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Comment by 0x8BADF00D | Hacker News Reader

Any company in the games industry is like this. It’s a sweatshop.

No, there are many, perhaps the majority, that are mature companies that respect employees’ work-life balance. I have worked in the industry for going on a decade and had mostly positive experiences. The poor experiences were either isolated to a specific team or part of a larger culture that I have seen change for the better.

That's ridiculous. Game companies are nothing like sweatshops and the reality is much less sensational than what you hear about, which should be no surprise.

Most are basically 9-5, generally with flexible hours. Often free food/snacks/games and other perks. Some take Friday afternoons off to drink and play games. Crunch toward release does happen a lot, it's a problem, but they're getting better about avoiding it.

You hear about the horror stories instead because that's outside the norm. "Game company mostly works normal hours, chills on Friday afternoons" isn't going to get much attention.

I was waiting to see if your post was satire.

Worked ~6 years in that industry, every placed I worked was a meat grinder and all the places my coworkers came from were meat grinders.

There's an attitude that if someone has "paid their dues" then new hires have to do the same and the cycle perpetuates. Saw 3 divorces on my last title alone, I don't care how much "passion" you have(and it will be exploited) that industry is not worth it.

I am sorry to hear that you had a poor experience and it is true that a toxic culture can be endemic.

However, your experience is not normative based on the best data available for the industry: https://s3-us-east-2.amazonaws.com/igda-website/wp-content/u...

Every year the IGDA publishes the Developer Satisfaction Survey that gives both a snapshot and longitudinal picture of the industry. The trends around things like work-life balance, diversity in the workplace and in the products themselves, and future outlook are all positive and have been for awhile. Most game developers day-to-day reality looks nothing like your experience, yet that impression lives on despite the reality on the ground.

The association of game developers says the game development industry is just fine?

Sure, but they would say that wouldn’t they.

I used to work for EA (five years at Ghost, specifically) and my experience there mirrors what you described. Often there was a crunch towards the end, but the last game I worked on had none. I'm currently working for Zoink and it's similar, though with a stronger stance against overtime.

Thanks. Also thanks to the silent majority who kept my post well afloat. It's weird that describing what typical game companies are like is controversial here.

EA and Acti have a reputation for crunch as well but only Riot has this many sexual harassment accusations.

EA, or at least Dice, have done a lot to move away from crunch as much as possible. It's been a slow process, but I definitely saw improvements during my time at Ghost. The last game I worked on didn't really have much of a crunch at all. I think I might have done some overtime, but almost every week was 40 hours and no drama.

EA is bigger than Dice, I believe. Maybe people who work for Dice (I love their games and tech!) had the leverage of opposing crunch becoming a norm. How you get such leverage over to your parent company, I do not know that. :)

Dice experimented with ways to prevent crunch by cutting down on unnecessary time sinks. It's shown good results, so it's only natural that other EA studios want to adopt it.

That is quite a generalization

Con confirm, the games industry is criminal in their treatment of employees. A studio cannot exist without the institutional abuse, as the budgets are not achievable otherwise.

Down vote all ya want, it won't change the reality and your fantasy of working there will be a nightmare of you make it. I was there.

Their COO would literally walk up to an employee and flick their balls, smack their ass, HUMP on them, and fart in their face (not all at once, although does that matter?)

Maybe you consider that normal in game dev companies, but I have to believe that's outside the norm.

The guy got suspended without pay for 2 months.

https://www.businessinsider.com/riot-games-suspends-coo-scot...

After basically one of the most massive media expose's in the games industry in the past decade.

[0]Their co-founder was being boosted by a player whilst going off about how boosting was evil and ruining the game and banning every booster they could find. Of course, I've seen a lot more about the dark side of Riot than most because [1]I've been around pro lol since before there was a cloud 9.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/533ak3/com... (apologies, some of the sites originally covering this have died since)

[1]https://lol.gamepedia.com/Pulse_Esports

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