9 ms·

‘Diablo IV’ developers work long hours, bracing for impending release

99 points by type0 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lucasyvas 4y ago
> Blizzard Entertainment spokesperson Andrew Reynolds told The Post, “As you may know, game development in general, and ‘Diablo IV’ specifically, follows an iterative process where the scope evolves over time. Production on the game is going extremely well. Overtime is voluntary and limited to specific teams. We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years.” Replace evolving scope with increasing scope and you've got the most common recipe for development failure being pitched as a good thing.
- Retric 4y ago
  Alternatively, evolving scope is decreasing scope as they cut ever more critical parts of the game to make the fixed deadline. Either way it isn’t a good sign to be changing scope this late in the development process.
- kramerger 4y ago
  It's not really an iterative process if you fail at every iteration. Let's call it what it is: a series of waterfalls, all with unreasonable schedules
- verdenti 4y ago
- barbazoo 4y ago
  I love how scope "evolves" as if it was a natural process and not just the result of poor planning.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    For a game the scope evolves since you can't know how things play or feel until you test it.
  - jay_kyburz 4y ago
    You can't plan for unknown unknowns. If you develop a feature and it turns out the feature is not great, you can choose to ship a game that's not great, or fix it. Once you have committed to a ship date and moving the date is no longer an option, fixing it means working over time. These crunches often come from the team themselves who are identifying that things aren't as good as they could be, want to fix it, but don't have the power to push dates back. Update: One problem is that creative teams are rarely satisfied, and would love to polish things forever. The production team needs to be constantly pushing back on the creative team to leave things alone and call it done. Working out what is "good enough" is really really hard. Update: Also, I wrote this comment before reading the article, and I don't mean to defend 6 months of crunch. That clearly _is_ bad management and exploitative. When you have a few bad features you can take a few weeks or a month to fix them. When you are 6 months out and only now just announcing a release date, there is lots you can do. You can cut the bad bits, you can hire more staff, you can move the date.
  - strictnein 4y ago
    All software projects have changes in scope. And yes, that scope evolves. You get new customers (internal or external), new feature ideas, and functionality that is discovered to be unwanted or too complex.
    - otikik 4y ago
      And deadlines are moved or features are cut in order to make them. “Pizza during weekend at the office” is just bad planning.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    So if your plan for the game is not fun when you play it, you should just ship a turd sandwich?
- ncallaway 4y ago
  An iterative process with an increasing scope is totally fine. Using it as an excuse for crunch is insane, because an iterative process with increasing scope needs to also have a flexible deadline.
  - jayd16 4y ago
    Can't change the holiday season timeline.
    - Thiez 4y ago
      That's fine, but then you should aggressively limit scope expansion.
    - hermitdev 4y ago
      If you cant change the time line, don't change the scope. This isn't rocket surgery. This late into the project, the scope should be well defined. I mean, especially in this era of DLC, why the need to increase the scope, anyways? Punt the extra ideas for later release.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - default_png 4y ago
        That's how you get Half Life 3..
      - jayd16 4y ago
        I don't think crunch works but trying to define game scope 3 years out doesn't work either.
    - jerf 4y ago
      "Activision Blizzard employees developing the upcoming dark fantasy action role-playing game “Diablo IV” say it will be hard to meet a June 6, 2023, release date without working significant overtime, in a process they say has been plagued by mismanagement." Not exactly a holiday release.
- throwuwu 4y ago
  I’m not in the games industry but all the war stories I’ve heard trend in the opposite direction. They start out with really broad scope and then increasingly drop and cut content and features as the deadline approaches. The only time I’ve heard of features being stuffed in and blowing out the timelines is in the major boondoggle cases where management was a complete shambles and it’s far more than just feature creep that goes wrong in those cases.
- musicale 4y ago
  It was nearly 12 years from Diablo 2 to Diablo 3, and they didn't have to deal with a pandemic. I don't think waiting another year for Diablo 4 will be the end of the world. Though I'd like to see a WarCraft 4 someday too.
  - atoav 4y ago
    > I don't think waiting another year for Diablo 4 will be the end of the world. Exactly. As I see it such things are much more crucial for games that might look/feel dated if they come out too late. The magic within the Diablo games (especially the first two) comes from the world it places us into, the way it is presented, the music, the story. All of these are things that shouldn't break with one year of delay. The worst thing that xould happen with a Diablo 4, would be that fans of the series get the impression it was rushed.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  I feel like my team lead has forgotten what iterative means, and expects much shorter turnout times in recent months for things that will absolutely not fit into a 2 week sprint. Since he kept going on about tickets that were getting stale due to last-minute unrelated scope expansions and me not being able to reprioritize new commitments on old tickets, I've just started being more strict. No, this ticket intended to literally just fix a typo is not also going to fix this unrelated bug qa discovered while testing.
  - MrGilbert 4y ago
    > No, this ticket intended to literally just fix a typo is not also going to fix this unrelated bug qa discovered while testing. That's basically how it is supposed to work. If you need something to get fixed, create an item/bug for it and let it get prioritized.
  - wildrhythms 4y ago
    I think this is a top-down issue caused by people in charge who fundamentally do not understand development lifecycles. When the requirements change at all I have to completely reassess the timeline.
  - everforward 4y ago
    I've found success in cutting tasks up in things that will fit in a sprint. If I have to write a feature, I commonly split it into a few tickets: - Write the code - Test the code - Documentation changes - Deploy the code If it's a big enough change (or a new app), I might create a few sets of those tickets. E.g. one "write/test/document/deploy" set for the database schema to do Y, another one for the business logic to do Y, another for the HTTP endpoints for Y, etc. The tickets are specific to the implementation, not to the feature, so they can't be expanded. New work can only come through new tickets, which get prioritized. Manager is happy because tickets get cleared. I'm happy because I can fight scope creep by pointing to my sprint and asking which tickets they want to bump for their new scope creep. Tickets like "implement X feature" with a 2 week estimate are a landmine for engineers because it's broad enough for the scope to expand infinitely, and it starts to look like nothing is getting done to management.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
I've been wondering lately how the attempted acquisition from Microsoft is impacting the schedule, combined with the high-rate environment, worker leverage, and economy. I wouldn't be surprised to see D4 pushed out until 2024 or even farther.
- shard972 4y ago
- strictnein 4y ago
  The release date is June 6, 2023, which was announced a couple of days ago. You can preorder it now. A delay from June or November of next year wouldn't be super surprising, but a delay to "2024 or even farther" is really, really unlikely. A lot of press got their hands on it recently and the response was rather positive.
jontro 4y ago
https://archive.vn/c8FKu https://archive.vn/c8FKu
neilv 4y ago
> The company is incentivizing employees to “crunch,” an industry term referring to working late evenings and weekends outside of regular work hours, by promising them perks some workers say are paltry. Though today I wouldn't manage a project to rely on crunch, nor expect anyone to crunch, it's still new to see a software development crunch described as something out of the ordinary and that needs incentives. Starting with my first real software engineering job, crunches were something that just happened. And I didn't question it, because it wasn't that different than being a kid and coding into the night, or being in school with long "lab" hours. My read of the tone of the WaPo is that the reader is supposed to see a crunch more like an hourly store clerk being expected to keep working after they've punched out on the time clock, rather than what used to just be the norm for software teams that wanted to ship. Probably this is a good change, since we should be focusing on managing the project and greasing effectiveness in ways that mean hitting external deliverables, not assuming we can crunch.
- michaelt 4y ago
  The games industry is on a whole different level. My friends who've gone into 'normal' software development will work on things out-of-hours from time to time, especially if they're doing something interesting, and they're sometimes on call - but they're also making enough money that if they'd rather work a 4 day week, they can afford to. My friends who've gone into game development report frequently working 10 hours a day Monday-Friday, and then going into work on both Saturday and Sunday. Or at least, they reported that the last time we saw them - you can imagine how hard it is to maintain friendships after a few years of such a work pattern.
  - vvanders 4y ago
    I'm a bit over a decade removed from that industry but that largely lined up with my experiences(and from the tabs I've kept on things it doesn't seem like much has changed). There's a constant stream of developers who have a high degree of interest in games so not only is crunch incredibly common but also compensation is significantly less(was about 1/2-1/3 standard SWE rates when I was in the industry). Combine that with publishers who pull recording industry contract style shenanigans and it's just a brutal industry. Tons of really interesting technical problems but even as someone who knew what they we going into at the time I advise people to think very carefully if it's a career option they want to pursue.
cloudking 4y ago
At the least the Diablo IV SCRUM daily standup meetings are probably interesting. "Today I'm implementing the soul sucking demon mechanics, and improved realism in the dismemberment physics engine"
olliej 4y ago
From the first sentence “mismanagement and scrupt changes” vs scheduling designed for a crunch, but I’m dubious of that given they’re already in a crunch 6 months before FCS, probably sooner given given there was time to write an article. It seems some amount of crunch is unavoidable in large projects, but if you’re talking months of crunch time good management will either delay the release or cut features. That said the games industry is notorious for shitty treatment of ICs, so perhaps 6 month crunch is just the norm?
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  It’s only “unavoidable” because of the profit motive - Diablo is hugely profitable for its owners and investors, and that is accomplished by maximizing margins including with the labor market (through constrained teams, as low wages as the market will bear, and demanding crunch periods)
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Will it be compatible with my iPhone?
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Nope, only Diablo Immortal.
- yazzku 4y ago
  Is this an April Fools joke?
  - arvigeus 4y ago
    Don’t you guys have phones?!
    - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
      Lol, seems like Blizzard doesn't like my comment.
- blibble 4y ago
  you don't want that you think you do, but you don't
  - unrealhoang 4y ago
    You guys all have phone right?
- johlits 4y ago
  One of the reasons I am not interested in D4. I like my daily logins quick and easy.
cpeterso 4y ago
Worth reading: The Games Outcomes Project was a 5-part series analyzing the results of a 2014 survey of hundreds of game developers to determine how teamwork, culture, leadership, and project management contribute to game project success or failure. > Our results clearly demonstrate that crunch doesn't lead to extraordinary results. In fact, on the whole, crunch makes games LESS successful wherever it is used, and when projects try to dig themselves out of a hole by crunching, it only digs the hole deeper. The survey results showed project crunch was negatively correlated with both a game’s financial return on investment and MetaCritic score. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-1-the-best-and-the-rest https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-pro...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
raziel2701 4y ago
They should unionize.
- throwuwu 4y ago
  Not remotely possible in an industry where the workforce is practically volunteering their labor. Even if you could convince every college grad and drop out to sign on you’d still get steam rolled by all the indie studios that would be more than happy to eat your lunch.
  - JonChesterfield 4y ago
    Why would an indie studio working every hour they have be expected to outcompete an established company with unionised engineers? I _want_ to believe the indie group would win that but it seems unlikely. Maybe one of a large number of small studios comes out ahead while most fail, but that doesn't help the failing ones much. Do you have a mechanism in mind?
yazzku 4y ago
I've given up on Activision/Blizzard. The company's creative talent is held hostage by a combination of former cow milkers who have discovered the largely unregulated business of online teen casinos together with a legion of political correctness zealots who render the creative work devoid of any trace of identity so that it can be marketed to every possible type of audience without offending a single peanut. On an unrelated note, didn't the FTC seek to block the acquisition? https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/ftc-seeks-block-microsoft-corps-acquisition-activision-blizzard-inc https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/... The WP article says that it's "set to close" rather ambiguously. Sounds like it won't actually close?
- hermitdev 4y ago
  > On an unrelated note, didn't the FTC seek to block the acquisition? The FTC has to file suit in court to attempt to block the acquisition. Until that's done and the court actually sides with the FTC, everything regarding the acquisition is likely to basically proceed as scheduled. The FTC doesn't just get to say no the acquisition and be done with it.
pugworthy 4y ago
I would say (from experience) if you are a small game team working on a game you love, you just work a lot because you want to. It's when it changes from "because you want to" to "because you have to", it's when it gets to be no fun.
- TillE 4y ago
  If you're working on your own game, something where you share in the profits, that's certainly a different scenario. But even then you still shouldn't go crazy with overtime, you'll still end up with diminishing returns, burnout, and eventually poor quality work. It's just a bad idea outside of emergency scenarios (eg, a serious crash bug in production that you can't just revert).
  - pugworthy 4y ago
    It's not even profits. Was on a mod team for a while until we bought by the company who's game we were modding. Hugely motivated to just make a free game that a lot of people liked. Pay just meant being able to invest more time in it.
- Herbstluft 4y ago
  > because you have to This is a blurred line in the industry. Rarely does your superior walk up to you and tell you that you have to stay long hours or else. Instead crunching in the games industry is much more passive aggressive. "Sure you can go home, but look at all the colleagues you are abandoning, I thought you were a team player, are we not a family? Do you not want this game to be the best it can be?" And millions of small variations of that, praising only ever those that do crunch, building an atmosphere of immense peer pressure. Your boss won't tell you to stay, he will actively build and nourish an environment in which you and your colleagues do that job for him. And that doesn't even include the whole topic of benefits, raises, and promotions. Ultimately it is the same as "you have to", but still. Many have a false image of the way crunch is forced upon a team.
Aeolun 4y ago
> We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years. This reminds me of a story about bombers in the second world war. Bombers that come back full of bullet holes still come back. You need to strengthen the parts where there are never any bullet holes (implying the bombers dropped out of the sky, and couldn’t make it back). In the same line, saying all your remaining developers are happy is not entirely surprising. All the ones that couldn’t stand you have already left.
- johnny_canuck 4y ago
  Ah, survivorship bias? Very applicable in tech it seems
- rco8786 4y ago
  Might be a bit of a stretch to use that analogy here. By this logic any dev team that shows a positive trend in employee wellbeing is simply because the unhappy ones left. Which clearly is not true.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years Emphasis mine. It doesn’t say anything about the trend. For all we know a whole batch of people giving a 0 star rating just left, and therefore this year is positive. Anyway, I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but you need more information to make a judgement.
    - rco8786 4y ago
      > but you need more information to make a judgement That is quite literally the entire point I was making, fwiw. “Recent surveys show people are happier” “oh it must be because all the unhappy people left”. You can’t jump to that conclusion, or use the airplane analogy to get there, without a whole lot more info.
  - Herbstluft 4y ago
    > which clearly is not true Is it clear? Given the incredibly high turnover rate at any point of time in the games industry it does not sound like the worst assumption to make, true or not. (And having worked in the industry myself not that long ago, none of my friends and colleagues from that time still work in it. But that is just anecdotal)
turbobooster 4y ago
Is this going to be a non mobile game? Was their mobile version successful?
- falcolas 4y ago
  Wildly. They're making hundreds of millions off it. Which makes me sad. It's a mediocre game built around hawking microtransactions at every turn. And it works, because those microtransactions make the payers more powerful than their non-paying peers. The end game is PVP. And you can not be competitive without paying gobs of money. Now, imagine what they'll bring into D4, a PC/console focused game...
  - michelb 4y ago
    D4 will not be pay-to-win, you can only buy cosmetic items. Pretty sure the mobile game revenue pays for a lot of other stuff, like D4. Not saying I like it, but it's a great commercial success.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      > will not be pay-to-win, you can only buy cosmetic items Lied every gaming company ever. Blizzard has already lied about this with Overwatch. Why would anyone believe them when it comes to D4?
danbmil99 4y ago
I worked with Activision on a game years ago. It was absolutely terrible. People were working 18 hour shifts and eating junk food. Everyone was completely stressed out and some looked positively sick. The producer was prancing about in storm-trooper boots and basically promising that the beatings would continue until morale improved. He just struck me as a sick sadist, attracted to the job for the same reasons we get bad cops. I've heard similar stories from former EA folks, and others. It's just a shitty, crappy industry, that takes advantage of the perceived glamour to exploit people and burn them out without any conscience.
CottonMcKnight 4y ago
> The company provides a $25 DoorDash credit to employees who work more than 10 hours a day. Wow, what a generous perk!
bentt 4y ago
This is just another example of Bobby Kotick and Activision executives being bad people. They've ruined the Blizzard brand and let the good people of Vicarious Visions down. Hopefully the game turns out well for all involved, but certainly not for the snake at the top who should have been gone after the harassment stuff.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JonChesterfield 4y ago
There are diminishing returns after some duration of work. Whether it's 2, 6 or 10 hours at some point you get worse at it. Diminishing returns is not zero though. There's another period after that threshold where you can still build working stuff, either slower or more carefully or choosing simpler things. Then the third stage where everything you do makes things worse. Whether that middle block is better spent working or doing something else comes down to opportunity cost and time. It's easy to write it off as "getting a bit sloppy now, time to stop", but that does mean lower total output.
TheChaplain 4y ago
> We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years. Funny. Of course this is just my experience over the years, but I've rarely seen people "tell how it really is", no matter how garbage the project is. I admit I belong to that group as well, it's hard challenge the power that feeds you.

99 points by type0 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

> Blizzard Entertainment spokesperson Andrew Reynolds told The Post, “As you may know, game development in general, and ‘Diablo IV’ specifically, follows an iterative process where the scope evolves over time. Production on the game is going extremely well. Overtime is voluntary and limited to specific teams. We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years.” Replace evolving scope with increasing scope and you've got the most common recipe for development failure being pitched as a good thing.

Retric 4y ago
Alternatively, evolving scope is decreasing scope as they cut ever more critical parts of the game to make the fixed deadline. Either way it isn’t a good sign to be changing scope this late in the development process.
kramerger 4y ago
It's not really an iterative process if you fail at every iteration. Let's call it what it is: a series of waterfalls, all with unreasonable schedules
verdenti 4y ago
barbazoo 4y ago
I love how scope "evolves" as if it was a natural process and not just the result of poor planning.
- Jensson 4y ago
  For a game the scope evolves since you can't know how things play or feel until you test it.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  You can't plan for unknown unknowns. If you develop a feature and it turns out the feature is not great, you can choose to ship a game that's not great, or fix it. Once you have committed to a ship date and moving the date is no longer an option, fixing it means working over time. These crunches often come from the team themselves who are identifying that things aren't as good as they could be, want to fix it, but don't have the power to push dates back. Update: One problem is that creative teams are rarely satisfied, and would love to polish things forever. The production team needs to be constantly pushing back on the creative team to leave things alone and call it done. Working out what is "good enough" is really really hard. Update: Also, I wrote this comment before reading the article, and I don't mean to defend 6 months of crunch. That clearly _is_ bad management and exploitative. When you have a few bad features you can take a few weeks or a month to fix them. When you are 6 months out and only now just announcing a release date, there is lots you can do. You can cut the bad bits, you can hire more staff, you can move the date.
- strictnein 4y ago
  All software projects have changes in scope. And yes, that scope evolves. You get new customers (internal or external), new feature ideas, and functionality that is discovered to be unwanted or too complex.
  - otikik 4y ago
    And deadlines are moved or features are cut in order to make them. “Pizza during weekend at the office” is just bad planning.
- brianwawok 4y ago
  So if your plan for the game is not fun when you play it, you should just ship a turd sandwich?
ncallaway 4y ago
An iterative process with an increasing scope is totally fine. Using it as an excuse for crunch is insane, because an iterative process with increasing scope needs to also have a flexible deadline.
- jayd16 4y ago
  Can't change the holiday season timeline.
  - Thiez 4y ago
    That's fine, but then you should aggressively limit scope expansion.
  - hermitdev 4y ago
    If you cant change the time line, don't change the scope. This isn't rocket surgery. This late into the project, the scope should be well defined. I mean, especially in this era of DLC, why the need to increase the scope, anyways? Punt the extra ideas for later release.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - default_png 4y ago
      That's how you get Half Life 3..
    - jayd16 4y ago
      I don't think crunch works but trying to define game scope 3 years out doesn't work either.
  - jerf 4y ago
    "Activision Blizzard employees developing the upcoming dark fantasy action role-playing game “Diablo IV” say it will be hard to meet a June 6, 2023, release date without working significant overtime, in a process they say has been plagued by mismanagement." Not exactly a holiday release.
throwuwu 4y ago
I’m not in the games industry but all the war stories I’ve heard trend in the opposite direction. They start out with really broad scope and then increasingly drop and cut content and features as the deadline approaches. The only time I’ve heard of features being stuffed in and blowing out the timelines is in the major boondoggle cases where management was a complete shambles and it’s far more than just feature creep that goes wrong in those cases.
musicale 4y ago
It was nearly 12 years from Diablo 2 to Diablo 3, and they didn't have to deal with a pandemic. I don't think waiting another year for Diablo 4 will be the end of the world. Though I'd like to see a WarCraft 4 someday too.
- atoav 4y ago
  > I don't think waiting another year for Diablo 4 will be the end of the world. Exactly. As I see it such things are much more crucial for games that might look/feel dated if they come out too late. The magic within the Diablo games (especially the first two) comes from the world it places us into, the way it is presented, the music, the story. All of these are things that shouldn't break with one year of delay. The worst thing that xould happen with a Diablo 4, would be that fans of the series get the impression it was rushed.
brailsafe 4y ago
I feel like my team lead has forgotten what iterative means, and expects much shorter turnout times in recent months for things that will absolutely not fit into a 2 week sprint. Since he kept going on about tickets that were getting stale due to last-minute unrelated scope expansions and me not being able to reprioritize new commitments on old tickets, I've just started being more strict. No, this ticket intended to literally just fix a typo is not also going to fix this unrelated bug qa discovered while testing.
- MrGilbert 4y ago
  > No, this ticket intended to literally just fix a typo is not also going to fix this unrelated bug qa discovered while testing. That's basically how it is supposed to work. If you need something to get fixed, create an item/bug for it and let it get prioritized.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  I think this is a top-down issue caused by people in charge who fundamentally do not understand development lifecycles. When the requirements change at all I have to completely reassess the timeline.
- everforward 4y ago
  I've found success in cutting tasks up in things that will fit in a sprint. If I have to write a feature, I commonly split it into a few tickets: - Write the code - Test the code - Documentation changes - Deploy the code If it's a big enough change (or a new app), I might create a few sets of those tickets. E.g. one "write/test/document/deploy" set for the database schema to do Y, another one for the business logic to do Y, another for the HTTP endpoints for Y, etc. The tickets are specific to the implementation, not to the feature, so they can't be expanded. New work can only come through new tickets, which get prioritized. Manager is happy because tickets get cleared. I'm happy because I can fight scope creep by pointing to my sprint and asking which tickets they want to bump for their new scope creep. Tickets like "implement X feature" with a 2 week estimate are a landmine for engineers because it's broad enough for the scope to expand infinitely, and it starts to look like nothing is getting done to management.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

I've been wondering lately how the attempted acquisition from Microsoft is impacting the schedule, combined with the high-rate environment, worker leverage, and economy. I wouldn't be surprised to see D4 pushed out until 2024 or even farther.

shard972 4y ago
strictnein 4y ago
The release date is June 6, 2023, which was announced a couple of days ago. You can preorder it now. A delay from June or November of next year wouldn't be super surprising, but a delay to "2024 or even farther" is really, really unlikely. A lot of press got their hands on it recently and the response was rather positive.

jontro 4y ago

https://archive.vn/c8FKu https://archive.vn/c8FKu

neilv 4y ago

> The company is incentivizing employees to “crunch,” an industry term referring to working late evenings and weekends outside of regular work hours, by promising them perks some workers say are paltry. Though today I wouldn't manage a project to rely on crunch, nor expect anyone to crunch, it's still new to see a software development crunch described as something out of the ordinary and that needs incentives. Starting with my first real software engineering job, crunches were something that just happened. And I didn't question it, because it wasn't that different than being a kid and coding into the night, or being in school with long "lab" hours. My read of the tone of the WaPo is that the reader is supposed to see a crunch more like an hourly store clerk being expected to keep working after they've punched out on the time clock, rather than what used to just be the norm for software teams that wanted to ship. Probably this is a good change, since we should be focusing on managing the project and greasing effectiveness in ways that mean hitting external deliverables, not assuming we can crunch.

michaelt 4y ago
The games industry is on a whole different level. My friends who've gone into 'normal' software development will work on things out-of-hours from time to time, especially if they're doing something interesting, and they're sometimes on call - but they're also making enough money that if they'd rather work a 4 day week, they can afford to. My friends who've gone into game development report frequently working 10 hours a day Monday-Friday, and then going into work on both Saturday and Sunday. Or at least, they reported that the last time we saw them - you can imagine how hard it is to maintain friendships after a few years of such a work pattern.
- vvanders 4y ago
  I'm a bit over a decade removed from that industry but that largely lined up with my experiences(and from the tabs I've kept on things it doesn't seem like much has changed). There's a constant stream of developers who have a high degree of interest in games so not only is crunch incredibly common but also compensation is significantly less(was about 1/2-1/3 standard SWE rates when I was in the industry). Combine that with publishers who pull recording industry contract style shenanigans and it's just a brutal industry. Tons of really interesting technical problems but even as someone who knew what they we going into at the time I advise people to think very carefully if it's a career option they want to pursue.

cloudking 4y ago

At the least the Diablo IV SCRUM daily standup meetings are probably interesting. "Today I'm implementing the soul sucking demon mechanics, and improved realism in the dismemberment physics engine"

olliej 4y ago

From the first sentence “mismanagement and scrupt changes” vs scheduling designed for a crunch, but I’m dubious of that given they’re already in a crunch 6 months before FCS, probably sooner given given there was time to write an article. It seems some amount of crunch is unavoidable in large projects, but if you’re talking months of crunch time good management will either delay the release or cut features. That said the games industry is notorious for shitty treatment of ICs, so perhaps 6 month crunch is just the norm?

wahnfrieden 4y ago
It’s only “unavoidable” because of the profit motive - Diablo is hugely profitable for its owners and investors, and that is accomplished by maximizing margins including with the labor market (through constrained teams, as low wages as the market will bear, and demanding crunch periods)

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

Will it be compatible with my iPhone?

nickthegreek 4y ago
Nope, only Diablo Immortal.
yazzku 4y ago
Is this an April Fools joke?
- arvigeus 4y ago
  Don’t you guys have phones?!
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Lol, seems like Blizzard doesn't like my comment.
blibble 4y ago
you don't want that you think you do, but you don't
- unrealhoang 4y ago
  You guys all have phone right?
johlits 4y ago
One of the reasons I am not interested in D4. I like my daily logins quick and easy.

cpeterso 4y ago

Worth reading: The Games Outcomes Project was a 5-part series analyzing the results of a 2014 survey of hundreds of game developers to determine how teamwork, culture, leadership, and project management contribute to game project success or failure. > Our results clearly demonstrate that crunch doesn't lead to extraordinary results. In fact, on the whole, crunch makes games LESS successful wherever it is used, and when projects try to dig themselves out of a hole by crunching, it only digs the hole deeper. The survey results showed project crunch was negatively correlated with both a game’s financial return on investment and MetaCritic score. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-1-the-best-and-the-rest https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-pro...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

raziel2701 4y ago

They should unionize.

throwuwu 4y ago
Not remotely possible in an industry where the workforce is practically volunteering their labor. Even if you could convince every college grad and drop out to sign on you’d still get steam rolled by all the indie studios that would be more than happy to eat your lunch.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  Why would an indie studio working every hour they have be expected to outcompete an established company with unionised engineers? I _want_ to believe the indie group would win that but it seems unlikely. Maybe one of a large number of small studios comes out ahead while most fail, but that doesn't help the failing ones much. Do you have a mechanism in mind?

yazzku 4y ago

I've given up on Activision/Blizzard. The company's creative talent is held hostage by a combination of former cow milkers who have discovered the largely unregulated business of online teen casinos together with a legion of political correctness zealots who render the creative work devoid of any trace of identity so that it can be marketed to every possible type of audience without offending a single peanut. On an unrelated note, didn't the FTC seek to block the acquisition? https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/ftc-seeks-block-microsoft-corps-acquisition-activision-blizzard-inc https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/... The WP article says that it's "set to close" rather ambiguously. Sounds like it won't actually close?

hermitdev 4y ago
> On an unrelated note, didn't the FTC seek to block the acquisition? The FTC has to file suit in court to attempt to block the acquisition. Until that's done and the court actually sides with the FTC, everything regarding the acquisition is likely to basically proceed as scheduled. The FTC doesn't just get to say no the acquisition and be done with it.

pugworthy 4y ago

I would say (from experience) if you are a small game team working on a game you love, you just work a lot because you want to. It's when it changes from "because you want to" to "because you have to", it's when it gets to be no fun.

TillE 4y ago
If you're working on your own game, something where you share in the profits, that's certainly a different scenario. But even then you still shouldn't go crazy with overtime, you'll still end up with diminishing returns, burnout, and eventually poor quality work. It's just a bad idea outside of emergency scenarios (eg, a serious crash bug in production that you can't just revert).
- pugworthy 4y ago
  It's not even profits. Was on a mod team for a while until we bought by the company who's game we were modding. Hugely motivated to just make a free game that a lot of people liked. Pay just meant being able to invest more time in it.
Herbstluft 4y ago
> because you have to This is a blurred line in the industry. Rarely does your superior walk up to you and tell you that you have to stay long hours or else. Instead crunching in the games industry is much more passive aggressive. "Sure you can go home, but look at all the colleagues you are abandoning, I thought you were a team player, are we not a family? Do you not want this game to be the best it can be?" And millions of small variations of that, praising only ever those that do crunch, building an atmosphere of immense peer pressure. Your boss won't tell you to stay, he will actively build and nourish an environment in which you and your colleagues do that job for him. And that doesn't even include the whole topic of benefits, raises, and promotions. Ultimately it is the same as "you have to", but still. Many have a false image of the way crunch is forced upon a team.

Aeolun 4y ago

> We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years. This reminds me of a story about bombers in the second world war. Bombers that come back full of bullet holes still come back. You need to strengthen the parts where there are never any bullet holes (implying the bombers dropped out of the sky, and couldn’t make it back). In the same line, saying all your remaining developers are happy is not entirely surprising. All the ones that couldn’t stand you have already left.

johnny_canuck 4y ago
Ah, survivorship bias? Very applicable in tech it seems
rco8786 4y ago
Might be a bit of a stretch to use that analogy here. By this logic any dev team that shows a positive trend in employee wellbeing is simply because the unhappy ones left. Which clearly is not true.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years Emphasis mine. It doesn’t say anything about the trend. For all we know a whole batch of people giving a 0 star rating just left, and therefore this year is positive. Anyway, I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but you need more information to make a judgement.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    > but you need more information to make a judgement That is quite literally the entire point I was making, fwiw. “Recent surveys show people are happier” “oh it must be because all the unhappy people left”. You can’t jump to that conclusion, or use the airplane analogy to get there, without a whole lot more info.
- Herbstluft 4y ago
  > which clearly is not true Is it clear? Given the incredibly high turnover rate at any point of time in the games industry it does not sound like the worst assumption to make, true or not. (And having worked in the industry myself not that long ago, none of my friends and colleagues from that time still work in it. But that is just anecdotal)

turbobooster 4y ago

Is this going to be a non mobile game? Was their mobile version successful?

falcolas 4y ago
Wildly. They're making hundreds of millions off it. Which makes me sad. It's a mediocre game built around hawking microtransactions at every turn. And it works, because those microtransactions make the payers more powerful than their non-paying peers. The end game is PVP. And you can not be competitive without paying gobs of money. Now, imagine what they'll bring into D4, a PC/console focused game...
- michelb 4y ago
  D4 will not be pay-to-win, you can only buy cosmetic items. Pretty sure the mobile game revenue pays for a lot of other stuff, like D4. Not saying I like it, but it's a great commercial success.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    > will not be pay-to-win, you can only buy cosmetic items Lied every gaming company ever. Blizzard has already lied about this with Overwatch. Why would anyone believe them when it comes to D4?

danbmil99 4y ago

I worked with Activision on a game years ago. It was absolutely terrible. People were working 18 hour shifts and eating junk food. Everyone was completely stressed out and some looked positively sick. The producer was prancing about in storm-trooper boots and basically promising that the beatings would continue until morale improved. He just struck me as a sick sadist, attracted to the job for the same reasons we get bad cops. I've heard similar stories from former EA folks, and others. It's just a shitty, crappy industry, that takes advantage of the perceived glamour to exploit people and burn them out without any conscience.

CottonMcKnight 4y ago

> The company provides a $25 DoorDash credit to employees who work more than 10 hours a day. Wow, what a generous perk!

bentt 4y ago

This is just another example of Bobby Kotick and Activision executives being bad people. They've ruined the Blizzard brand and let the good people of Vicarious Visions down. Hopefully the game turns out well for all involved, but certainly not for the snake at the top who should have been gone after the harassment stuff.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

JonChesterfield 4y ago

There are diminishing returns after some duration of work. Whether it's 2, 6 or 10 hours at some point you get worse at it. Diminishing returns is not zero though. There's another period after that threshold where you can still build working stuff, either slower or more carefully or choosing simpler things. Then the third stage where everything you do makes things worse. Whether that middle block is better spent working or doing something else comes down to opportunity cost and time. It's easy to write it off as "getting a bit sloppy now, time to stop", but that does mean lower total output.

TheChaplain 4y ago

> We regularly survey the team on their professional well-being, and the latest results are the most positive they’ve been in years. Funny. Of course this is just my experience over the years, but I've rarely seen people "tell how it really is", no matter how garbage the project is. I admit I belong to that group as well, it's hard challenge the power that feeds you.