Fortnite’s success led to months of intense crunch at Epic Games | Hacker News Reader

Fortnite’s success led to months of intense crunch at Epic Games

polygon.com

107 pointspmcpinto81 comments

If I were a mid-level manager at Epic, I wonder how I would handle internal politics at this time. So many competing objectives...

1. Focus on producing novel content to keep the game interesting, mixing things up enough over weeks/months, but without killing the core mechanics.

2. Hire lots of new employees, all while knowing that the popularity bubble may burst and they may need to be laid off in the near future.

3. Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry.

4. Acknowledge that this lucky streak is unrepeatable, and that if the game falls out of popularity, there is likely no one to blame. But when it happens, the demoralization will hit hard and the layoffs are inevitable.

5. All this, while the company reaps huge profits.

Sounds better than the usual coding job. Meetings. Sprint plannings. Meetings. Why aren't you done your work? Are you sure this is a 3 and not 1?

Should be a 2 hour task, right? Two weeks later, why wasn't this documented?

Please, I come on HN to escape all of this.

4a. Acknowledge that some companies have too many "lucky streaks" for them to be "lucky streaks" (e.g. Pixar, Valve, Nintendo, etc.). Attempt to build a work environment conducive to great creative work such that if there's any way to make this kind of success repeatable, at least we're putting the chances on our side.

Valve does not belong in that list. They got their lucky streak and used it to buy themselves a work environment where nobody has to be accountable to anyone in order to stay profitable. Productivity is optional at Valve. Take Steam or leave it, they don't need to make titles anymore.

At least Nintendo and Pixar create new content.

What about all the work they have done with VR, Linux, and supporting like any common game controller with most steam games?

> Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry.

Hah.

I've know a few people on break-away titles(on the level of fortnight for an era) in my time in that industry. In most of those cases the employer or publisher had slipped in some sort of cap in royalties on a per-employee basis. So while their % cut of royalties was in the 7-figures they never saw anything above 6-figures.

Kudos on you for thinking this way but I'd be surprised if most of the people working on Fortnight are seeing more than mid FAANG compensation.

Mid FAANG level compensation goes a lot further in Cary, NC than it does in the Bay Area though. If bonuses are 3-4x salary like mentioned in the article, then most employees are making more than they would for an equivalent role at FAANG (baring stock anomalies). According to glass door senior software engineers at Epic make around ~$150K. Three to four times that is $450K-$600K, which is higher than the equivalent at FAANG according to level.fyi (L5 at Google and E5 at FB make ~$350K). This isn't justifying crunch so much as it's pointing out that Epic games seems to be paying out bonuses that are on another level. I've worked on break-away game titles and currently work at FAANG so I generally agree with you and have points of reference.

> more than mid FAANG compensation.

Do FAANG do remote? If so... what's that compensation like?

levels.fyi

so... in Miami, I make $150k working for a non-FAANG company as a senior software engineer.

If I worked for a FAANG company, I'd make $300k?

Total comp yup, but guess what.. if you are senior at a non faang company you will not be a senior at a faang company, likely L4. Even then your TC will be ~250 at the right company

so... the generally accepted knowledge of the software industry is... you will make an extra $100k/yr+ minimum if you go work for a FAANG company.

Why doesn't everybody want to work for FAANG companies then?

I remote for Amazon (as part of twitch but know other amazon remotes) but from my experience when other FAANG recruiters cold call me remote at those companies is discouraged. Amazon pays based on regions so my salary does not match what the ancestor post claims but would if I lived in the Bay Area.

levels.fyi says an SDE III (Senior SDE) should make $300k/yr in total compensation at Amazon working in a non-inflated city like Austin, TX.

Is that in line with your compensation?

Close enough (I’m not in the USA)

> Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment.

While bonuses can help, expecting them to prevent resentment is, in my opinion, misguided.

When I was contracting (not for Epic) I always negotiated an hourly rate. When they called for overtime I loved it, the meta is to become 10-20% more productive by whatever metric they use but bill 50-100% more hours at 1.5x my already large bill rate. I can generally work for 6 months like this without any life changing burn out symptoms.

As much as it sucks to implicitly require people to work so many hours, i'd say it's OK in the short term if they were compensated accordingly (overtime or big bonuses), which according to the article they were (3x the salary?). Maybe someone more familiar with epic could enlighten me.

1) It's not short term. Fortnite is constantly adding new features. This isn't normal crunch before a game ships then relax after patching bugs, it's literally crunch every week.

2) The actual employees are paid very well via a profit share arrangement. To my understanding, the issue is when contractors are worked like this. I don't believe contractors receive overtime or bonuses.

edit: some below have pointed out contractors do receive overtime.

It's never ok, because once the suits get away with it once, it will be their crutch for every shitty decision that gets made.

Yeah, I know someone who works at Epic specifically on Fortnite(as a new hire too!) and the money is well, fantastic. The base salary was very high for the games industry and then bonuses on top of it were in the range of 1-2x the annual salary itself.

Ah, I remember my first live game, where you think we'll just crunch for this release, it'll be fine. Then the next release comes and because you were crunching on the other it comes out half baked, so you crunch again and again and before you know it half the team that made it happen is gone and no one wants to work there. You see this mentality in a lot of mobile studios that we're started by ex-AAA employees. Hopefully they learn that you can't crunch a live game or you'll never stop crunching. Single release games eventually ended, a good live game can go on for a very long time. The next generation of mobile studios knew that and ended up having a very good policy of no over time... Well some did

I think they interviewed mostly people new to the gaming industry who don’t know how to manage their time under pressure, Epic isn’t an easy place if you’re not pretty senior, they expect you to know what to do with little guidance. That said they also see the company as being a marathon since it’s success isn’t certain and fragile, so it’s something they expect employees to take care of because it’s a unique place, maybe similar to how museum staff look after art work. No doubt it’s brutal with Fortnight’s success, and you will get fired if you’re not competent and pulling your weight, but that’s the industry they’re in, you can’t have a few people putting everyone else’s livelihood at risk, and they also compensate very well when they’re successful. So it’s not like some sweat shop, it’s more complex than the article makes it sound.

> I think they interviewed mostly people new to the gaming industry who don’t know how to manage their time under pressure,

So everyone who has to work long hours is just incompetent or new, or new and incompetent, and should just do the same amount of work in less time, duh? That's not how these high-pressure workplaces function. Even if you are a significant contributor and you are technically allowed to opt out of overtime, that doesn't mean everyone won't resent you for it, and that management won't interpret as a 'lack of commitment' when promotion or reviews come around. As a corollary, the recent rise 'unlimited time off' policies have been widely criticized because they often inadvertently contribute to implicit pressures to take less time off than before, because of the resentment, hostility and jealously. I've seen some companies rolling out unlimited time off with mandatory minimums which seems healthier, but I'm unsure how successful it has been.

> they expect you to know what to do with little guidance

Even good engineers need guidance, and guidance and training are especially important when you're doubling and tripling your workforce.

> so it’s something they expect employees to take care of because it’s a unique place, maybe similar to how museum staff look after art work.

This is a super weird analogy and makes no sense to me.

> and you will get fired if you’re not competent and pulling your weight

Where does the article say that Epic shouldn't fire incompetent employees? No one is saying that.

> but that’s the industry they’re in, you can’t have a few people putting everyone else’s livelihood at risk

Your response to a toxic work culture is just 'It is what it is, deal with it'? Don't you think we should have discussions about the human impact and damage caused by these intractable competing interests? And there's almost certainly a financial and business cost, it's just not as obvious to measure.

> So it’s not like some sweat shop, it’s more complex than the article makes it sound.

The article covers both sides pretty thoroughly, there's a litany of quotes from Epic PR addressing the claims and recounting their efforts to resolve them. I understand WHY these pressures exist, and it's clear the Epic want to do everything they can to leverage their transient popularity. But that's not to say they shouldn't be criticized or they shouldn't do better.

I don’t think you’ve worked at a struggling studio before, but yes that’s just how it is, right up to the CEO. Once someone figures out a better way they’d do it in a heartbeat. Executives are no different than anyone else and they shoulder the responsibility of making sure everyone has a job too, it’s one sided to think they’re only interested in profit especially in Epic’s case. You may think the museum analogy is odd, but it’s not just another studio for many people.

But this isn't a struggling studio - it's a studio making insane profit.

It’s not the same as say selling Microsoft Office, where the sales are stable. It’s not stable and will taper off if they don’t act on it, they also only have one game. So they got lucky and it’s fragile success, it can change at anytime, they know this and since they’ve been around since 1991 and have come close to shutting down many times since then. EA would be more what you’re thinking, where they have more diverse income from many titles and studios, one game failing won’t cause EA to shutdown, but that’s not what’s happening here. I can understand the righteous feelings, but it needs to be coupled with an accurate understanding of the problem to find a solution.

But... no one is denying that. The article acknowledges it (it actually discusses it extensively), I acknowledge it. That doesn't mean they shouldn't do better, or that there isn't a huge cost on the personal lives of the people working there.

You are also making the assumption that their continued success is dependent on their toxic work culture, but I don't think that's a given. I'd wager that most people who work the kind of hours that we're discussing are:

a) either no more productive than someone working 40-50 hours, or only marginally more productive b) More likely to make simple/avoidable mistakes, which take time to track down, resolve and waste QA resources c) More likely to quit or have to go medical leave, which increases turnover, which is an enormous cost in development.

Furthermore, the stories of how bad the work place is will discourage potentially skilled applicants, and the longer they let it go on, the more trouble they'll have changing the way they are perceived in the industry.

I'd also wager that if you are constantly in crunch mode like this, it would stifle creativity and possible innovations. No one has the time to play around with new ideas, or try things and fail.

I'm not sure how that changes the understanding of the problem - no, they aren't guaranteed to profit forever (who is?). If the argument is "it's reasonable to abuse your employees unless you literally can't possibly ever run into financial trouble", it's a bad argument.

I might ruffle some feathers here but here it goes. Very much in the same manner some people refuse to eat inhumanely raised and slaughtered animals, buy diamonds or coffee from companies associated with slave-like labor, or palm oil because its harvesting destroys the tropical forests, or watch American football to protest constant stress of trauma for players, I refuse to play big name games. It is a moral stance. Once in a while I spend some time playing an indie game and before I do that I make sure to find the site or the blog of the producer.

I'm not sure that level of crunch is generally lower in indie companies. In theory, they might be struggling more, they are in disadvantageous position against big companies, they have to do more experiments and take more risks than AAA, which make the same "press X to hollywood" or network shooters for the last 20 years.

(I don't play big companies' (modern) games, because almost always I'm not in target audience and find such games completely unplayable)

At least with indies the staff are more likely to share the windfall. While they crunch, it's their own choice and they profit directly.

Yeah, if crunch is the moral issue, then indie companies are more prone to work/life balance issues than even the AAA developers. Indie companies have the usual startup issues of either the developers are moonlighting after their day jobs (working two jobs, a personal crunch) or pushed hard for "passion" to work hard (crunch) to pay the bills when it's still life or death to the company.

A lot of indies directly come from "game jam culture" which celebrates over-taxing developers with crunch "for fun".

Sustainable business practices in the games industry are unlikely to be possible until the industry is much more strongly unionized. At which point it would be more likely for the AAA games to be union shops and/or able to afford unionized workers to work on games.

Indie workers get rewarded proportionally for their crunch though. AAA workers seem to have to crunch for their base salary and good luck ever seeing an extra penny if the game becomes a phenomenon like fortnite did. meanwhile notch is a billionaire now and his employees are all comfortable millionaires

Indie workers may get rewarded for their crunch efforts. Usual startup worker caveats apply that far more indie development companies bankrupt than succeed, and even in a small, early startup not all stock is equivalent (depending on funding sources and corporate politics).

Most of the time I cannot drop by their office or home office and watch over their shoulder, but I try to do my due diligence as much as possible. Last game I played for example, was from this team [1], started playing it when it was an actual indie company (Alex as a single developer and Lacey as ops)

[1] http://edgeworksentertainment.com/about

I applaud your principles and voting with your wallet, however I find your comparisons frankly ridiculous and tone deaf.

The people murdered by warlord funded by blood diamonds didn't really have a choice. Exploited coffee farmers in the third world who barely make enough to survive also don't really have a choice if they want to feed themselves and their families. They can't exactly say "well screw this farm, I'm going to go write code for Morgan Stanley instead".

The 20-something freshly graduated CS engineers who sent their resume to get hired by those big name devs did so willingly and were probably very happy when they got hired. They most likely could've easily gotten a well paying job elsewhere and if their working conditions really become unbearable they'll probably do just that.

Should we still support this bad industry? Probably not and I think you're right to boycott these games, but it's nowhere near comparable to those other things you talked about.

My apologies, some analogies are definitely tone-deaf. Developers, producers, QA in North Carolina definitely have more options than most people on the planet. And I am definitely not in a position to tell them what to do with their lives. Voting with the wallet is probably the most effective way available to me personally,

Voting with your wallet doesn't apply here since Fortnite is free to play.

so what? they increase human suffering in proportional amounts. Or are you saying suffering as a human being over how many years of game development(stress/emotional distress) doesn't matter compared to suffering in africa. It isn't an either or situation even though you talk as if it is.

suffering is suffering, you must acknowledge it wherever it happens. people in jobs don't have choices a lot of times either.

Indie game developers often self impose crunch that is significantly more extreme than what many AAA developers go through, which can also lead to long term health or mental issues. There are AAA games that have little to no crunch involved in production as well (although universally that's not the case for the most popular games, unfortunately).

https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/9/11/4614458/antichamb...

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/267563/The_4_years_of_se...

This might seem ok with outlier games that make the creator super rich, but this thing also happens with smaller titles that have no chance in the market.

I mean, that's applaudable, but I'm afraid your filter might be too broad. I've worked(and still work) on one of the largest AAA releases of this year and we've done zero crunch. I'm a senior engine programmer and no one on my team has done more few hours of overtime in the month leading to the release . I'm at work 8am and leave at 4pm every day like clockwork. So yeah, not every company is like this and not every AAA title requires crunch to be finished.

I did not mean to imply that all AAA studios are that bad. Probably the missing part of the context is that I do not have much time for games these days, and this filter - while an overly broad heuristic - works just fine.

That's fair enough. I can certainly see that games have gotten so large that there just isn't enough time in the day to play multiple 80h+ games all at once.

Semi related, but Epic pays 25%+ above market.

Do they really ? if you end up doing unpaid overtime, it might even things out

How much is your health and sanity worth?

And you're working ~50% more hours, do the math.

Honest question, why would competent developers subject themselves to this kind of treatment? If a company ever "requested" that I work Saturday or Sunday I'd be gone later that same day.

It's all in the culture.

I did similar after a long drawn out crunch. Decided I was going home at 10pm rather than 11-12(after being in at 8am each day for the last 6 months).

I was branded as 'not a team player' the whole team basically resented me for 'not pulling my weight'.

In summary, fuck that industry.

The real solution is unionization or fresh blood but I don't think it'll happen in the next 5-10 years. Both titles I worked on previously I'm almost dead certain the constant crunch lead to a sub-par game and subsequent poor releases. Until that industry learns that crunch isn't the solution nothing is going to change.

The video game industry already gets fresh blood constantly - then burns them out in three years.

I was once at a startup that did well enough at Demo, they wanted to launch without a proper ops team in place (it was a service). In addition to demands, lack of planning, and poor management -- there was an expectation that people work unreasonable hours. Taking a weekend off without proper genuflection was frowned upon. Multiple people walked before their 1 year cliff was up, other people stayed.

Working hard isn't an issue, but expectations like those in the gaming industry or some startups (like the one I encountered) are unreasonable and it would help if more people voted with their feet. That said, I know a lot of people in gaming have a passion for such.

Because there's a risk of being seen as "not a team-player" and a fear of losing your job as a result of it, social pressure is real in tech culture, if all developers refused to take part in the rat-race and left the office at 6 on Friday the management would have no other choice than to deal with it by _managing_ the human ressources differently, or increasing the count of developers which I will agree: is not easy when it comes to software development.

Social pressure, and the lack of interest (or even contempt) the developers have when it comes to unions mostly explains why such abuse is still seen as normal in the industry.

I'd add also the possibility of being recognized, even if only in the game end credits. If you're young and a possibly a game enthusiast, it can move mountains.

Because videogames are glamorous and a significant portion of people in CS went into it for the specific purpose of working in videogames. As such it's one of the rare sectors in our industry where employers do not struggle too much to hire fresh blood.

At the risk of sounding a bit jaded I don't feel too bad about overworked videogame developers. The vast majority of them can quit at any point and probably land a job in some other sector of the industry, probably with better work conditions and a better salary.

Developers chose to work for these videogame studios. They chose the glamour of being able to say "I wrote some code for GTA V" rather than the comfort and quality of life of being able to say "I write backend code for a flower shop".

I get it, some jobs are more desirable than others, and there has to be some reason for people to take the less glamorous job, but that barrier could just be skill. I support hard work when it comes to training. Hey, you want to make video games, well it's a really competitive field and you better train your ass off in order to be the best at what you do. I think generally, leveraging passion in order to get people to work really hard is good. They get fulfillment out of it, and everyone else gets a great product.

But that's not what this is. This is investors and executives who found a money pump and are pumping as hard as they possibly can without any regards for the health and wellbeing of the human machine they're putting pressure on. At some point, you have to give people the time to live their lives outside of work or the world is going to become a worse place. They become stressed and depressed, and it affects their families and friends, and and then has a ripple effect on society.

I agree with you completely, I'm not arguing that these studios are behaving ethically. I'm just pointing out that the fact that videogame studios have bad working conditions has been public knowledge for a long time and the engineers who apply for these jobs have to be aware of it. Yet they still decide to get into these jobs even though I'm certain that the vast majority of them could land a more comfortable and probably better paid developer job elsewhere.

I realize that I'm playing the "blame the victim" game and I'm not entirely comfortable with that but in this case it reminds me of that guy who knowingly got in touch with a cannibal to get eaten. If you know what's going to happen and you still on your own free will and without external pressure decide to continue on that path can you really complain that things are exactly how you knew they were going to be?

Are these people coerced in any way to work for these game studios? Were they lied to? Didn't they know that AAA game development is a thankless, soul-crushing task with very tight deadlines and terrible work ethics? Because I remember having almost exactly this conversation with a friend at school more than 15 years ago when he told me he wanted to become a game developer.

Backend code for a flower shop contributes to global and local economy and facilitates trade. Video games are (in my opinion) largely cheap entertainment with some artistic merit and mild popular culture importance (depending on your social crowd). I guess this is an unorthodox opinion, but I consider backend flower code to be cooler and better.

An some comments above said, layoffs are likely after the games popularity wave recedes. Also, maybe they're hoping for promotions?

Game devs need to unionize. Now. This madness has got to stop.

I love the downvotes for suggesting unionization. Very nice, HN.

HN is full of people who fit the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" stereotype perfectly. Droves of developers sure that one day their SaaS site will make them rich, that one day they'll sell their side-project to google.

Most of us won't!

I feel personally attacked

When people make criticisms of the HN community that apply just as much to any large sample of humans in general, I don't think they're really talking about HN.

That comment wasn't particularly substantive, and arguably broke this site guideline: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Note, though, that it received corrective upvotes and is no longer downvoted. That's common, and is one reason why we ask users not to post like you did here. Such posts are not just off-topic distractions, they stick around as uncollected garbage once the thing they're mentioning no longer exists. This is in the guidelines too, so could you please review them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Working more than 40 hours is stupid, but I can see doing it for very short times. In a culture where you are branded as not a team player if you don't work 70+ hours a week uncompensated is exactly what Marx called exploitation. You make other people wealthy while you burn yourself out. No matter the job its not worth it. If however you own the company it might be worth the risk of killing yourself, but it's not right to make other people do it to enrich yourself. Not that that ever stopped people from demanding others do it (see Jack Ma for an example).

It's remarkable how someone will always find a way to lambast successful companies even if it means faulting them for becoming successful and relevant in the first place.

> faulting them for becoming successful and relevant in the first place.

Sorry but I'm going to call out bad work practices that run counter to building a better product when I see it regardless of the success.

Crunch destroys lives(remember easpouse?) and has no place in that industry.

When you have a tiger by the tail (either literally or figuratively), it's not unreasonable to temporarily increase your level of effort beyond that which is long-term sustainable.

I've done it (in games, in 2 other startups, and in finance). I still do it now sometimes when waves of unrelated work all happen to peak near the same time.

It is unreasonable to force developers to increase their level of effort.

Manage adequately, hire more people if necessary. There are other solutions that going "welp, we're successful, better work even more hours now".

Yeah except that epic already prints money via their engine licenses and has since the days of UE3(when MS paid for the development of Gears while the rest of us licensees fended for ourselves mostly).

There's literally no reason for this other than exploiting developers for more money.

"counter to building a better product ... rgardless of the success"? That's nonsense.

Using your own logic, a company could justify slavery in order to deliver the best product.

Software can be made without forcing people to work insane hours. Other sectors of the programming field accomplish this, yet games companies are somehow incapable? No, they clearly use and abuse people who have a passion for making games.

Slavery ain't legal.

But if it were, you would be okay in justifying a company using slavery as long as they're "successful". Got it.

So now all we have to do is make working "crunch hours" for months illegal, since you don't have the ability to determine what's ethical or not for "successful" companies unless the law literally tells you, apparently.

Game companies can become successful without ridiculous "crunch hours".

Game companies can become successful without abusing programmers who are passionate about making games.

People are quick to criticize the fire and deaths, but you can't argue with the fact that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was very successful.

So your entire takeaway from this article is that because Fortnite was so successful, Polygon's writing a hit piece on Epic?

I find that assertion far more remarkable.

> faulting them for becoming successful and relevant in the first place.

you make it sound like this article is nitpicking uncomfortable chairs in the office. they're calling out deplorable working conditions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com