In the Videogame Industry, Hiring People Is a Last Resort

That's why you don't do that unless you own the business or shares of that business. Stick to what you're were hired for, don't be over invested, don't put on extra hours of work thinking you'll be rewarded somehow. I'm pretty sure this guys is burned out now. There is no such thing as being a "loyal employee" when your boss isn't paid to be loyal to you. That's business not some social club.

In every industry, everywhere, employees are an expense.

To maximize profits, expenses must be cut.

Maximizing profits is currently the goal of our society, and we seem hell bent on doing everything we can to achieve that goal.

Game industry has ridiculous turnover, for developers it is something like five years and you are likely to be out.

This is one reason why "follow your passion" is a bad career strategy.

It's not unique to this industry. Look at all the folks who get PhDs and waste their 30's doing low paid postdocs ($50K is higher end).

I know many developers in gaming and I constantly tell them to leave the industry for anything else. But they rarely do. And over time I see them get more run down and despondent. I actually see them age over a short period time. It's some sort of occupational Stockholm Syndrome.

The proper way to work in the game industry is to make your cash in another industry and then start your own game studio.

I just wonder if the 20something who dream of stock options and fame, of the game developers who dreamt of doing this since they were children, just haven't reached a point where the disappointment has hit. That, or internalized so strongly that they get promoted and catapulted up the chain. Workaholism, or 'passion' as some call it, can get noticed by the brass and now the passionate people are handed whips.

Age makes you more rational and common sense makes you see exploitation when faced with it.

But boy, IT folks seem to be the LAST to see it. Why is that? It's not like it's the only profession in the world where people can really enjoy what they do.

Only a handful of AAA games are in the "HW arms race". By sheer numbers, the overwhelming vast majority of games sold are casual games downloaded on mobile devices.

The game industry is driven by people's short attention spans. It doesn't matter how fast you upgrade the technology, people get bored of playing the same game in the same way they get bored of watching the same movie even if you upgrade it to super-purple-ray-3D-smellivision. You already know the plot.

Even with the clout of Disney it was really hard to work with "professional" actors who were SO bad at doing the voices for games. They were slow and VERY error prone. They often demanded ridiculous extras and final say on lines used but couldn't match their performance in the original movie. We could hire professional voice actors and record quality accurate depictions of the characters in 1/10th of the time. In fact recording the foreign versions where we used the original foreign voice actor was nearly always easier and more efficient because there is less ego.

The Hollywood system is a sham. There are fixed unionised rates for voice acting but that's not worth the top actors time so they roll in to the studio to do their $100/hr talk knowing that when they leave there is a brand new BMW, Lexus or even piece of art to add to their private collection waiting for them as a gift. We're talking Picasso's as sweeteners!

The games industry has a lot wrong with it but it's nothing like the shambles of the movie industry.

I worked in games for 3 years and we worked with a few contractors. I noticed a few bizarre things about the contractors we used. We never worked with the same contractor for two different games in a row. Every contractor we used we heard of through word of mouth. They were all small (2-20 people) and most of the time they had no to little online presence. The most effective avenue for getting jobs seemed to be handing your business card out at GDC to as many people as you can.

As far as I can see, if you want to be a game contractor, you're better off starting one on your own than trying to get hired by a contracting company. Find a game artist who's also just starting out, launch a shitty game or two to show that you can, then hand your card out at GDC.

Game industry veteran here. It's not surprising to me at all. Large dev studios don't want unions. They've been able to capitalize on an endless sea of starry eyed young devs willing to work 60+ hour weeks for months on end for half the salary they could make in other software fields until they get burned out, just so they can say they worked on the 10th sequel of a game they loved as a kid, or tell their friends 'I worked on this game you can download here!' and it doesn't look like the supply of that has gone down at all.

Meanwhile, individual software developers not in the midst of a company death march and are probably doing the Indie thing and tend to see themselves as lone wolves and thus don't make much effort to organize with their other developers.

There's associations like IGDA (International Game Developers Association), but in my interactions with them, I haven't seen them organize anything more than social activities with some veteran from the game industry to give a talk.

Psyonix

Nah, not even close. I mean, not unless you include every random app store game made by some teenager.

Obviously the big companies almost always do well, but there are a ton of small and medium-sized companies which have been ticking along for years, releasing game after game with at least modest success.

Failure isn't random either. You have good designers and good management, you're probably not going to release a bad game. A company's track record is often surprisingly consistent, in either way.

Depending on the game you may be content heavy in which case may use outside contractors (or outside studios) to help with the mass of work but that seems to have dropped off as a practice in recent years. Using Chinese and Indian art outsourcing studios was big 10 years ago. More recently the big players have moved to a model where each of their development studios has a game (or two) in development with a core team working only on that game and a content team who will work on whichever studio needs their help (typically the next game for release).

If you are not 'outsourcing' the entire game development you'll typically want most of the core staff in the same location and full-time. Design, code, technical art and art direction all have to work very closely together. Not something you can easily split around the world or assign to short-term contractors.

Psyonix did outsource their console versions to another studio (likely comprised of full-time employees), which is common with smaller companies who would rather not have to ramp-up their engineering staff for console support. It also saves Psyonix the large capital expense of purchasing development kits.

Big corps because they want to form the people so they become exactly as they want them.

Small start-ups probably because they can't sell a company without employees?

On the other hand I know a few devs of bought start-ups that had hard times because the buyer only wanted a few of the devs and only those they considered good, not the "bystanders".

Also, managers want more control and employees can be scared with the prospect of losing their job, because they value stability.

As a contractor I'm always aware of losing a project, people don't have any budget left or it is simply finished and I need to go on, so if a manager wants to give me a hard time, I simply wrap things up and go to another company.

> Layoffs often hit after a game was released, which was hardest on workers who were let go and damaged morale for those who stayed. “It was like ‘Welcome to the family!’ ” he recalls. “Then we released the game, and it was ‘See you later!’ ” Outsourcing became a solution to the hire-and-fire cycle, says Mr. Hartsman.

Most software developers are employed to write custom software for internal use by their employer, which is expected to last for years and will generally receive a lot of continuing investment. Almost every company of substantial size has such a project, so there are plenty of stable employment opportunities. If the company doesn't want to use its old software anymore, they keep their employees onboard because they have useful knowledge about the business and what does/does not work from the prior package. None of this is really relevant or true of game companies.