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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

I've heard nightmare stories about working for Blizzard/Activision way before this most recent fiasco. I don't understand why anyone capable enough to work for Blizzard wouldn't work for the slew of other awesome tech companies/startups in SoCal/Irvine/LA that don't treat their employees like absolute garbage.

The current situation is shameless, and I really hope Blizzard folks jump ship en masse. There are better companies out there, the pride or fulfilment of working on "video games" isn't worth your mental health.

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People are willing to sacrifice an enormous amount to work in gaming.

The salaries are poor. The work hours are poor. The work environments are poor. The benefits are poor.

Just by those metrics they should only be able to hire bottom of the barrel Wordpress engineers. But they can get people who are far better than that.

> People are willing to sacrifice an enormous amount to work in gaming.

There are many ways you could build a good resume. Gaming companies don't have a monopoly on that.

Gaming companies do have a monopoly on working in gaming though. "Working on games" is the main motivator, not resume building.

I believe independent gaming has never been more popular.

It is, but being an indie game dev is a lot like founding a tech startup. It's extremely risky if you don't already have industry experience to understand how producing games works, and you get industry experience from well established studios.

Agreed, but it is also much worse than a tech startup. It is the most competitive and saturated market, and participants are up against prodigies of talent that work long and hard on their projects. A tech startup usually has some strategy to attack a problem, where a game is more of a creative passion project with hope of pleasing a very outspoken customer base.

They don’t work in gaming for career benefits. They want to work on games.

It may be they don't realise it, but they just want to work on stuff people visibly use.

I worked on games nearly 30 years ago and it was awesome. Did the usual corporate stuff after that, but last few years have been working at a food delivery company you know that is huge.

There is something awesome about working somewhere where your fuckups and successes are visible. I see people sat outside pubs using my app and have to have a nosey to see their reaction, bad or good. It's pretty addictive.

Game dev also skews very young (I believe - I don't have stats, sorry). I think it gets a lot of people who don't necessarily realise just how bad the culture and other aspects are compared to a lot of other jobs.

People are willing to sacrifice an enormous amount to work in _Entertainment_.

Games, Music, Movies, TV.

Its hard not to exploit people when you have constant stream of candidates begging you to work for exposure.

Here is an example casting for Netflix "TV" show, Hyperdrive, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHR66Isz3Ug where whole driver compensation amounted to 2 weeks hotel stay and plane ticket. No damage coverage (cars in $0.1-1mil range), no car prep allowance, no per diem, no insurance, no contest prizes. Produced by a woman too, Charlize Theron.

Blizzard has (or at least had) one of the most dedicated fanbases in the industry. People wanted to work there simply because it was Blizzard. Working in video games is already a "cool job" and working at Blizzard was even cooler. That creates a natural supply of workers which exceeds demand. People are therefore willing to sacrifice a tremendous amount in order to continue doing that job.

You find this same type of mistreatment of employees at a lot of "cool jobs" like in Hollywood and the sports industry. The difference is that many workers in those industries have unions to help bring balance to the natural power discrepancy.

Isn’t this a bit similar to FAANG?

Yes and no. There are certainly people who want to work at FAANG companies no matter what. However it isn't close to the same degree as a company like Blizzard.

A simple way to look at it is whether people would do that job for free. Lots of people make video games, act in local productions, or play sports for free. Doing that as a career is a dream. Not very many people have a hobby writing adtech software. This leads to better compensation and treatment for FAANG workers when compared to the video game industry because the job is inherently not as desirable.

Yes, sure I wasn’t trying to compare FAANG to Blizzard in that regard. However, there might be other aspects of working for FAANG that might be a nogo for some (e.g. privacy and/or ethical reasons), despite being state-of-art in other regards. But yes, that’s a different story.

Job seekers in game development are many. These companies will never lack developers.

They can stack warm bodies, but they seriously lack for talented developers which tends to force dumping manpower at most problems.

They still had enough momentum from their history to bring people in I guess. :/

Maybe you should mention that your explanation refers to women ... I mean some men do enjoy harrassing women and those come and stay there maybe particularly for that specific reason.

> I don't understand why anyone capable enough to work for Blizzard wouldn't work for the slew of other awesome tech companies/startups in SoCal/Irvine/LA that don't treat their employees like absolute garbage.

I think this has happened. Many times. They’ve had massive staff departures year after year after year. It’s a Ship of Theseus that’s continued sailing again and again. Anytime that all the employees leave, another fresh slew of kids will take up the name.

I don’t mean to question the talent or skill of anyone who has stuck it out the whole way. But from what I can tell, these companies just churn through fresh blood and slap the developer “brand” on at the end.

Designers of Diablo, most WoW classes, Overwatch, Starcraft, have all trickled out. Then you try and generate enthusiasm with a _different kind_ of remaster (See Diablo 2 Remastered marketing).

It’s probably a bunch of young kids, straight out of school, being told “you have a chance to make up for WC3 remastered, you can do it!”. And they even pay a few of them decent and everything.

Then they’ll push deadlines, encourage crunch out of the young blood (or hell, they’ll want to “prove something”), and the game and developers suffer.

When the game doesn’t sell well as a result? Cut all the kids and try again.

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