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Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

This is why I never, ever recommend a job in the games industry, especially for programmers, and will actively work to change people's minds who do want to make games professionally.

This isn't an exception, this type of horrendous behaviour is the norm. For an industry who's product is software, they're the worst at doing it in a sustainable and repeatedly successful way.

Find a non-games programming job, and do game development on your free time. Indy games is the way to go (just look at Minecraft), anything else is a souless meat grinder.

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I'm a programmer working on PS3 games and I am both well paid and never work over time. Never.

This year so far I have already doubled my salary in royalty checks. My company works 9-80s, so we get every other Friday off. And, if you work overtime, our management will get on your ass to stop it and go home.

So it is possible to have a normal career in games, but I guess I should count myself lucky.

Valve recently has had a good reputation for treating developers well, too.

This isn't an exception, this type of horrendous behaviour is the norm. For an industry who's product is software, they're the worst at doing it in a sustainable and repeatedly successful way.

It isn't just the games industry. Pretty much all of entertainment is like that. It is like that (and always will be, IMHO) because of the endless supply of labor. Lots of programmers want to work in the games industry, just like lots of actors want to be in the movie industry. This allows the bosses in those industries to treat their workers as disposable commodities.

Well, unfortunately conditions like these are not confined to the games industry. Psycopaths in leadership positions can most likely be found in every industry. Perhaps it's more common in the games industry, though. Or perhaps it just gets more attention, I don't know.

Seems to be a lot of horror stories about the games industry. Doesn't anyone have any more pleasant stories to share?

I liked a portion of my time in the games industry, but I don't really have much good to say about the studio where I worked: It was horribly dysfunctional like most other games studios. The positive aspects are mostly rooted in that your coworkers tend to be really driven, creative individuals.

I know of a few particular studios with a reputation for having good work environments, but in general, the nature of the industry causes bad managers and directors to rise to the top because it's impossible to reliably connect bad results with bad decisions.

On the other hand, I know lots of people who still like their industry jobs. I think for them, putting up with dysfunctional management is okay because they get enough out of the job otherwise to make it a fair trade. It's also possible to diminish the destructive effects of the job if you're strong-willed and productive - crunch is a good example. It's possible to work in the industry without working crunch more than a few weeks in your entire career.

I know of a few particular studios with a reputation for having good work environments, Are you willing to share? It would be nice to have a list of non assholes to buy games from. Enough of these articles have come out about Rockstar that I have decided not to buy from them anymore.

>Find a non-games programming job, and do game development on your free time.

Does the startup model as touted here all day not apply so well to game development? I was under the impression that the indie smash hits like braid were generally made by small startups?

A lot of it probably depends on how much art you need I guess. If you can get away with putting abstract, algorithmically generated textures on everything, that's gonna shed a lot of man hours.

Algorithmically generated textures don't necessarily have to be abstract, and there are a number of workflow benefits to using them: http://www.werkkzeug.com/examples/texture_gallery

Nothing wrong with being an indie game developer. The problem is with the culture in the corporate game houses, not something inherent to game development.

Unfortunately, these conditions are similar to those I hear about at many startups too. Games and startups are probably the two worst groups in this regard.

True, although my impression is that in most startups the folks putting in long hours actually own company stock and are hoping for a huge pay-off eventually.

The games industry is bad, but Brendan is not the norm.

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