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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

"years of nonstop crunch culture, toxic management, and frustration from developers who believed the company’s refusal to diversify gameplay had led to creative stagnation"

I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...

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If you moved to an expensive area to take a job (which many people did, some of them literally weeks before the Telltale shutdown) you're probably locked into a lease and can't just afford to ditch on short notice. Furthermore, the pay scale for game studios isn't especially generous so these people don't always have a big nest egg. Finding another gig in games is also time consuming and not something you can do on short notice.

Every time I've lined up pro work in games it's taken at least 3-6 months of up front hunting and negotiations before landing it.

fwiw I know lots of former telltale employees and interviewed there at one point. Investment in projects and in coworkers goes a long way and was definitely present there. Some of the people who did end up leading got a lot out of sticking around because the titles they shipped gave them a strong resume to point to.

Even for people who have considerable talent/experience there is often a peak window of opportunity for leaving and if you miss it then it can become a lot more difficult afterward. Putting yourself out into the job market is difficult, and risky. A lot of people work paycheck to paycheck so any disruption to that whatsoever is a risk. Working crunch constantly also burns you out, depriving you of time, energy, and motivation to seek other jobs. You can also get stuck in trying to rationalize your situation. It's super easy to think "this isn't so bad" because you get to work in an office instead of out digging ditches or whatever, because you get to work on "cool stuff you love", because you get to spend all day working alongside a bunch of "cool/fun people" and friends, and so on. And you may not notice the exact point at which each of your justifications top being true, there may be no one glaring tipping point that pushes you to look elsewhere for work.

    > I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...

I feel the same way. One often hears the statistic that the games industry revenue (~36 Billion) exceeds that of the film (hollywood) industry.

It makes me wonder, given that there's probably fewer workers in games, who is making the lionshare of the money? Is it just a tiny sliver of investors? How did it get that way? One would think that talent could just walk away from toxic workplaces and be paid handsomely elsewhere.

The burden of organizing a group of people large enough to make a triple A game is enormous. Revenues come after long, painful development periods only. Risk is high. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the workers get a tiny proportion, unsatisfactory as that is.

I don't have any statistics but I'd guess a lot of the money goes to the publishers and IP/Licence holders.

Most game studios produce games on behalf of established publishers like EA with licenses from companies like Disney and I would assume they know to take a pretty piece of the cake.

I also have a feeling that the culture in the games industry have been rotting for a while and talent being "abused" has become the norm.

You can be a "rockstar" coder or coding "Wizard" all you want, but you'll probably never reach the paycheck of a good actor.

Once a game company has a hit they become their own angel investor and try to find the next hit. The odds are really low though so most die before finding it. It doesn't help that most companies have no idea why the first game was a hit.

It's easy to hide for a long time because a hit can be so profitable. Look at Riot Games. League of Legends remains their only product even after trying to find another one for a decade. Zynga is still around because in a few short years they got a couple billion in the bank.

If you want to work in games, the crunch and toxic management are endemic almost everywhere.

Reading "who believed the company’s refusal to diversify gameplay had led to creative stagnation" makes me laugh.

That would be like a Call of Duty developer or Assassin's Creed developer complaining that the company not diversifying the gameplay leads to stagnation.

I can see from an artists perspective why that's annoying.

But from an investors standpoint, if you have a profitable, winning formula, you use that formula!!

Telltale Games had a unique and successful storytelling formula and some extremely impressive partnerships, and it would be surprising to have seen them abandon their niche just because it got boring.

Of course, they were run into the ground so it's neither here nor there...

"Call of Duty" and "Assassin's Creed" are made by different studios and owned by big publishers I think.

Activision and Ubisoft offer different games.

CoD and AC are actually good examples because they are two of very, very few franchises that ship a game every 1-2 years like clockwork, and to do this they have multiple studios working on games at the same time. Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey shipped roughly 1 year apart and this required separate studios working on them, basically in parallel. At various points in time Call of Duty has been rotating between 2 or 3 different game studios, effectively making totally separate games with the same* branding.

* The branding isn't really the same either, since CoD lacks strong continuity - with Black Ops and Modern Warfare basically being different games with only some shared elements.

CoD games after COD4 are all similar enough that if you can play well on one of them, you can do the others quite good.

With the exception of BO3 perhaps, because it actually added some more fun gameplay elements. (The running along walls / double jumping).

But in general, the games are all quite similar.

Then again, the days the COD games were actually good games are long gone (in my opinion). CoD2 remains my favourite by far, and CoD4 is a close second. Both of which are over a decade old now.

A successful formula? They had 1 big hit, followed by a neigh collapse of interest that only got worse every game. They then kept at this “successful” model for half a dozen games. Sounds bull headed to me.

Lots of reasons. Not thinking you could find another job being one. Thinking that things will be just as bad elsewhere, so stick with the "devil you know" being another. A version of "battered spouse syndrome", but with employer instead of spouse, being a third.

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