point over developers. Just looking at video games, the most profitable games now aren't AAA games with super immersive graphics, worlds, stories and so on, it is the mobile gacha games with simple graphics and simple mechanics that are basically predatory in how they are able to ingrain and establish themselves into a routine while they siphon money away from a certain demographic of their user base. These days AAA games are mostly AAA in their cost to produce, few are innovative, or produce better gameplay or tell better stories than what is being made by smaller indie studios. Most are just pretty to look at if you have a beefy video card that can crank the settings up.

sudosysgen 5y ago
Well the most successful gacha game is a AAA game with a pretty nice story, a very large and detailed world, fairly complex mechanics, etc..., So it's clear those things still have a lot of value.

sirspacey 5y ago

That’s what I’m curious about - what does it look like to build a company for & run by engineers? I used to think middle management was the thing to eliminate. But then I learned - middle managements’ job is to protect their team from disconnected leadership. I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but I’m committed to finding out how to create a great place for engineers and their creativity. My co-founder & I created a company just to do that. Mostly it’s about avoiding inputs that drive exploitive management. We don’t take outside capital, we fire clients if they don’t treat our engineers well, just shedding anything that seems to be or proves to be exploitive. We’re already finding out just how much it matters - the people we hire are having the most fun they’ve ever had. The money we make is fine, but not really the point. cover salaries, do cool stuff.

gnahckire 5y ago
Last I checked Valve is a game company with a pretty flat org structure. They have their own problems but, last I checked most people like working there.

nine_zeros 5y ago

I know there will be a lot of comments about how "A good manager can do wonders". No one denies this. The problem is that the industry is rife with bad managers who only care about themselves instead of the actual producers of output. Truly surprising to see how many managers overestimate their role so much without producing any value. Managers should be paid less than ICs and should really only be assistants to ICs (especially if ICs are syncing with product, marketing and doing all non engineering work anyway). The manager is only a paper pusher at this point.

manigandham 5y ago

> "more than the value they add" This sounds like a very biased perspective. Sales and marketing is not "non functional bloat" - it's actually far more important because if you don't have sales then you don't have a business. There have been countless companies with brilliant engineers that no longer exist because they couldn't actually bring a product to market. Also managing people is incredibly difficult and easy to ignore if you've never done it.

golergka 5y ago

I'm sorry, but I don't see who in their right mind could look at the current developer labour market and say that companies don't value them (us). Even in gamedev, where I worked most of my life (but not anymore) salaries are not *that* lower and crunchtime is not *that* more prevalent.

drewcoo 5y ago

I don't think anyone is embarrassed. If they are, they don't seem to act like it.