The Human Cost of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 | Hacker News Reader

The Human Cost of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

kotaku.com

32 pointssmacktoward14 comments

As far as I understand this is the norm in the game industry and has been for as long as I can remember. A friend who has worked in the industry (lead dev) for more than twenty years recounted to me several times that during crunch time he’d effectively live at work for 2-3 weeks before major game launches. You won’t be surprised to hear his marriage did not survive this type of unhealthy work environment.

I’m not an expert in US labour rules but isn’t this how contract workers are treated everywhere, not just at Treyarch? My understanding is that if contract workers receive the same benefits like happy hours, catered lunches etc., they can sue the company claiming that they were being treated like full time employees and therefore deserve the other benefits due to FTEs, like bonuses. Which is why companies like Treyarch go out of their way to be dicks about this, explicitly reinforcing the message that they are not FTEs.

Happy to be corrected here if I’m mistaken about this.

Yep. Funnily enough, it was a lawsuit against Microsoft that triggered this. A court said that Microsoft had to give the group in the class action compensation for not giving them ESPP (https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-...) and health benefits etc.

(My recollection is that since ESPP was given to every employee, but stock options were supposedly merit-based, they were able to sue for ESPP and not options, contrary to what the article says)

Anyway, that led to a hard separation of temps vs permanent employees in the tech industry, and probably other industries with similar compensation schemes.

Of course, US companies have always been scummy with regards to this kind of thing. I remember when Microsoft moved receptionists from being permanent employees to temps. There were probably fewer than 50-60 affected at that point, so it just felt like unnecessary cheapness to me. For a company that was making dozens of people millionaires every day at that point (mid 90s).

You can blame those sorts of things on the drive for shareholders to extract the last drop of blood from a stone. The management must show growth in stock, damn the human toll.

Game companies on top of the perm/temp caste system, also have a QA/not-QA hierarchy. They treat QA as a job that anyone can do and treat the people accordingly. Of course, good QA lead is valued more. Lots of young people wanting an in to the games industry are willing to do the job for low pay, so that doesn't help.

It would be nice if employers could be nice to all employees, but that's not how capitalism works. Every SV tech company that has masseuses and yoga for their employees also has contract janitors, cafeteria workers, security etc. Not to mention things like IT support and other better-paying jobs that are still temporary or outsourced.

You might say "well those people are not essential to the company", but that's exactly what game developers say about QA.

The way Treyarch treats QA seems particularly shitty, but I'm not surprised. If you start treating them the same as employees, you are literally asking for a lawsuit demanding equal compensation sooner or later.

(Now, in my opinion, they should get equal compensation, but that's an argument for another thread. Or likely another site).

As far as crunch goes, I challenge anyone who's ever worked on products with hard ship deadlines to tell me that they haven't had to crunch. Companies like Blizzard (pre Activision anyway, because they were private) could afford to "ship when it's ready" for their games, but most publishers don't have the luxury.

You've put tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars into a game and it needs to ship on time or you cede buzz/momemntum to a competitor, end up out of the holiday season, or whatever.

It's not that the game industry is particularly horrible with crunch. It's just that no one else really ships packaged software within time constraints any more, so games look bad comparatively.

Sounds like the playtesters should form a union and collectively bargain.

The union won't be recognised by the company and they will all be fired at worst, ignored at best.

Sadly the viable options really are either to leave the games industry or band together and form your own company and do things "right"

Unionising or even mentioning it while employed as a contractor is going to ensure a cancellation. As unfortunate as it is, it's desperately needed.

Yep. Unions make sense in the game industry in the same way they make sense in the movie industry. These folks are being taken advantage of. The overtime is insane.

The title makes it sound more like the inevitable requirement for releasing the game, though with $1.1 billion profit (figure from few months back) it's more like the human cost for maximizing profits.

Related: really interesting SEGA video from 1996. Training video for their testing department. "This is SEGA Test":

https://youtu.be/kTHghq6DNBE

Even in this video, it's mentioned that they sometimes work up to 100 hours in a week. This was 23 years ago. Has no progress been made at all?

And it goes back farther than Sega, E.T. for Atari was such a big charlie foxtrot because Atari went to Howard Scott Warshaw and was like (paraphrasing) "hey you have 5 and a half weeks to get a title ready for launch, by yourself, we've got this rights deal with Spielberg in the works and want to launch for Christmas".

For context he had 5 and a half weeks for E.T., he spent 7 months working on Yars' Revenge and 6 months on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Half the problems are solvable with allowing remote work, including the issue with such low pay in LA. But that will mean more chance of leaks.

For $15/hr, can they not find employment elsewhere (even in a different industry) with less-terrible work conditions?

something seems so 2019 about "the human cost of building a videogame that glorifies the human cost of war" or something

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