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Why Game Developers Keep Getting Laid Off

74 points by footpath 12y ago

shmerl 12y ago
> But inertia is hard to fight. How do you convince a multi-billion-dollar industry to change practices that prioritize short-term profit over long-term morale How does it compare to smaller studios, for example those which use crowdfunding (inXile, Larian etc.), or even bigger ones but self sustained, not relying on external publishers such as CD Projekt Red for example? Are their practices better than those of the big and nasty companies like EA and Co.?
- Paul_S 12y ago
  Obviously, I don't know all of them but CD Projekt is not any different than any other publisher funded (owned or funded on a per project basis) developer I worked for in the decade I spent in gamedev. There's little incentive in keeping your staff - there is never a shortage of younger people who will work for next to nothing and stay at the office till midnight, doing 80 hour weeks. You'd think that the owners would realise that more senior devs doing 40 hours would be a better ROI but we are talking about people who plan for crunch - it's not done in an emergency, it's planned for, literally, like in a spreadsheet.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Are you familiar with CD Projekt Red or you just assume it? From what I've heard about the company they value their developers and in general they are quite different from your typical EA and Co. type of company and have more common sense. For instance they are strongly against any DRM.
    - Paul_S 12y ago
      My friends work there. The games industry is tiny. After 10 years I probably know at least one person in every company in the UK simply because of how often people change companies - including going to a different country they don't even speak the language of. So OK, kudos to CD Projekt for hiring from an international talent pool (and treating them well, helping with the move and all that which is rare in gamedev companies who seldom have rich compensation packages beyond the salary) but they are not some hippie commune and will scale the workforce to whatever they need at the moment.
      - shmerl 12y ago
        What I meant is, do you know if CDPR are often firing developers to hire new ones just in order to rotate them? Or they value their input and invest in those who work for them? They had financial difficulties in the past. They wrote how they almost went bust a while ago, while developing the Witcher 2. I don't think that's the subject of this thread.
neves 12y ago
Layoffs aren't a problem. There will be a new generation of young freshman whom greatest desire is to be a video game developer. The non unionized guys will work 140 hours a week. Have a great salary for someone so young. And get their layoff when they get older and can't stand more this.
- EdwardDiego 12y ago
  Are there unions in game dev? In my country, IT professionals are very hostile to unions, but then our labour laws are less imbalanced between employer and employee (IMO) than America's.
  - bittermang 12y ago
    I have not encountered any. With all of the Hollywood Accounting that goes on at the publisher level to ensure a development team gets fucked out of as many royalties as possible, there is a lot the games industry could learn from the Unionization of Hollywood.
    - trentmb 12y ago
      > there is a lot the games industry could learn from the Unionization of Hollywood. That they can't use the keyboard, cuz the union says only the typists can use the keyboard?
      - bittermang 12y ago
        Specifically, how Hollywood has a writers guild, an actors guild. Games could see an artists union, a programmers union, a game design union.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    There are certainly unions in France at least and this is a place where many video games are developed (well, less now than before). Unions are mandatory in France when your company has more than 50 employees, so companies like Ubi Soft most certainly have unions at least in France, but my guess is they expanded in the US, Canada and Asia precisely for that reason: to lower the risk of having unions in a single development center.
drpgq 12y ago
The Curt Schilling story has always fascinated me (the video game part, not the baseball one). I live in Ontario and like a lot of other place, Ontario gives pretty large tax incentives to video game companies. I've interacted a bit with some small video game companies here who basically seem to only exist because of the various tax incentives (both federal and provincial). I've pretty much decided these aren't a good idea, but politicians think video games are cool.
- shard972 12y ago
  I remember when I first herd about him and his company. As an Australian I didn't know who Curt Schilling was so in my mind it was a guy who got a lot of tax benefits and money to build an MMO.
nnq 12y ago
This sounds like like one of the few problems that can really be solved by unionizing workers and moving to long term work contracts... but good luck selling this "socialist" mentality to game developers :)
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  lol. Game studios shut down left and right. Almost every game studio in existence lives project to project. Most live paycheck to paycheck. You can unionize all you want but when there's no money there's no money. This isn't a tale of fat cats getting rich at the expense of the little man. It's a brutal industry where most games don't ship and most games that do ship still lose money. All of us who work in the industry are mildly insane to do so.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - true_religion 12y ago
      > There are other businesses where projects are high risk and still jobs work more or less normally. I'm honestly curious. What businesses are these and what industry do they work in?
  - nnq 12y ago
    so then the problem is more in a pathological game-dev-studio to publisher relationships? or are most studios too small to have a bunch of running projects at the same time? ...because the industry as a whole, on average, surely makes enough money to actually keep people employed even for the short periods when they aren't needed. What the OP describes is simply exploitation. The only alternative conclusion to draw would be that the game dev industry attracts more talented programmers than it can support, but this sounds like a dubious claim. I doubt talented programmers are so attracted to game dev to actually saturate the sector with cheap and high quality labor...
- iwwr 12y ago
  That's more likely to just drive away publishers to friendlier jurisdictions. There's also the issue of voluntary vs. mandatory unions.
Furzel 12y ago
Couldn't this problem be solved by a shift to a video game consulting industry ? In tech companies it's quite common to have a period of 'inter contract' between two missions where you can do trainings or even self training. Is the video game market hostile to this kind of organisation or has it just not been tested yet ?
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  I considered that option too - consultants or freelancers or the like with less rigid contracts - however, the cost for those would be exponentially that of the young easy to hire developers; hourly rates at least twice as high, which doubles if you make them work double hours during crunch hours. In-house developers work for a flat annual salary, and IIRC most game development companies don't pay overtime whilst demanding devs work overtime during crunch time. But game dev extortion is a known problem, and the other problem is that people take it. Working in the video game industry is a dream for a lot of people, and they're willing to take a lot of shit for the perceived privilege to work on the things they love. And the weirdest part? The actual development of a video game is often only a small part of the total cost package; iirc, games like the Call of Duty series cost more in marketing than the actual development.
dsirijus 12y ago
This relates only to a particular type of games - the ones that are shipped and forgot, or the ones that need minimum upkeep costs. So, perfectly understandable, and this is (almost) analogous to complaining why some hotel staffs 30 during winter instead of 100 people during the summer season. As a game company owner myself, I've found a way to do efficient damage control (with regards to morale) on this - announce the "cuts" as early as project pitch! It's not incomprehensible that you know how many people you'll need for the game's upkeep and how many for development stage. Throw an "if game is successful" and "if game is !successful" clause in there, and that way everyone knows what's the playing ground for your game. I've noticed that these policies of mine have attracted fast-moving employees, the ones that will find it perfectly understandable if I, right now, scrapped every project and said goodbye to everyone. Which, in game industry, is a frequent occurence.
- Sniffnoy 12y ago
  Isn't this more or less how movies get made in Hollywood? You're always hired just for a particular project? (Going by memory here, may be way off.)
  - dsirijus 12y ago
    Of course. There's a bit of delusional idea that games are somehow sustainable business model (admiteddly, they _are_ for some genres). But, yes, that's the nature of business. This, to me, is a bit like complaining how war-time journalists don't get to spend enough time with their families and are at life risk. It's the biz, and, I'm sorry to be slightly verbally violent, get tougher skin or gtfo. Plenty of sustainable software/design/management roles in various spheres for you if you can't take it.
    - Retric 12y ago
      Games are a sustainable business model. The problem is games are a highly competitive market so where most startups get some traction and keep executing that for years the game industry moves fast and you need a new hit every time. IMO, Pixar is probably the most sustainable model for a hits industry. At a minimum you need a multistage pipeline, rock solid management, and a focus on customers.
frik 12y ago
If they drive off the hardcore gaming community by adding more and more casual elements like pay for win, double-DRM and dumped down gameplay, the franchise will go downhill. For example open world games usually center around vehicles to move around vast amount of map-terrain. You can make the driving physics (the central gameplay element) arcady and fun (like GTA San Andreas) or realistic and still fun (like GTA 4 or Mafia 1+2). Or you don't care and get the driving mechanics mediocre like most such games (GTA V, Watch Dogs, Sleeping Dogs, Need for Speed, etc.)
- chris_wot 12y ago
  I can't understand why this comment has been downvoted. It seems like a controversial but valid opinion. What are the specific objections?
  - agersant 12y ago
    It's off-topic.
Iftheshoefits 12y ago
Game developers keep getting laid off for the same reason game developers generally earn lower salaries and have worse working conditions than other people in this industry: a robust oversupply of potential labor. These companies can replace their entire development staff regularly. That is, of course, the successful ones can. Developers at smaller places are laid off when their studios are bought by the sharks or fail to achieve any success in the market.
- mattm 12y ago
  Yeah, I had a friend a few years younger than me say he wanted to get into game development. I told him the horror stories that many devs work all the time, get paid little and don't even have time to play games. His response? "I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."
  - tsotha 12y ago
    This is the key. You wouldn't want to be a game dev for the same reason you wouldn't open a surfboard shop or depend on your band to pay the bills. To much in the way of virtually unpaid competition.
mynameishere 12y ago
It's weirdly common to hear about people getting laid off from the same company more than once—i.e., they get laid off, rehired, and laid off again in a span of two or three years It's not too weird. This was how factories used to work on a regular basis. Guys would work for 8 months, get laid off, get unemployment for 2 months and lay around the house bugging their wives, then get called back again. Repeat until retirement. The supply chain techniques have improved so that doesn't happen very much now.
- seanewest 12y ago
  But that sounds like a dependable cycle... one you could financially depend on. Your situation is more uncertain when you get laid off in the game industry.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Which country/time period? Across much of Europe for much of the 20th century, trying to do that would bring your entire workforce out on strike.
  - collyw 12y ago
    I would be quite pleased with unpaid leave for two months, if I knew it was coming.
    - GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
      Only if you had enough money to survive for 2 months...
      - nnq 12y ago
        That's the point, if you know it's coming you'll adjust your lifestyle to have enough OR you'll negotiate a bigger salary from the get go to compensate for planned down time.
  - yen223 12y ago
seanewest 12y ago
I've worked in the AAA game industry and there are many factors. When you break down the interests of companies this seems like just a product of economic self-interest, financial risk, volatility, and publisher/studio relationships. But the truth is that the practices of industries are often based on what the employees are willing to take. Employees in the game industry will come back after being fired ... and fired again. They won't quit their job even though they work 80+ hours a week for months on end. In other industries, this would never fly, and practices that assume you can do this to employees would have never caught on, because the employees in (many) other industries won't as consistently take that abuse. The practices of the gaming industry have, over the years, formed around this fact of nature about the employees. None of it would be this way if employees weren't willing to take the abuse in the first place.
- sportanova 12y ago
  But I'm guessing that a lot of these devs are really interested in x genre, but they're working in y genre, so why do they take the abuse? Is there just a huge over supply of game devs?
  - yen223 12y ago
    > Is there just a huge over supply of game devs? Bingo. Too many people think being good at playing games means they are good at making games.
    - chucknelson 12y ago
      Isn't it more about thinking they'll enjoy making games rather than thinking they are good at making them? Games = fun so it must be fun to make them...I assume that's how the initial thinking goes.
    - sportanova 12y ago
      Do the ones who are actually good at making games get treated better? Is this just at the lower / junior levels?
x0054 12y ago
Wouldn't one solution to this problem be telecommuting combined with contract based model. You put a team together for a project, work the project, and let every one know up front that this is a temporary gig, not a permanent job. Like in the movie industry. But the twist is, you embrace a telecommuting model, allowing developers to move from project to project without having to move from house to house. This would also make it much easier to rehire people who worked for you before, providing continuity to the games, and increasing level of code reuse. I know it's not a steady job, but perhaps it's a fair compromise. Also, this would allow the video game industry to keep older talent, as developers would be able to have a more flexible schedule and live in more family friendly suburban neighborhoods. Just an idea....
- ehurrell 12y ago
  That does seem like it has a lot of potential to tackle this, though it would probably make game development less attractive (the illusion of a steady job is better than 'well in 9 months you'll be looking for work'). Game dev is hugely attractive of course, so it could conceivably take the hit. One possible problem with this is what's already been happening with contract CG people in the movie industry. Their work is becoming increasingly devalued so there's a race to the bottom in terms of charging, such that situations like Ang Lee's Life of Pi, where he said something to the effect that he felt he paid too much for CG (I can't remember offhand the exact quote) and the CG people were barely making ends meet. They also aren't being acknowledged at awards, which for some can be a disincentive.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  I'm really surprised that's not the case. Contracting would be great for this sort of thing.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  Remote contractors are heavily leveraged in the game industry. It's not a solution; it usually makes things worse.
  - yen223 12y ago
notastartup 12y ago
I think developers/designers or any type of creative work that involves using the computer need a union of some sort. Artists have it, Writers have it, why not the tech crowd?
- mattgreenrocks 12y ago
  Naivete and immaturity. The tech crowd doesn't realize that the best time to work towards a better future for themselves is when things are [generally] going your way. What many do not see is the rapid commoditization of the low-end of the market, fueled by OSS RAD tools.
- chris_wot 12y ago
  I see you have been downvoted, but I've increasingly been of that opinion. I see developers being screwed over all the time by big corporations - as an example, Apple and Google with illegal agreements not to poach each other's workers. A union, IMO, would have helped.
angelortega 12y ago
It's a strange language when "getting laid" and "getting laid off" mean such different things.
- thesteamboat 12y ago
  To compound the problem, "getting off" happens when "getting laid".
- aikah 12y ago
  Yeah,as a foreigner ,it's hard, never know what to put after a verb to get the right meaning,let's take "to go". to go on,go back,go off,go around,go by have a different meaning...that's the most difficult part of the english language imho,now you can use a different verb for each expression,but it wouldnt feel idiomatic. At the same time,it makes english composable and easy to extend,it cannot work with my language.I wonder if other languages work like that too.
  - sammyd56 12y ago
    Most Germanic languages have constructs similar to English´s phrasal verbs. Learning them, for a foreigner, is really difficult (I know, because I spend most of my time teaching English to Spanish students). I actually just released the Android app I´ve been building to help with this. I didn´t think it was worthy of a Show HN post, but now seems a good time to mention it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phrasalverbworld https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phrasalver...
tsotha 12y ago
>Several of the developers who contacted me for this story said they were fed up with layoff cycles and had left the video game industry entirely. Some told tales of endless relocations and unreasonable hours, and bragged that in their new fields, they were paid more to work less. Yeah... this isn't exactly news. You work in the gaming industry because you love video games. It's not a career. It's a job you do when you have youth and health and minimum entanglements. When you get married or get older or get just plain sick of working around the clock for not much money then it's time to look around for something more stable and remunerative. It's ridiculous to compare video game industry jobs with Big Grey Financial Company. If you want comparisons, look at the movie industry, where people get together to work on a project and then all get laid off when it's done.
- bowlofpetunias 12y ago
  The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry? The tools people use in the movie industry are commodities with relatively slow innovation. People can get by on more or less the same skill set they had 15 years ago, and once the movie has been shot, virtually nobody has gained any new knowledge. The game industry has to considerably up their game (no pun intended) with every new release. The only way they can keep up the movie-style cycle if a company producing a new game can pick up developers just laid off by someone else. I doubt if that is sustainable in the long run. At some point hiring new devs with very recent experience will become more expensive than retaining knowledge. The game industry will always have more dramatic cycles because any company is as successful as their last game, but the current state of affairs just reeks of immaturity.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    > The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry? Well at the same time the technologies you used to make the game you worked on 2 years ago are probably going to be obsolete in the new game you'd be hired to work on. There's only a few jobs in the game industry where highly specialized, technical people are valued and retained. And there's a ton of talent pool to pick up fresh people from out there who are decent at what they do - probably more than there are jobs for them. Look at Mercury Steam, they had no experience doing a AAA game (unless you consider Jericho one of them, but I'd say it was rather average in scope), and yet they managed to convince Konami they could do a reboot of Castlevania and they did it pretty well without much prior experience in the similar genre or scope.
herperderp 12y ago
employment is a scam
lazyjones 12y ago
Isn't the bigger issue here that game developers have been underpaid for many years? They are usually exceptional programmers who would be getting much higher salaries (and much better working conditions) elsewhere, so getting laid off would not be such a dramatic experience due to savings etc..
gambiting 12y ago
>>The average yearly salary for game developers, according to a Gamasutra study, was $84,000 in 2013. I just got hired as a junior programmer at a large studio(one of the largest in the world in fact) and I make ~$30k a year - wonder where they get their numbers from, or if maybe the market in the US is better(I am in the UK).
- hackerboos 12y ago
  That's low for any programming job. My first job out of university was $42k. Where about are you based?
  - gambiting 12y ago
    I know it's low - and everyone is telling me that "that's how games industry is like". Both me and my girlfriend finished the exact same course at uni, and I got my dream job in games industry, making £18k a year, and she got a job in BT, making £30k a year. It's in the North East of England.
    - hackerboos 12y ago
      I know the North East doesn't demand London salaries but even here in the North West you can get more than £20k as a junior. I guess it depends on your priorities. Are you learning a lot? Do you enjoy it? etc.
      - gambiting 12y ago
        I do enjoy it, I get to work on a game that sells millions of copies per year, and I currently have every single devkit(Xbox 360,Xbox One, PS4, Wii, Wii U) right on my desk and I get to work with them,which I always found exciting. So yeah, I am working at my dream job, because I always wanted to get into the games industry. I am just saying that in any other industry, I could literally be making £10k more/year, which means that in a way, I am paying almost a £1000 a month just to have the privilege of working in the games industry.
was_hellbanned 12y ago
A good friend of mine has worked in the games industry for over a decade now. He worked on the Spore project at EA. It was insane how many hours he put in while on-project. He'd have to answer his phone at any time, and sometimes drop whatever he was doing to trudge back into work. At the end of a three month crunch, he said he'd spend about two weeks just dicking around at work, sort of an informal comp-time system. I remember the "EA spouse" incident, and by the sound of it, my friend was on one of the 'good' teams. I once asked him why game developers don't get any royalties, since there was a time when that was at least not unheard of. He insisted that it would just cause people to game the system, with lazy people trying to get on the money-making teams. Personally, I fail to see how that's not always the case, everywhere, anyway. I think he's simply drunk the Kool-Aid and bought the line that upper management fed him in order to maximize their profits.

74 points by footpath 12y ago

> But inertia is hard to fight. How do you convince a multi-billion-dollar industry to change practices that prioritize short-term profit over long-term morale How does it compare to smaller studios, for example those which use crowdfunding (inXile, Larian etc.), or even bigger ones but self sustained, not relying on external publishers such as CD Projekt Red for example? Are their practices better than those of the big and nasty companies like EA and Co.?

Paul_S 12y ago
Obviously, I don't know all of them but CD Projekt is not any different than any other publisher funded (owned or funded on a per project basis) developer I worked for in the decade I spent in gamedev. There's little incentive in keeping your staff - there is never a shortage of younger people who will work for next to nothing and stay at the office till midnight, doing 80 hour weeks. You'd think that the owners would realise that more senior devs doing 40 hours would be a better ROI but we are talking about people who plan for crunch - it's not done in an emergency, it's planned for, literally, like in a spreadsheet.
- shmerl 12y ago
  Are you familiar with CD Projekt Red or you just assume it? From what I've heard about the company they value their developers and in general they are quite different from your typical EA and Co. type of company and have more common sense. For instance they are strongly against any DRM.
  - Paul_S 12y ago
    My friends work there. The games industry is tiny. After 10 years I probably know at least one person in every company in the UK simply because of how often people change companies - including going to a different country they don't even speak the language of. So OK, kudos to CD Projekt for hiring from an international talent pool (and treating them well, helping with the move and all that which is rare in gamedev companies who seldom have rich compensation packages beyond the salary) but they are not some hippie commune and will scale the workforce to whatever they need at the moment.
    - shmerl 12y ago
      What I meant is, do you know if CDPR are often firing developers to hire new ones just in order to rotate them? Or they value their input and invest in those who work for them? They had financial difficulties in the past. They wrote how they almost went bust a while ago, while developing the Witcher 2. I don't think that's the subject of this thread.

neves 12y ago

Layoffs aren't a problem. There will be a new generation of young freshman whom greatest desire is to be a video game developer. The non unionized guys will work 140 hours a week. Have a great salary for someone so young. And get their layoff when they get older and can't stand more this.

EdwardDiego 12y ago
Are there unions in game dev? In my country, IT professionals are very hostile to unions, but then our labour laws are less imbalanced between employer and employee (IMO) than America's.
- bittermang 12y ago
  I have not encountered any. With all of the Hollywood Accounting that goes on at the publisher level to ensure a development team gets fucked out of as many royalties as possible, there is a lot the games industry could learn from the Unionization of Hollywood.
  - trentmb 12y ago
    > there is a lot the games industry could learn from the Unionization of Hollywood. That they can't use the keyboard, cuz the union says only the typists can use the keyboard?
    - bittermang 12y ago
      Specifically, how Hollywood has a writers guild, an actors guild. Games could see an artists union, a programmers union, a game design union.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  There are certainly unions in France at least and this is a place where many video games are developed (well, less now than before). Unions are mandatory in France when your company has more than 50 employees, so companies like Ubi Soft most certainly have unions at least in France, but my guess is they expanded in the US, Canada and Asia precisely for that reason: to lower the risk of having unions in a single development center.

drpgq 12y ago

The Curt Schilling story has always fascinated me (the video game part, not the baseball one). I live in Ontario and like a lot of other place, Ontario gives pretty large tax incentives to video game companies. I've interacted a bit with some small video game companies here who basically seem to only exist because of the various tax incentives (both federal and provincial). I've pretty much decided these aren't a good idea, but politicians think video games are cool.

shard972 12y ago
I remember when I first herd about him and his company. As an Australian I didn't know who Curt Schilling was so in my mind it was a guy who got a lot of tax benefits and money to build an MMO.

nnq 12y ago

This sounds like like one of the few problems that can really be solved by unionizing workers and moving to long term work contracts... but good luck selling this "socialist" mentality to game developers :)

forrestthewoods 12y ago
lol. Game studios shut down left and right. Almost every game studio in existence lives project to project. Most live paycheck to paycheck. You can unionize all you want but when there's no money there's no money. This isn't a tale of fat cats getting rich at the expense of the little man. It's a brutal industry where most games don't ship and most games that do ship still lose money. All of us who work in the industry are mildly insane to do so.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - true_religion 12y ago
    > There are other businesses where projects are high risk and still jobs work more or less normally. I'm honestly curious. What businesses are these and what industry do they work in?
- nnq 12y ago
  so then the problem is more in a pathological game-dev-studio to publisher relationships? or are most studios too small to have a bunch of running projects at the same time? ...because the industry as a whole, on average, surely makes enough money to actually keep people employed even for the short periods when they aren't needed. What the OP describes is simply exploitation. The only alternative conclusion to draw would be that the game dev industry attracts more talented programmers than it can support, but this sounds like a dubious claim. I doubt talented programmers are so attracted to game dev to actually saturate the sector with cheap and high quality labor...
iwwr 12y ago
That's more likely to just drive away publishers to friendlier jurisdictions. There's also the issue of voluntary vs. mandatory unions.

Furzel 12y ago

Couldn't this problem be solved by a shift to a video game consulting industry ? In tech companies it's quite common to have a period of 'inter contract' between two missions where you can do trainings or even self training. Is the video game market hostile to this kind of organisation or has it just not been tested yet ?

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
I considered that option too - consultants or freelancers or the like with less rigid contracts - however, the cost for those would be exponentially that of the young easy to hire developers; hourly rates at least twice as high, which doubles if you make them work double hours during crunch hours. In-house developers work for a flat annual salary, and IIRC most game development companies don't pay overtime whilst demanding devs work overtime during crunch time. But game dev extortion is a known problem, and the other problem is that people take it. Working in the video game industry is a dream for a lot of people, and they're willing to take a lot of shit for the perceived privilege to work on the things they love. And the weirdest part? The actual development of a video game is often only a small part of the total cost package; iirc, games like the Call of Duty series cost more in marketing than the actual development.

dsirijus 12y ago

This relates only to a particular type of games - the ones that are shipped and forgot, or the ones that need minimum upkeep costs. So, perfectly understandable, and this is (almost) analogous to complaining why some hotel staffs 30 during winter instead of 100 people during the summer season. As a game company owner myself, I've found a way to do efficient damage control (with regards to morale) on this - announce the "cuts" as early as project pitch! It's not incomprehensible that you know how many people you'll need for the game's upkeep and how many for development stage. Throw an "if game is successful" and "if game is !successful" clause in there, and that way everyone knows what's the playing ground for your game. I've noticed that these policies of mine have attracted fast-moving employees, the ones that will find it perfectly understandable if I, right now, scrapped every project and said goodbye to everyone. Which, in game industry, is a frequent occurence.

Sniffnoy 12y ago
Isn't this more or less how movies get made in Hollywood? You're always hired just for a particular project? (Going by memory here, may be way off.)
- dsirijus 12y ago
  Of course. There's a bit of delusional idea that games are somehow sustainable business model (admiteddly, they _are_ for some genres). But, yes, that's the nature of business. This, to me, is a bit like complaining how war-time journalists don't get to spend enough time with their families and are at life risk. It's the biz, and, I'm sorry to be slightly verbally violent, get tougher skin or gtfo. Plenty of sustainable software/design/management roles in various spheres for you if you can't take it.
  - Retric 12y ago
    Games are a sustainable business model. The problem is games are a highly competitive market so where most startups get some traction and keep executing that for years the game industry moves fast and you need a new hit every time. IMO, Pixar is probably the most sustainable model for a hits industry. At a minimum you need a multistage pipeline, rock solid management, and a focus on customers.

frik 12y ago

If they drive off the hardcore gaming community by adding more and more casual elements like pay for win, double-DRM and dumped down gameplay, the franchise will go downhill. For example open world games usually center around vehicles to move around vast amount of map-terrain. You can make the driving physics (the central gameplay element) arcady and fun (like GTA San Andreas) or realistic and still fun (like GTA 4 or Mafia 1+2). Or you don't care and get the driving mechanics mediocre like most such games (GTA V, Watch Dogs, Sleeping Dogs, Need for Speed, etc.)

chris_wot 12y ago
I can't understand why this comment has been downvoted. It seems like a controversial but valid opinion. What are the specific objections?
- agersant 12y ago
  It's off-topic.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago

Game developers keep getting laid off for the same reason game developers generally earn lower salaries and have worse working conditions than other people in this industry: a robust oversupply of potential labor. These companies can replace their entire development staff regularly. That is, of course, the successful ones can. Developers at smaller places are laid off when their studios are bought by the sharks or fail to achieve any success in the market.

mattm 12y ago
Yeah, I had a friend a few years younger than me say he wanted to get into game development. I told him the horror stories that many devs work all the time, get paid little and don't even have time to play games. His response? "I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."
- tsotha 12y ago
  This is the key. You wouldn't want to be a game dev for the same reason you wouldn't open a surfboard shop or depend on your band to pay the bills. To much in the way of virtually unpaid competition.

mynameishere 12y ago

It's weirdly common to hear about people getting laid off from the same company more than once—i.e., they get laid off, rehired, and laid off again in a span of two or three years It's not too weird. This was how factories used to work on a regular basis. Guys would work for 8 months, get laid off, get unemployment for 2 months and lay around the house bugging their wives, then get called back again. Repeat until retirement. The supply chain techniques have improved so that doesn't happen very much now.

seanewest 12y ago
But that sounds like a dependable cycle... one you could financially depend on. Your situation is more uncertain when you get laid off in the game industry.
pjc50 12y ago
Which country/time period? Across much of Europe for much of the 20th century, trying to do that would bring your entire workforce out on strike.
- collyw 12y ago
  I would be quite pleased with unpaid leave for two months, if I knew it was coming.
  - GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
    Only if you had enough money to survive for 2 months...
    - nnq 12y ago
      That's the point, if you know it's coming you'll adjust your lifestyle to have enough OR you'll negotiate a bigger salary from the get go to compensate for planned down time.
- yen223 12y ago

seanewest 12y ago

I've worked in the AAA game industry and there are many factors. When you break down the interests of companies this seems like just a product of economic self-interest, financial risk, volatility, and publisher/studio relationships. But the truth is that the practices of industries are often based on what the employees are willing to take. Employees in the game industry will come back after being fired ... and fired again. They won't quit their job even though they work 80+ hours a week for months on end. In other industries, this would never fly, and practices that assume you can do this to employees would have never caught on, because the employees in (many) other industries won't as consistently take that abuse. The practices of the gaming industry have, over the years, formed around this fact of nature about the employees. None of it would be this way if employees weren't willing to take the abuse in the first place.

sportanova 12y ago
But I'm guessing that a lot of these devs are really interested in x genre, but they're working in y genre, so why do they take the abuse? Is there just a huge over supply of game devs?
- yen223 12y ago
  > Is there just a huge over supply of game devs? Bingo. Too many people think being good at playing games means they are good at making games.
  - chucknelson 12y ago
    Isn't it more about thinking they'll enjoy making games rather than thinking they are good at making them? Games = fun so it must be fun to make them...I assume that's how the initial thinking goes.
  - sportanova 12y ago
    Do the ones who are actually good at making games get treated better? Is this just at the lower / junior levels?

x0054 12y ago

Wouldn't one solution to this problem be telecommuting combined with contract based model. You put a team together for a project, work the project, and let every one know up front that this is a temporary gig, not a permanent job. Like in the movie industry. But the twist is, you embrace a telecommuting model, allowing developers to move from project to project without having to move from house to house. This would also make it much easier to rehire people who worked for you before, providing continuity to the games, and increasing level of code reuse. I know it's not a steady job, but perhaps it's a fair compromise. Also, this would allow the video game industry to keep older talent, as developers would be able to have a more flexible schedule and live in more family friendly suburban neighborhoods. Just an idea....

ehurrell 12y ago
That does seem like it has a lot of potential to tackle this, though it would probably make game development less attractive (the illusion of a steady job is better than 'well in 9 months you'll be looking for work'). Game dev is hugely attractive of course, so it could conceivably take the hit. One possible problem with this is what's already been happening with contract CG people in the movie industry. Their work is becoming increasingly devalued so there's a race to the bottom in terms of charging, such that situations like Ang Lee's Life of Pi, where he said something to the effect that he felt he paid too much for CG (I can't remember offhand the exact quote) and the CG people were barely making ends meet. They also aren't being acknowledged at awards, which for some can be a disincentive.
matthewmacleod 12y ago
I'm really surprised that's not the case. Contracting would be great for this sort of thing.
kevingadd 12y ago
Remote contractors are heavily leveraged in the game industry. It's not a solution; it usually makes things worse.
- yen223 12y ago

notastartup 12y ago

I think developers/designers or any type of creative work that involves using the computer need a union of some sort. Artists have it, Writers have it, why not the tech crowd?

mattgreenrocks 12y ago
Naivete and immaturity. The tech crowd doesn't realize that the best time to work towards a better future for themselves is when things are [generally] going your way. What many do not see is the rapid commoditization of the low-end of the market, fueled by OSS RAD tools.
chris_wot 12y ago
I see you have been downvoted, but I've increasingly been of that opinion. I see developers being screwed over all the time by big corporations - as an example, Apple and Google with illegal agreements not to poach each other's workers. A union, IMO, would have helped.

angelortega 12y ago

It's a strange language when "getting laid" and "getting laid off" mean such different things.

thesteamboat 12y ago
To compound the problem, "getting off" happens when "getting laid".
aikah 12y ago
Yeah,as a foreigner ,it's hard, never know what to put after a verb to get the right meaning,let's take "to go". to go on,go back,go off,go around,go by have a different meaning...that's the most difficult part of the english language imho,now you can use a different verb for each expression,but it wouldnt feel idiomatic. At the same time,it makes english composable and easy to extend,it cannot work with my language.I wonder if other languages work like that too.
- sammyd56 12y ago
  Most Germanic languages have constructs similar to English´s phrasal verbs. Learning them, for a foreigner, is really difficult (I know, because I spend most of my time teaching English to Spanish students). I actually just released the Android app I´ve been building to help with this. I didn´t think it was worthy of a Show HN post, but now seems a good time to mention it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phrasalverbworld https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phrasalver...

tsotha 12y ago

>Several of the developers who contacted me for this story said they were fed up with layoff cycles and had left the video game industry entirely. Some told tales of endless relocations and unreasonable hours, and bragged that in their new fields, they were paid more to work less. Yeah... this isn't exactly news. You work in the gaming industry because you love video games. It's not a career. It's a job you do when you have youth and health and minimum entanglements. When you get married or get older or get just plain sick of working around the clock for not much money then it's time to look around for something more stable and remunerative. It's ridiculous to compare video game industry jobs with Big Grey Financial Company. If you want comparisons, look at the movie industry, where people get together to work on a project and then all get laid off when it's done.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago
The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry? The tools people use in the movie industry are commodities with relatively slow innovation. People can get by on more or less the same skill set they had 15 years ago, and once the movie has been shot, virtually nobody has gained any new knowledge. The game industry has to considerably up their game (no pun intended) with every new release. The only way they can keep up the movie-style cycle if a company producing a new game can pick up developers just laid off by someone else. I doubt if that is sustainable in the long run. At some point hiring new devs with very recent experience will become more expensive than retaining knowledge. The game industry will always have more dramatic cycles because any company is as successful as their last game, but the current state of affairs just reeks of immaturity.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  > The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry? Well at the same time the technologies you used to make the game you worked on 2 years ago are probably going to be obsolete in the new game you'd be hired to work on. There's only a few jobs in the game industry where highly specialized, technical people are valued and retained. And there's a ton of talent pool to pick up fresh people from out there who are decent at what they do - probably more than there are jobs for them. Look at Mercury Steam, they had no experience doing a AAA game (unless you consider Jericho one of them, but I'd say it was rather average in scope), and yet they managed to convince Konami they could do a reboot of Castlevania and they did it pretty well without much prior experience in the similar genre or scope.

herperderp 12y ago

employment is a scam

lazyjones 12y ago

Isn't the bigger issue here that game developers have been underpaid for many years? They are usually exceptional programmers who would be getting much higher salaries (and much better working conditions) elsewhere, so getting laid off would not be such a dramatic experience due to savings etc..

gambiting 12y ago

>>The average yearly salary for game developers, according to a Gamasutra study, was $84,000 in 2013. I just got hired as a junior programmer at a large studio(one of the largest in the world in fact) and I make ~$30k a year - wonder where they get their numbers from, or if maybe the market in the US is better(I am in the UK).

hackerboos 12y ago
That's low for any programming job. My first job out of university was $42k. Where about are you based?
- gambiting 12y ago
  I know it's low - and everyone is telling me that "that's how games industry is like". Both me and my girlfriend finished the exact same course at uni, and I got my dream job in games industry, making £18k a year, and she got a job in BT, making £30k a year. It's in the North East of England.
  - hackerboos 12y ago
    I know the North East doesn't demand London salaries but even here in the North West you can get more than £20k as a junior. I guess it depends on your priorities. Are you learning a lot? Do you enjoy it? etc.
    - gambiting 12y ago
      I do enjoy it, I get to work on a game that sells millions of copies per year, and I currently have every single devkit(Xbox 360,Xbox One, PS4, Wii, Wii U) right on my desk and I get to work with them,which I always found exciting. So yeah, I am working at my dream job, because I always wanted to get into the games industry. I am just saying that in any other industry, I could literally be making £10k more/year, which means that in a way, I am paying almost a £1000 a month just to have the privilege of working in the games industry.

was_hellbanned 12y ago

A good friend of mine has worked in the games industry for over a decade now. He worked on the Spore project at EA. It was insane how many hours he put in while on-project. He'd have to answer his phone at any time, and sometimes drop whatever he was doing to trudge back into work. At the end of a three month crunch, he said he'd spend about two weeks just dicking around at work, sort of an informal comp-time system. I remember the "EA spouse" incident, and by the sound of it, my friend was on one of the 'good' teams. I once asked him why game developers don't get any royalties, since there was a time when that was at least not unheard of. He insisted that it would just cause people to game the system, with lazy people trying to get on the money-making teams. Personally, I fail to see how that's not always the case, everywhere, anyway. I think he's simply drunk the Kool-Aid and bought the line that upper management fed him in order to maximize their profits.