Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them | Hacker News Reader

Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them

nytimes.com

285 pointsdanso225 comments

I've been in an out of the games industry most my career. I was one of the OS developers for the 3DO, the original PSX, as well as lead or team for 15 years from 1990 on. Years before "EA Spouse" I tried and failed to get some type of collective effort against the rampant, illegal employee abuse. The collective game developer brainwash is thick, and their treatment is 100 times more abusive than the sexual harassment the larger public is currently outraged about.

After leaving games, I thought VFX was going to be less abusive. I spent 7 years doing that; artist, programmer & financial analyst. VFX was only better in the respect that the pay and perks were better. Were. Film VFX is mostly overseas or Canada now.

I'm in facial recognition now. It is still just exiting the "computer scientist" stage, not at that "Crappy AI College" level yet.

Until younger people get some type of collective sense of their abuse, it will continue. Everywhere.

This was puzzling about "there are not enough women in games development" fights. It is not a good job and it is not good for you trying to work in games. Most people leave the industry in five years - they leave the industry not just a job.

The question is not why women dont go there and how to get them in. Chances are, they do a good guess about what it will be like and nope out. The question is why the hell men put up with all that and accept all the crap without even trying to negotiate.

I guess it is the typical macho attitude, trying to prove one can handle better than the others.

Often they seem to be clever than us. :)

The same is often said about roofing jobs in the construction industry.

Could you explain what these phrases mean in the context of your comment - "computer scientist" stage, and "Crappy AI College" phase?

Most areas of software engineering start in deeply theoretical stages where they're only studied in Computer Science universities. Then they gradually leak out where you no longer need a PhD to understand it but a 4 year Bachelors is still preferred. Then they enter the mainstream and any tech school will do (and maybe even just some online tutorials). Finally some shitty colleges will offer 2 year programs dedicated to teaching you "all the skills required to get a job in the industry" from scratch in 2 years.

"Video game development" is squarely in the last category. Facial Recognition, NLP, ML are still in the second (out of the hands of academics but not quite plug-and-play yet - though getting there with TensorFlow and MXNet and some of the newer AWS services)

Thanks

Pretty much what I saw my short time in VFX. Met one or two people that had come in through games that said that, despite the long hours, vfx life was better. Most people at the companies were in their 20s.

After a while, you normalize it: "Oh, next few months are chill, only on 10 hour days instead of 14s. But still have to work weekends."

And since you're working so much, you're not spending all that overtime, sometimes double-time money. That's the thing vs the hours you see in other industries - at a decent company, you actually get paid for the hours you work. Now, you might have to carry your own healthcare and shit (because that's only for "staff", even if you've worked there for two years every single day) but at least you have a fair bit of money and can maybe up your quote between projects. My architect colleagues regularly put into 70-80 hrs/wk on a not great salary for a highly-trained, highly-regulated profession.

That's great for people right of college that haven't gotten burned out. They don't know anything else and even get off on comparing 'how hard' ('how many hours') they worked.

And, as you said, there are more around the corner. If you get too expensive, you might be pushed out the door. Because the margins in VFX, or so I've been told, are so low. The studios have the companies bid each other to as low as possible, and sometimes you take a loss to get a big project so you can possibly do business in the future.

I think beyond employee unionization (which I never see happening, same in programming) it seems like vfx would need a national trade organization that could help them fight against not only the power of the studios but the outsourcing to Canada and elsewhere.

Anyway, best of luck to you. Just wanted to second your comments and add a little of my own observations. I was only in for 3 or so years when I realized how debilitating and abusive it was and set out very quickly to change things up.

As a layman, I'd be grateful if you could enumerate on this line:

It is still just exiting the "computer scientist" stage, not at that "Crappy AI College" level yet

I never understood why people went into the gaming industry unless it was in a position where they did decision making and got credit.

Growing up in the 80/90is I remember thinking a place like Bioware or Black Isle/Troika would've been cool places to work, but as I reached adulthood and understood what went into working those places, the dream quickly faded.

Imagine having to work long hours at shit pay, to design/build some loot crate system. Especially when your skill set is in high-demand and you could've gone into something like healthcare IT, where you could be improving people's lives, at 37-45 hours a week at four times the pay.

I really don't mean to be rude, I just can't fathom the motivation you would have to work some anonymous job in the video gaming industry.

I can't speak for others, but for me when I started: - It's much more fun to work on something creative and with creative people than not. Yes, people will say there is a creative aspect to almost anything, but I think games (and probably other things like film) are really different. - It is a big deal to work on something that you can identify and people will have heard of or understand. I used to be able to go into a store and point at the boxes that had my name written on them. - When I was younger I really just tended to work a lot anyway.

Some people just love games so much that they're willing to sell their souls and/or health to work on them.

That's kind of how I feel about academia right now -- seems highly irrational from a financial or job security standpoint for most people to get a grad degree and aim for tenure, yet there are still droves of people willing to make that trade.

You are assuming that most grad students aim to be a professor, you have any data to back it up? Since that has not been my experience at all.

I don't think you need to make that assumption. Regardless of the number of grad students leaving academia, there is a huge and increasing backlog of postdocs waiting for professorship.

This is a recurring topic here, but this varies a lot by field. In many fields literally the only reason to go to grad school is to (try to) become a professor.

On the flip side, I'm pretty sure grad school is not financially rational if you intend to go to industry.

At best, you'll get a scholarship and maybe a teaching salary/stipend of ~30k over 5-6 years. In my experience, people who can do a PhD could've been making 2-3x that much in industry.

PhDs do get hired at a higher position, but you can easily get there the normal way over 5 years. IMO a lot of grad school students are just here to immigrate.

A chance to work on hard research problems; that is not possible without mentoring for most people. If everything you do in life is just money to you; then sure PhD is irrelevant and you find absurd reasons like immigration to justify it.

You go into the industry because you want to make games. You leave when you get sick of games companies taking advantage of your "passion for games" to offer you an exploitative deal.

This is how it appeared to me after a few years of mods and game prototypes. SAAS jobs pay the bills with a better life balance than what many game studios are offering.

Don't judge for other people and their priorities. For some of them it IS life. Maybe it shouldn't be but there are plenty of young devs working for Google/Amazon/Startup working too hard on stuff that may be way less rewarding.

Games were life for me but I was paid relatively well and I came from and went back to "industry". Still in "Games" though so a few years at a studio helped me learn some valuable engineering skills and made me a "bonafied" (lol) game dev to most people. I don't claim to be a dev.

Sharing my perspective isn't judging for others. Certainly each person has to find what works for them and their situation.

Still, I caution people to consider the possibilities they may be sacrificing.

And then you leave, and then you realize you miss shipping games. :(

Yep, pretty much. Been out of the industry for four years now, and I miss shipping games. But then recruiters in the game industry contact me, and I just can't bring myself to go through that mess again and the pay cut I'd have to accept, most likely. And I'm not even that highly paid in my current industry (in fact, I think my wages are a lot more depressed than they could be because I spent several years in the game industry working for much lower wages)

That's when you go back to coding little indie games on the weekend. It's better that way.

And there's always more wide-eyed youngsters that want to make games. That's why individual game developers have very little leverage to push back. If they want to end this sort of treatment, they should form a union. That's how you deal with situations where employers are exploiting employees with very little individual leverage.

A situation similar to academia.

Same applies to humanitarian aid and development.

Most of them probably just have unrealistic expectations and ideas about what it will be like to work at a game shop. This probably applies to designers and engineers both.

Although can you really do that well in healthcare IT? I've worked in a tangentially related space, and from the glimpses I've seen in healthcare, its all a giant clusterfudge (and pay wasn't that great either).

I've worked a couple of jobs in healthcare IT, and worked with several other big companies while working those jobs. I'd say you're not wrong.

And it's an industry where it seems like no one really has their acts together when it comes to properly managing their data or communicating their requirements in a consistent or timely fashion to the people they need to build their software, while pretending otherwise and thinking forcing everyone to take the same online HIPPA class every year is all they need.

And yeah, the pay isn't too great, unless you're an executive or founder.

> And it's an industry where it seems like no one really has their acts together when it comes to properly managing their data or communicating their requirements in a consistent or timely fashion to the people they need to build their software, while pretending otherwise and thinking forcing everyone to take the same online HIPPA class every year is all they need.

Wow, that has been my experience exactly. I think the odds are pretty high that there will be an "Equifax moment" in healthcare IT in the not-so-distant future.

Did a short stint at a healthcare IT company and also was surprised at how dysfunctional the whole industry is - can't say I was very impressed. At this point, my CV is peppered with healthcare related roles, positions I feel like I've already pigeon-holed myself :(

> you could be improving people's lives

I'd say games (and any art, for that matter) can and do improve lives.

Art usually is not designed as a Skinner box that keeps you awake until 5am and motivates you to skip school, so you can sit at a gaming café all day.

While I found some great friends during the "gaming years", most of the time games were ruining my life.

#notallgames

Eh? Yea there are crap games out there. There is also crap music. And crap health IT software.

The best games are also the most addictive. At least many single player titles end sooner or later but online ones are endless.

Would it also follow that the "best" drugs are the most addictive?

> The best games are also the most addictive

Pft says who? Few of my favorite games can be described as addictive. You can't simultaneously make the argument that "addictiveness" in the sense you're using it is bad, and then quickly switch word senses to claim its a requirement for very good games.

I was developing and designing them, so by "good" I mean a good game design – it achieves its goal of generating endless fun.

By "bad" I mean the impact of this game design on players' lives – the game is "too fun" for some of them.

I don't know if this is necessarily a consensus, but I think expecting a game to be endlessly fun to be good isn't really the sort of standard we should be holding games to. Other media such as writing or film doesn't promise to be endlessly entertaining, and ones that might are more like engaging in sport, which I would say isn't necessarily entertainment in the same way.

I think there are a lot of players that see the Skinner Box-like mechanics popping up in mainstream works, and are increasingly turned off by it too.

Replayability and long playing times are praised in reviews by both press and gamers. So Minecraft isn't considered an addictive game but it is.

I've found that for me, games without an end are discouraging, and most multiplayer games are just draining, like going to a party where I don't know anyone.

You're missing the fact that games are designed to be addictive through reward mechanisms that favour long hours of playtime. The ideal balance between positive and negative reinforcement schemes are responsible for motivating users to keep using. Some gamers pull all-nighters for multiple days in a row just to ensure that they keep receiving the stimulus they are seeking. The only difference between recreational drugs and games is that drugs act directly in the nervous system and are directly responsible for some physiological side effects.

I recommend not playing those shitty games. There's so many good ones out there.

You can't design a game that is not a set of Skinner boxes stacked on each other.

ET on the Atari 2600?

Okay. It sounds like, perhaps, you have something of an addictive personality and can't safely play video games at all? I'm sorry about that, and I'm glad you were able to get out of it, but that's not the universal experience.

It doesn't change the fact that game design is based on variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Many people have issues with them (see gambling).

Not sure I agree. Take a typical video game like Tetris or Super Mario Bros 2. There's no variable ratio reinforcement in sight, the reward is based on how well you play. Oh, but you could say the unpredictability (variable ratio) comes from the game throwing new stuff at you. That sounds reasonable, until you remember that books and movies also throw new stuff at you unpredictably as you keep turning the pages. Are books also Skinner boxes then? Is it even a useful concept if you stretch it this far?

I think it's better to judge games on the axis of compulsion vs fun. Some games you play because they feel inherently fun, like Mario. Others you play because you can't stop pressing the lever and it doesn't feel much fun, like grind heavy games. Only the latter kind of games should be called Skinner boxes IMO. And nobody dreams of making games like that! So the whole subthread started by your remark seems a bit unnecessary, no?

You can disagree but it's the basics of game design, both Tetris and GTA are made fun by tuning variable-ratio reinforcements: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_gam...

Game designers dream and talk a lot about creating the "flow" which is also achieved by correct reward ratio: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow...

The problem with the whole subthread is me assuming that everybody is more familiar with the subject and not writing a detailed explanation from the beginning.

The article on reinforcement doesn't mention Tetris or Mario, only RPGs with experience points and such. The article on flow doesn't mention reinforcement or reward. I can see you're thinking of them as parts of one narrative, but I don't think the articles support it. Flow is a pleasant challenging activity which is easy to accidentally drop out of. It's very different from clicking loot crates, which is unpleasant, unchallenging, and hard to stop. I'm not sure they even involve the same parts of the brain.

RPG is just the best example. The article about flow says the same in the requirements but it doesn't use the terms from psychology:

> 1. Have concrete goals [Reinforcers] with manageable rules [Contingency].

> 3. Have clear and timely feedback [Response] on performance and goal accomplishment.

I'm not making things up – just retelling the common knowledge that I used for work. Ask other game designers if you do not believe me. I understand that deconstructing pleasant experiences into a set of primitive triggers is uncomfortable (hence, over a dozen downvotes) but it's useful to see what pulls the strings from behind the curtain.

I'm sure some people do have trouble with those. Those people would probably do well to avoid video games if they disrupt their lives.

Upthread, santaclaus said "I'd say games (and any art, for that matter) can and do improve lives," and you immediately disagreed. You appear to be arguing that games are always harmful. That's silly, and that's why you're getting such pushback.

If I wanted to argue that games are always harmful, I would write this explicitly. I also didn't disagree with the statement but pointed to the problems that are unique to games.

you have a narrow idea of what games are

Counter-examples?

I recently played Life is Strange and ABZU, both of which would be difficult to classify as Skinner boxes.

Because they hide it better than some mobile city builder.

Both mentioned games are adventures where you need to overcome a challenge (condition) to get a reward (reinforcement) which could be the following part of the story or just an item.

Every single game design can be disassembled to its basic elements this way. Even the most artistic indie games are made from conditions and reinforcers.

Sorry, this is just too much of an absurd stretch. You could describe a book of pulp fiction in a similar way - you have to put in effort (read and turn pages) to receive a reward (entertainment).

No stretch, just the fundamental game design concept:

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_gam...

No, the stretch is that it's a definition that can be applied to any entertainment activity that isn't 100% passive.

Technically yes, but my original reply was about games abusing this mechanism more often.

Kind of like working for food to eat?

Yeah, but they are single player with an ending, so the player is forced to stop playing unless they really love repetition of story exposition.

The game I play the most is hexcells, an excellent puzzle game with no reinforcement to continue playing. Solving is the only reward.

> While I found some great friends during the "gaming years", most of the time games were ruining my life.

Yeah, I had my "gaming years", too - EverQuest in particular ate my life for a while to the extent that it threatened my mental health and my marriage.

What I discovered though was that EQ was a symptom, not the cause of my dysfunction. Gaming is an escape; I was at a point in my life where all I wanted to do was escape from it, and EQ offered that in unlimited quantity.

Disclaimer: wasn't able to read the article behind the paywall.

A lot of programmers get into the game industry because there are interesting technical problems to solve. Personally I'd have a hard time working on what look to me like deathly dull problems in fields like healthcare IT. For good, experienced programmers in the game industry I don't think the pay gap is as big as you suggest. I know a lot of game industry veterans who have taken higher paying positions in big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple but I don't think your average corporate programming job pays comparably.

I started my own VR company in the healthcare space which gives me the opportunity to continue working on interesting games technology while also hopefully improving people's lives but for my own personal motivation the work has to be interesting to me, not just paying the bills and benefiting end users (although both of those are important).

I don't know about industry wide, but I do know colleagues who went from gaming to other ("corporate programming") jobs, even non-profits, and got a boost in pay.

Game shops chew up their employees and spit them out, mainly because there is no end in sight to the number of young, naive people willing to take any kind of abuse for the prospect of having their name in the credits of a game.

The game industry pays pretty badly for the first few years when they can expect people to work out of 'passion'. However if you're one the handful of people that can thrive in that environment and move past the chew up/spit out stage and become one of the senior engineers that actually keeps the ship together then the pay can be very good.

Gaming is a big industry. My experience is mostly in 'traditional' games companies shipping what used to be boxed AAA console and PC games. A chunk of that experience was at EA which has a lot of senior employees with many years of experience who are being paid reasonably competitively. Not Google/Facebook money generally but not horrible. Things might be different in younger companies doing mobile game development, I haven't worked in that environment.

Big companies like EA recognized some time ago that they couldn't afford to lose their most experienced employees by "chewing them up and spitting them out" any more and have become more competitive for senior devs in both pay and working conditions. I still think there's work to do there but it's not as bad in my experience as some people seem to think.

I took a job at a game studio because it was one of the few places that was looking for Erlang developers (one of three in the area at the time). It was also my first professional programming gig after having done programming as a hobby for the last 14 or so years, so all in all it was a pretty good deal.

I have a much bigger network of people and companies to exploit now and so my next job very likely won't be at a game studio. It is a shit industry full of people who don't value programmers all that highly, except maybe the mythical hard-core engine programmer, while simultaneously overvaluing idea people to an almost absurd degree.

It looks like you're better off contributing to or modding FOSS games for free on your free time. At least you get positive direct feedback from the players when you do something people like.

Salary and hours depend on where you work. Bioware probably does not pay much but, say IW/Treyarch, are a different story all together [1].

As for improving people lives, why do you think games don't do that? People had been remembering games they played for decades. Games have an impact. Strangers will see a t-shirt with a game studio logo and come to you talk about its games. Does it happen with the Healthcare IT too?

1. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/358040/exhibit655.pdf

HN cracks me up sometimes. Compare the derision and skepticism hurled at would-be video game developers to the praise people working countless hours on pointless "portfolio side projects" on github or whatever get, just for a minor boost in the grueling interview process or because they're so passionate about it or whatever.

At least these people (who are certainly being exploited, often in ways that violate labor laws) are getting some real work experience while they're at it.

> Compare the derision and skepticism hurled at would-be video game developers to the praise people working countless hours on pointless "portfolio side projects" on github or whatever get

Ok: one is fun, ~100h spread out over any period you want (e.g. a year: 2h per weekend), completely 100% beholden only to yourself, no strings attached. The other... well, I’ve never worked there, but I’ll quote someone who seems to know: “certainly being exploited, often in ways that violate labor laws.”

Are you honestly comparing what people are describing here to side projects? honestly: what side project have you ever worked on that treated you that way?

The amusement is from the comparison to the use of side projects as a proxy/signal for "passion" as part of the job application process and resume support, not side projects in general.

Of course more generally the exploitation of open source work by commercial entities is also ignored in this context, which is also amusing. The number of side-projects that are used for free by commercial entities profiting off them dwarfs the number used to generate income by consulting or as a business. But that's just fine because "open source."

You do have a point that they're getting real work experience. But that's where the similarities end. I've never heard stories about health problems, stress, and burnout from side projects. I'm sure it probably happens to some people, but it's almost certainly nowhere near the same rate that it sounds like it happens in the game industry.

Well, one's a demanding job, the other is some Saturday fun working on a project of your choice until you lose interest.

Perhaps that wouldn't be amusing to you once you realize that HN isn't a hive mind and there is a broad spectrum of what people think, believe or aspire to. For example, those who are unemployed or seeking to improve their job prospects or wanting to work on specific skillets may invest their time in "portfolio side projects", but those who are employed and feel overworked may complain about the Stockholm syndrome aspect of some software sweatshops.

If you just do side projects because you think it will help your portfolio you shouldn't work on side projects. I work on my side projects because I find it fun to do, the experience I get from that, like any experience, helps me in my day to day job.

I am fine with you cracking up over 'normal programmers' like me vs would-be video game developers I get in at 8:45 and leave at 17:10, I go swimming with my baby daughter once a week from 9:00 to 10:00 and I work from home 2 days a week without a single minute in overtime.

If you are out there doing 80-100 hour workweeks (as described in the article) you are an idiot. I get it when there are no jobs in your industry and too many candidates (psychology here in the Netherlands), but if you can program for games you can program applications with minimal self-training and start working normal hours and working on your life. So if you can program and you choose to work like described in the article you are an idiot.

Nobody gets health problems from working on side projects, that's a non argument.

Plenty of people get burnt out from side projects that turn out to be bigger than they had the capacity for.

And if it gets too much, they can stop without loss of employment.

It's not the people that work in the industry that I'm annoyed with, it's the people running the game dev cos. And to a lesser extent the "startups" that are also poorly ran and exploitative.

It's this same late stage capitalism BS where some people are successful doing X, where X also involved working obscene hours, not planning things out the way they would have to in a large company, and doing other things that are either "trailblazing" or "cutting corners" depending on your perspective. And they get lucky and make a ton of cash.

And so a ton of other people try and follow this path, but the only lessosn they seemed to learn was "working long hours is awesome" and "you don't need to pay people fair wages, just let passion (and/or stock options) motivate them". And people who would have made a decent living 20 years ago doing something boring are conned into it because it seems like the only path left for them.

Overall I agree with you. I was very skeptical when I took a job at Riot Games several years ago. Luckily, Riot operates a successful massive online game and therefore operates more like a traditional internet company than it does a traditional game company (at least with respect to engineering culture and work/life balance).

So it is possible. It's just going to take enough executives and producers to take a risk (while their competition continues to crunch) and see the long term results. That or we see some sort of union/guild action which most engineers shy away from.

I work in healthcare, it really is not 4x the pay, at least not in Belgium.

I do enjoy the altruistic aspect and I do indeed work about 40 hours a week.

But I believe that people who are attracted to game development are not immediatly attracted to healthcare systems. Just a guess :-)

You can't really compare Belgium and the US though, with Belgium being in the top of egalitarian countries[1], far ahead of the USA. Talks about income should be be held between your country and your neighbouring country to have any relevancy.

[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/101706

Everything else is just really boring by comparison.

I has asked this question a while back here [1]. The consensus is game developers don't see making them as a "job"; to them, it's about working on something magnificent, being part of a team they have dreamt about since they were kids. Of course, they burnout few years down the line, only to replaced by a new batch of zealous developers. There's an endless supply of fresh graduates who are fervent about working on an AAA title.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747550

This is what happens when you do something that a lot of other people aspire to do. Growing up, many of the girls in my schools would talk about how they want to go into fashion or interior design (thankfully most them figured out that it would be hard to make ends meet unless they had some particular talent, and the luck and patience for sales and marketing); many of the boys talked about how they wanted to get into game development, many of them acquiring poseur-level knowledge of the field, playing around with development tools.

When you have a continuous supply of giddy, overjoyed young applicants who have dreamt since childhood of working a position and want nothing more than to pour their life into what you're making, they will gladly accept pay and working conditions below the general standard for the applicable skills.

To expand a bit, there's a bit of a trap in the truism "you should do what you love". On the surface, it seems to say that you should do the singular thing which you love the most, but you may love more in reality to do something other than that singular thing.

I'd say that you should do what you will love the most to have been doing, all things considered. If bathroom in a bag, a 30-70% pay cut, and seasonal firing still leaves game development at the top of that list, then don't sweat it.

It also got worse after social, mobile, and indie bubbles. Nowadays a small number of companies control most of the market. In 2012 I had more freelance gigs than I could handle, but 3 years later it was impossible to find something decent.

Oddly enough, the working conditions at some (many?) of the most successful social/mobile game companies are pretty great.

They have enough cash to not work on a brink of bankruptcy[0] all the time – Valve has great working conditions too.

[0]: http://www.lostgarden.com/2015/04/minimum-sustainable-succes...

There is literally a part of labor economics that studies these issues: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential

tl;dr people get paid more for doing unpleasant things, and take pay cuts for jobs that people like

What that wiki page is missing is a discussion of actual desirability, and perceived desirability of a job (I'm sure actual academic discussions of the theory do include it).

Because game development seems objectively more unpleasant than some of the other programming jobs. It certainly seems more unpleasant than my work situation, and with worse pay.

Markets are subjective, not objective. Measures of objective goodness have absolutely no place in market phenomena.

If you want more objective markets, you will have to influence the actors through a side channel (and you have to be actually right, not just think you're right!).

And before games, software, the web, apps and "entrepreneurship", boys were sold to become rock stars or athletes and women we sold to become wives. Sounds silly, but that is actually true.

That was my experience too. When I was a teenager and attending college, I invested hundreds of hours learning how to make video games, on top of years I'd invested during high school.

My teachers strongly discouraged me.

It took me about 6-8 years to realize that my teacher were right, and writing software for banks is a lot more satisfying than working for Electronic Arts.

Politics, movies, game development, fashion: it's simple heartless supply and demand. If the intrinsic motivation across your labor supply is higher than average, there's going to be downward pressure on all the other facets of the job (pay, work environment, etc). The really tragic twist is that for many of these, they only need to hint at the person's dream instead of actually fulfilling it. So they get a few years to chew up starry eyed 22 year old interns and spit out jaded 26 year olds, just in time to pick up the next generation. Growing up in LA, I saw a fair few of these for Hollywood among my friends. They tend to aimlessly drift towards law and real estate in LA

> The average American game developer earned $83,060 in 2013, according to a Gamasutra survey, or less than half the pay of a first-year associate at a New York law firm.

What kind of comparison is that? Most people in the world earn less than half of what a first-year associate at a NY Law Firm makes. So what? A proper comparison should be against similar professions, in the entertainment industry. Did the author do any research at all?

> The average American game developer earned a respectable living wage for the entertainment industry which is likely less than you would make if you were a law, cs, or engineering professional.

> if you were a law, cs, or engineering professional

Isn't game developer in fact a class of CS professional?

Maybe not if they're a designer or artist.

Did you read the enclosing paragraph?

"Their income pales in comparison to what’s offered in other fields with reputations for brutal hours, like banking and law. The average American game developer earned $83,060 in 2013, according to a Gamasutra survey, or less than half the pay of a first-year associate at a New York law firm."

Your answer is right there for goodness sake! The author compares game developers to a first-year associate because both are "fields with reputations for brutal hours."

The author is also Jason Schreier, an editor at Kotaku which has frequently covered these topics. I would argue he's quite aware of the issues developers face, many journalists are close friends with developers in the industry.

To echo your demeaning tone: did you do any research at all?

Does the reputation match reality? The brutal hours in law firms are mostly for junior associates on partner track. Lawyers working in government, corporate, or non-profit jobs tend to work about the same hours as developers in those organizations.

The author had the universe of salaries to choose from and chose ... lawyers. And not nationwide, but lawyers in literally the highest (or very close) paid market in the world. A comparison to Hollywood union rates would have been much more logical and probably still supported the writer's thesis.

So, yes, I think it fair to call it a lazy comparison and criticize the author for that point. Even if it doesn't really undermine any of the other well known issues with the field.

The other reason the comparison is so flawed is the education requirements for lawyers in that market and the enormous debt usually incurred in getting there. (These characteristics are not unique to lawyers, but are not totally shared with game devs.) Large NYC firms will only hire from a dozen or so law schools and those schools accept students from relatively small pool of mostly pricey undergrads. Without scholarships or aid, you're looking at $2-350,000 in student loans over the 7 years of school. Then you generally don't work for 6 months after graduation in order to study for the bar exam because you didn't expect $300k to teach you that stuff did you?

And the average salary of a first year associate in NY is probably about $10-20k above the average pay of a first year lawyer, and I assume many of them work hard.

If you're talking nationwide, no, the NY large firm pay is 2-4x the average pay. Many lawyers start out making $40-60k. Many will never make more than 80-120k per year in their life.

They need to compare it to the salary of an average paralegal.

Is there any part of the entertainment industry that isn't like this?

It seems that trying to be a writer, actor, game maker or a musician is incredible amounts of hard work and a small number of people do well and everyone else does badly.

The video game industry is especially bad as it combines the bad aspects of the entertainment industry with the bad aspects of software development.

A good story of the combination of overwork and technical mismanagement is the Mass Effect: Andromeda debacle (written by the same author as the NYT article): https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-t...

    > The video game industry is especially bad as it combines 
    > the bad aspects of the entertainment industry with the 
    > bad aspects of software development.

Another corner of the world where those two collide is the visual effects side of film production. What you see there mirrors the game industry to a tee: tons of overtime, high stress, low pay, studios constantly folding, and a never-ending stream of young hungry creative people waiting for their turn.

Same with Manga artists in Japan.

Same with advertising industry in Japan.

Sounds like working in Michelin starred restaurants.

The problems extend to beyond the confines of game developers and publishers. It also doesn't help to have to contend with a deeply critical and particularly cheap audience and overly influential terrible game 'journalists'. Many of the customers, if you've ever played online, are downright abusive actually. The customers, many of whom are young and immature want everything for free. If publishers try to charge for anything at all, it's 'a rip off'. Even though game prices have remained the same for a couple of decades while games become vastly more complex (and hence more expensive to make).

Basically games are not valued. The only reason they even get made is because there's enough people who love making them without sweating about not having the best salary, and enough young people who keep coming in to replace the people who've finally decided they've had enough.

The problem of people wanting software for free is such a hard thing to combat. There's something psychological about software that people don't realize what it takes to make it. Most people would never expect to obtain a physical item for free, and then get mad when they are charged for it, yet they do this with software.

> and overly influential terrible game 'journalists'

I would argue that you're pointing that finger in the severe wrong direction. The young generation of young males who buy video games do not visit the web pages of the enthusiast game press (IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku). Instead, they consume all of their game "reviews" and "criticism" via YouTube - figures like PewDiePie, TotalBiscuit, etc (not exactly a great crowd).

The gaming press is actually having a really fascinating resurgence IMO. Websites like GiantBomb and Vice's Waypoint have both found success through cultivating personalities with distinct critical viewpoints. Recently, games criticism has developed into something very unique and enjoyable if you're passionate enough to go looking for it.

In this way I disagree with your final point. Games are still immensely valued by [old / women / minority / enthusiast] gamers, but the majority of the market (especially the big $$$ from micro-transations) is thanks to the demographic you describe and (IMO) the media they consume. As a result, large block-buster games will increasingly market themselves to this incredibly lucrative (but not always large) segment of the market and you'll continually see behavior like in the OP as companies like EA try to cut costs and maximize their revenues.

> Even though game prices have remained the same for a couple of decades while games become vastly more complex (and hence more expensive to make).

A decade ago I paid 40€ for a game, and maybe 20€ for an addon.

Nowadays I pay 60€ for a game, plus about 60€ for DLCs, plus another 40€ addon, and I'll also have to pay for microtransactions to circumvent the blockades the game constantly throws at me.

How have proces remained the same?

And this is in a field of the industry where games just got easier to make, because, instead of building custom engines they're now all using Unity or Unreal, and delivering cookie-cutter content.

They are not all using Unity or Unreal and even the ones who are - it doesn’t necessarily make games easier to make when expectations are constantly rising. You still need to recruit and pay large numbers of the most talented people from a wide range of disciplines for several years to get out one game.

I don’t like the dlc / add-on approach either btw but it’s all done to get better margins while attempting to avoid the ‘sticker shock’ that would result if they charged one time to get the margins they actually want.

Everything would be able to change if naiive young people didn’t put up with bad conditions in the industry but I think this isn’t a problem just for games, this is how many industries keep ticking along. It’s a cycle, the young don’t believe the old, they think they’re cynical and this time they’ll do things different. I hope there is change.

It unfortunately seems like video game development, and entertainment generally, are very deadline-motivated. You want to release your game at a particular time, so it doesn't coincide with another game's release, or to finish by a particular quarter or holiday / Christmas.

I think it's actually worse than that. I've seen a couple crunches for games. They're not usually tied to holidays. It usually plays out, "Hey, we're only going to crunch for 3 months." "Oh, well, we've extended the deadline 3 months--so only 3 more months of crunch."

Most recently, a game studio a friend works as was supposed to wrap in early October. That's now extended until the end of the year with a ship date around March. If they had any flexibility in the release date, who thought this was a good idea? Of course an October deadline is going to push and now you've ruined the holidays for everyone.

A lot of the big game studios put out a game every 4 years or so, but if you're hired for the project they hire you just for the crunch. Then you're on to the next project heading into crunch.

Compare with the film industry, which is heavily unionised; there are often dreadful hours for people working on films, but there is generally suitable overtime and so on.

None of this exists in videogames.

Most of film is unionized. The big exception is VFX (computer graphics).

Maybe similar to the startups world too? Super long hours, not much pay, minimal chance of payoff, infinite supply of people who want to do it. The desired result is financial freedom, whereas perhaps in videogames the desired result is creative freedom.

Also yes, anything that seems glamorous has too much supply and not enough demand, so you end up with these skewed power dynamics. Pick a job that maybe pays ok but is super unglamorous, and I doubt you'll see the same practices

The desired result is financial freedom, whereas perhaps in videogames the desired result is creative freedom.

Creative freedom is definitely nice and a goal of people in games. Both developers and designers go into it with the goal of making games and eventually making their games.

What you find out is, most game companies can only make a few people's games. It is the same in any creative industry.

This results in most developers, designers, artists going to work on their own games or at small to medium studios where they can have some input after 3-5+ years.

It is the same with entrepreneurs and any work/team really. You will get more shots at implementing things the way you want towards the market you want if you can control it, especially if it is your own or you control the funds.

Game studios and agencies are great to learn all the skills you need at a rapid pace and understand the amount of effort it takes, but eventually you will need to break off on your own or small teams to deliver the experience you want. Working at an agency or studio is a bit of an education or hardcore apprenticeship.

Most people that get to control creative and design decisions at large game companies had to do just that or make their own (or they put up the money) i.e. John Carmack, Tim Schafer, Tim Sweeney, nearly all mobile studios initially are small teams and either launch their own or subcontract for a label and on and on.

Due to the unstoppable force of automation and other productivity multipliers, the situation is creeping into more and more jobs/sectors. The trend is already clear: Increasing numbers of hungry people in line and pushing each other aside for a chance at one of the increasingly fewer jobs. Today it's a few highly desired niches within a few industries. Tomorrow it's the new normal for employment in general.

There are two, somewhat overlapping, problems here which apply to a lot of parts of the entertainment industry.

The first is that supply exceeds demand: "everyone wants to be" an artist. This is basically unfixable.

The second is the very skewed distribution of revenue: a few big names get hundreds of millions of people's money, everyone else doesn't come close. This doesn't have to be that way at all (remember the 2000s when everyone was talking about the "long tail"?), but it would be a huge cultural shift and it involves a long discussion about commercialism and entrenched interests.

Isn't the winner-takes-all phenomenon counteracted by the fact that nobody can predict which games will make it? So studios/publishers/self-publishers finance many times more games than will make money.

It is the failing of the free market. It happens in any industry in which the supply of people who want to work in the industry vastly outpaces the number of jobs available. If you are lucky, the industry might have a union like much of the film, TV, or professional sports industries. If you are unlucky you end up in the video game industry and have this article written about you.

> It is the failing of the free market.

That's the opposite. It's exactly how a free market is supposed to work. When supply exceeds demand, you can fix any condition you want and you'll still get to fill your seats. If an industry loses attractiveness, they'll have to raise salaries, provide better working hours to retain employees.

By failing of the free market I mean an undesirable flaw in the outcome of the free market. Free markets lead to all sorts of nasty stuff like sweatshops and child labor. We usually create regulations or unions in order to fight back against these flaws. Without one of those, you can get a situation like this.

Wait. This is not on the same level as child labor at all. This is situation where free, consenting adults, sign a contract to work in a well-known and well-reported industry, forsaking compensation for extra working hours (as specified in their contracts) and knowing very well the crunch phenomenon (it's been reported in numerous publications for at least more than 20 years now) - so what extra protection do you need? They are free to decide what is the best for them, as individuals. And they are free to leave for better jobs, if they are not satisfied with the industry they are in.

Why can't all the above be true for a child if they consent to it or if their parents consent to it? Why can I hire a adult for $3 per hour if we both consent to it?

> Why can't all the above be true for a child if they consent to it or if their parents consent to it?

Children are not considered in most countries to be able to make decisions regarding employment until they are 16 or more. That's why - a question of assumed maturity and ability to make judgments over longer term vs short term benefits.

> Why can I hire a adult for $3 per hour if we both consent to it?

Personally I don't see a problem with that - if for that adult that means 3 dollar additional benefit per hour versus nothing, it's really up to them. But in a proper marketplace companies compete for people and salaries tend to rise by themselves way about 3 dollars per hour. Look at Switzerland, a country that has no minimum wage Law, yet has the highest salaries in Europe, even for jobs requiring only low qualifications.

It's also the reason unions formed and labor laws were passed.

People don't end up in the video games industry because they're unlucky. It's not like you can lose a poker game and be condemned to a life working for EA.

> It seems that trying to be a writer, actor, game maker or a musician is incredible amounts of hard work and a small number of people do well and everyone else does badly.

I'm not sure the picture is so bleak financially for game developers. I mean, there's a ton more revenues in the video games industry and it's a growing industry with more and more gamers (mobile, console and PC alike). Then, there's the fame aspect "I worked on X game with this Mr Y superstar game designer" even if they only worked on a very tiny aspect of the said game. And there's the advantage of being IN the industry, the networks, the fact that you are the forehead of what's happening and there's literally tons of ways one can innovate even in "boring" AAA titles.

sports too

Just for the heck of it, I signed on to be an extra on a pretty well known tv show that filmed in my area.

It was a at least a 12 hour day (but IIRC it was more like 18, but its been while now). As an extra, most of that was spent sitting around and waiting. The crew on the other hand were mostly on their feet the ENTIRE time and were still going even after all the extras were dismissed. Many of them were doing laborious tasks, others like the show runner, are running a million miles a minute the whole time.

And from what I gathered, this was basically the norm, while shooting the season which can last for months.

It's a lot like being a "startup founder," really. High risk high reward.

Game dev and startup founder at least can pay a lot better than actor/writer/musician even before reaching unicorn status.

A lot of it is, but it doesn't have to be.

I'd argue that over at Riot Games, we see crunch as antithetical to what we do. But then we're lucky enough to run a massive online game that needs to be up 24/7 year after year. So our engineering culture is much more like what you'd see at other traditional internet technologies such as Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc. It's just that in our case, our online service is a video game.

My girlfriend is at Disney and last year she worked 6 day weeks for much of the time as they led up to a film release. Change would require producers and executives to take a risk (while their competitors continue to crunch). It's going to be very hard to adjust.

I think your experiences are touching on some really interesting points, as the development environment of a game like League of Legends compared to Halo 5 is very different.

I think service-based games aren't just popular because they're profitable, but also that they can be developed more akin to a typical software company.

Well, it's true. I've worked on both gaming and enterprise software companies."Crunch" is everywhere. The only difference Games (especially casual one) has very short lifetime and changes are frequent and sometimes targeting some event or season like Christmas. With this, the work load becomes very uneven throughout the year. There are months teams are waiting for a solid project (otherwise management keeps them busy with some "New IP" experimental work which is destined to fail crossing approval gates ) and there are spikes where they have to work 6 or 7 straight weekends. Some regions where labor laws are not strict (or in culture itself work-life balance is not expected) its for irratic. In one hand the crunch time is extreem where employees are asked to spend very long hours sometimes overnight at work on the other hands they may have to wait for months for a project to be outsourced from the studio that is holding the IP.

It's not like people who work in the video games industry do not have the skills to do something else if they wish to. What the article fails to mention completely is that most people in the VG industry actually want to be there in the first place, despite knowing and experiencing all this.

Holiday hell: welcome to e-commerce.

Redesign, relaunch, rebuild, replatform, add vendors, remove vendors, deal with poorly built contracts that allow for shenanigans because no one in tech signed off on the deal you just made.

I think our whole industry is hell bent on consuming youth and self destruction. No one in tech is immune but some have it worse than others.

I know a guy in his late 30s that just had a freaking heart attack as a result of chronic stress and overwork. Worst part is his is self-imposed! He is an entrepreneur and does lots of contract work.

Sometimes we don't realize what we are doing to our bodies with overwork, stress, poor diets (you know it's true), and insufficient exercise. It's good to get reminded every once in a while.

I agree. I have left jobs that were grinding me when I realized that the end purpose was not something that I felt was moving the world forward.

Bill Watterson said the following via Hobbes (08 Apr 92, pg 56) that rings true for me: 'I don't know which is worse...that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low.'

It's easy to be cynical and claim that "crunch" is everywhere, but my subjective impression is that the better managed enterprise software companies have actually reduced crunch in recent years by applying agile development methodologies and continuous integration. That stuff actually works if you take it seriously and make it a core part of the organizational culture.

"Crunch" is everywhere.

Crunch is a function of deadlines. In my experience you don't get crunch if you have continuous incremental releases (eg a SaaS product where pushes to live are automated). Unfortunately that tends to only happen when something is both successful and mature.

Since you have to assume every executive funding or managing a gamedev studio knows that developers grow up dreaming of working on games, it seems like this is a pretty good example of a sector of tech ripe for collective bargaining. Unchecked supply and demand ensures abusive working conditions for entire generations of game developers, unless they can find a way to in some way link the fates of veteran developers with newcomers and allow engineering teams to bargain for some control over and sanity for their shipping schedules.

Until that happens, though, the classic tech career advice remains true: don't go into gamedev. There is comparably interesting, creative work elsewhere in tech that is also lucrative and relatively secure.

I am curious as to what those other creative fields are (honest question).

These extreme development environments aren’t even creating games that are that fun, certainly compared to some older games.

First, there are so many bugs and obviously-unfinished things. “Ship now, pay now, pay again later and maybe it’ll be fixed later” is the new normal.

Then there’s the huge production costs. Games suffer and become boring because they take forever to develop these photorealistic scenes and don’t have time to produce a lot of actual game content!! Instead of spending an eternity to create a handful of amazing-looking things, focus on just-OK-looking opponents and make a much bigger and better game.

This is ripe in the animation and CGI studios also. ILM/Lucas Arts were notorious meat grinders of young professionals. There must be an upper bound to hours worked in a shift/day/week legally for salaried employees/management/executives. No game or movies is worth working someone to death to keep on budget.

Classic example of supply and demand. More people want to become game devs than there are jobs, and so they can be abused knowing that if they complain, they will be replaced.

Tools like Unity, Gamemaker etc are part of the solution : lower the barrier of entry to expand the market, which might even eventually introduce IT level employee competition.

Might also be useful if the current generation of game dev 'elites' retire. Props to them for their games, but it often seems their success bias allows them to view crunch and other terrible development practices as normal.

I think this raises many questions that are somewhat similar to raising minimum wage.

Can companies survive without this "cheap" accessible labour? Are the game devs being screwed by their employers or the markets? Is it better to regulate for higher salaries, and potentially less total jobs and maybe less games per year?

I think the answers to these questions are hard to find, but ultimatly would dictate the pros and cons of the current situation.

If execs are just pocketing all the money, ya, that's a problem and maybe unions or regulation is needed.

If game development of the current scale just isn't sustainable by the markets given higher salaries, we need to explore what kind of game development scale can? Is it one which reduces the number of jobs? If so, we have the taxi vs uber dilemma... Is it better for fewer people to get good wages, or for more people to get lesser wages?

Finally, we must explore the lengthy crunches. Are they truly delivering productive value? Is management in the game industry just poorer? Would reasonable hours impact cost and profits? Maybe it wouldn't, if we believe all the science about how lack of sleep and overwork nullifies productivity.

This is all a complex problem.

> Finally, we must explore the lengthy crunches. Are they truly delivering productive value?

They're not. It's a huge waste of money. It's all poor planning. But each company has to learn that individually, over and over, before an industry figures it out. There's some quote about making movies (or art) that the hard part is making the movie the first time. Once they knew what they were making, doing it a second time would cost 1/10th as much.

A lot of the leadership at Pixar talk about how difficult Toy Story 2 was on the staff [1]. '"a full third of the staff" ended up with some form of RSI by the time the film was finished.' 'In one instance, an animator had forgotten to drop his child off at daycare one morning and, in a mental haze, forgot the baby in the back seat of his car in the parking lot.' Even though 'Pixar did not encourage long hours, and, in fact, set limits on how many hours employees could work by approving or disapproving overtime.'

It created a huge culture shift at Pixar. Luckily, they've in a comfortable enough position to carry out and keep up with those changes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story_2#Controversy_and_tr...

"They may gaze with envy at their colleagues in the film industry, where unions help regulate hours and ensure overtime pay."

Why gaze with envy when you could organize instead?

Haven’t we known for a long time that this kind of stuff is counter productive?

It's well known. I think it's hard with creative industries, especially since digital has sped things up and communications has allowed way more people to collaborate. Now you can have many more people making last minute changes...throughout the last 6 months of a project.

I've heard lawyers talk about what it was like before fax machines. Turnaround on documents were expected to take a week because they went out through the mail. Now you can get a txt message and expect to turnaround in minutes--no matter where you are.

It's just a tempting feedback loop and I feel like as a culture/society we need to set some boundaries.

some 'update' since EA Spouse and corresponding lawsuits ~10 years ago

http://www.gameqol.org/igda-qol-survey/

How does one limit bathroom breaks?

I believe the answer is in your name.

they spy on you. in one studio there was a system that monitored yout kb/mouse inputs and logged an automatic pause into the billing system if there were no activity on your inputs.

When you look at what a lot of games end up doing to a lot of gamers, does anyone think there might just be a little bit of karma mixed-in here? Just a little?

I've seen so many otherwise well-adjusted people blow their time, health, and sanity on these things rather than deal with their own real-life problems. Then there are the newer ones where they nickel-and-dime people actual money for digital cornfields and lollipops.

well, i think that's a conservative point of view. My point of view is different. Video games spur a ton of technological advancements because there's always so much demand from consumers. Technological advancements are always slow and under-funded if it's not backed up by common consumers. There aren't many things that common consumers crave more than entertainment.

i think that's a grossly sub-optimal arrangement. we got VASTLY more bang for our buck out of the ARPA guys like Minsky, McCarthy, Kay, Sutherland, etc than we ever did out of the gaming and entertainment industries, and we did it without exploiting the competitiveness and compulsiveness of children and children-at-heart

edit: to be fair, some games have risen to the level of high-art, but I doubt many artists are going to complain about the pay or the effort when they know that they have accomplished such a thing

I wonder what the point is of these crazy hours. We are encouraged at work to not make overtime too often because it decreases code quality. More of a "go home, come back fresh" tomorrow.

As a consumer I also rather have games delayed than delivered in the EA style, full of bugs.

But I might be a more understanding consumer as I work in IT. I really do doubt these hours have a positive impact on code quality though.

If you skim the common gaming websites and their comment sections you will see that your sentiment is not shared across the audience. Lots of people like to make a fuzz about delays and 'those stupid people not getting their shit together in time.' These people might be the vocal minority, but they are getting heard by management + developers alike.

Unfortunately that is probably true. Another good reason to not skim those comment sections!

Does code quality matter as much for games? Automated testing is rare and much of the heavy lifting is handled by libraries such as Unreal Engine and Havok, leaving one-off glue code.

The majority of sales happen in week 1, and the DLC is usually shipped within a year. Unless the game attains classic status and requires porting to new platforms one day, it is unlikely you will need to work on that code in the future even.

Don't misunderstand, I rarely even play a AAA release until a few months in when the bugs are quashed because they irritate me so much. However I suspect EA et al optimise for release frequency rather than code quality. Presumably the affect of the latter on the profit & loss is dwarfed by the affect of the former.

You're probably right there. There is pressure to release because of competitors (like BF, and CoD used to do) and because customers start to expect it.

But better code quality can also mean losing less time fixing bugs that could have been prevented in the first place. Thus, actually reaching the expected release date, but attention focussed elsewhere.

I'm not familiar enough with that world though to really understand how complex their code is. As you said, I assume libraries such as UE, CryEngine, .. take care of the truly hard bits.

There are lots of systems to develop between the low level generic engine and the high level one-off (ish) gameplay code for a specific product. For example, a good brawler combat engine and the tools, pipeline and experience to put it to good use is pure gold to a company like Platinum Games. You can see similar systems lineages in companies attached to certain game types, like Bungie, Firaxis, etc.

American corporations are destroying their workers. Most companies do not care about their employees. There are some that do, many that claim they do, and more that give it lip service. Most Americans are overworked, underpaid, and don’t get enough time off. We need to change the system so it works for us, not the other way around.

It's not just America. Heck, the article quotes a co-founder of very well known Polish studio as saying he "sees crunch as a necessary evil." There were a lot of negative articles talking about how brutal The Witcher 3 crunch was. Mass Effect: Andromeda, made by Bioware in Alberta, Canada "ended up building most of the game during the ensuing 18 months."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect:_Andromeda#Game_de...

10+ years, working in 3rd or 4th game studio.

no issues, but with certain employers the crunches can be quite intensive. escpecially when promised 'relief after crunch' never really comes.

with decent employer and if you like math and coding as such, it's an amaze-balls (i believe is the expression) job to have: very broad spectrum of problems that the coding of the games involve and almost free hand in realization and the best part is that performance and memory really matters, and there's no way around it. what i like the most is lower level (sometimes significantly) of corporate bullshit, and that's true even for bigger studios. it's a bit like in quantum physics: "shut up and calculate!" except we code.

And on top of that, your users will probably hate you.

Complaining is a thing on the whole internet, but I'm always shocked by how common it is for gamers to trash those who basically make their leisure possible.

Indeed, this industry seems to be the most toxic one for developers. Among all recruitment mails I receive, gaming industry ones always stand out. They're basically always in the line of "want to work in your dream industry?" and make me feel like they actually are doing me a favor by sending me a recruitment mail. "lol" is my usual thought while closing the mail.

By the way, to game developers : don't feel too bad. Once MR will be a thing, you'll be kings of the world, just like webdev from 2000'.

It doesn't surprise me. Video Games tend to rely on stressors to provide eustress and a pleasurable experience. This is okay with single player games, but multiplayer games wind up adding a ridiculous amount of additional stressors that developers can't compensate for and often can even make it worse. you're often invoking fight/flight responses and potent stress reactions; why is it so odd that players over time start to turn on people who do this to them?

I see your point, but you make it sound like they have no choice but play games :) Ultimately, they do that to themselves and they want it (because they want to beat it). It's like watching an horror movie and insulting actors for being scared.

I've thought for a long time that public school should include material on understanding and preventing abuse to yourself and others. I had a parent that was emotionally manipulative and grew up accepting it. When I went out into the world I put up with a lot of emotional abuse and let myself get whipped by jerks because I wanted to avoid confrontation at all costs. My wife deals with poisonous people much better than me, and I regularly use her as the voice of reason when I have trouble with some people.

> Mr. Iwinski, like many other top video game creators, sees crunch as a necessary evil.

Some developers have a lot of critical things to say about working environment in CDPR. Extreme crunch is one of those.

Sad that The Witcher 3 is such a phenomenal title, yet it caused so much misery in the making. Are there examples of extremely successful games that were made in a boring 9 to 5 fashion?

I went for an interview at a game company before I got my current job. As well as the technical questions, a large part of my interview seemed to be indirectly about my attitude to working many extra hours and days.

I explained that surely in a properly managed company, with proper planning such things would rarely or never be necessary.

Surprisingly I got asked back for a second interview (which I declined because I'd been offered a much more suitable job elsewhere)

I've heard similar things about places like SpaceX. So many people want to work on something cool that the companies can afford to not be the best places to work.

I wonder how much of this applies to Blizzard who delays products as long as possible or would even cancel big projects that's been long underway

It still exists, but I'm unsure to what exact degree as I only know from multiple firsthand sources. If you're on of the old guard you are paid a fair enough wage to live in Irvine, and the job is generally fun. If you're one of the masses of new guard then good luck affording Orange County, have fun chaperoning Blizzcon, etc etc. That's the sensation I got.

Someone should talk to Tynan Sylvester from Rimworld. Guy took some months off in the middle of the hype and it didn't hurt the game.

I'm interested to learn how these gaming companies are able to retain talent with conditions such as this. Perhaps they just churn through entry level Devs who move on to better jobs after gaining some exp.?

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