Ubisoft's unprecedented “exodus” of developers | Hacker News Reader

Ubisoft's unprecedented “exodus” of developers

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235 pointssofixa288 comments

It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company, but very few companies actually value them accordingly. This is especially true in the gaming industry. Most companies start with great talent, but then more and more middle management comes in. Managers hire more managers so they can become senior managers. Non functional bloat starts coming in the form of sales, marketing, “strategy and ops” etc. Not saying they don’t add value, but they get hired and rewarded way more than the value they add and ultimately drown the company.

> Not saying they don’t add value, but they get hired and rewarded way more than the value they add and ultimately drown the company

I thought similarly when I was younger, but then I became a manager and realized it’s not so black and white.

Going back to IC developer (for a while) was a surprising relief from the stresses of managing people.

I know some companies let managers run wild and make devs do all the work, but most successful tech companies actually have very high demands of managers. A decent manager will be good at hiding all of the behind-the-scenes issues from the team, but I didn’t truly understand the volume of problems managers quietly deal with until I was in the role.

Google may not have "started" the whole get rid of middle management idea, but they have certainly popularised it. Only to learn later ( much like 99.9% what Google does ) that you do need middle manager. But then they have zero idea how it should work. ( much like 99.9% of their product ) May be A/B testing?

Middle Management is hard. Constantly being torn apart by top and bottom. You either have decent manager that gets your team a huge boost of productivity but stressed to burn out. Or they run wild and becomes the villain themselves. I guess this is either you die being a hero or do it long enough to become the villain.

Good middle management is hard. Bad middle management (as popularized by the pointy-haired boss of Dilbert) is easy.

Actually ...

It's equally hard to do good or bad management, since most of the time you have no idea if you're achieving either outcome - and neither does anyone else.

The problem with all forms of management is that it's completely unscientific. The main resource you're working with is a "human" which has emotions and who will respond to inputs in very different ways depending on all sorts of factors you as a manager don't know about.

And, when you put a group of "humans" together you might expect a direct increase in productivity - 6 humans should be 6x more productive right - you'd be wrong. Also, for whatever reasons the dynamics of the individual humans change in groups! They are differently productive depending on what other humans they work with! And, since there's no scientifically proven way of categorising them - you can't even tell which ones will work well with other ones.

Oh and the big joke, even if you get that working, sometimes they *change* and then some part of the group is broken for some unknown reason.

Then there's the problem of measurement, and I don't mean the team members. As a manager trying to measure the outcome of your own efforts is difficult, bordering on impossible - maybe something you did changed something, on the other hand it might be some other factor you know nothing about.

Finally, you might expect that the individual "humans" might know what makes them individually more productive. But, nope - most humans have no idea what makes them individually more productive, and then throw in a team setting and you're in a whole world of pain. Some of them think they're "analytical" and can't tell that they're dragged around by their emotions, love life, caffeine, commute or sunshine quota. There's a variety of 'received wisdom' stories they tell themselves, but it's often just a random walk.

So actually ALL management is hard, and you often have a equal chance of doing it "well" or "badly" on pretty much a daily basis. It's as hard to do it badly, as it is to do it well since most of time you're not sure if either is happening.

Don't forget that as a manager there's usually a ton of information about the humans you're in charge of helping (both up and down the chain) which you're not allowed to know, either by law or social norms, and some that you know only partly through indiscretions or observation, and even if you do know, it may be information you aren't supposed to use for your decision making. And that's before getting to the rest of the "resources" that are expected to be wrangled.

100%. And it is even worst you cant share the pain with anyone else. Unlike IC where they do get more support from other IC.

I am willing to bet, if engineers were given the chance of doing management for 3 months, more than 95% of them would want to go back debugging computer code than debugging human emotion and debugging organisation.

As a former middle manager I completely agree with this. It can be a very difficult role. I called it the the A-symmetry of knowledge. As a tech person on tools you have such a small view of the company at large and all of the other issues that are going on. Most of which you as a manager cannot/should not share with your team.

I have had tech leads come to me with solid solutions for their little slice of the world except it would be detrimental to another team or project that you can't talk about yet.

So you have to delicately tip to about your tech team with out upsetting them. Which is difficult because they largely see you as useless middle management. All this while doing the dance with the senior managers/execs justifying why your team deserves bonuses and pay rises, or taking their half baked ideas and 180 flips in directions and trying to calm them and figure out what problem it is they actually want solved.

The idea that you can’t talk about it is fundamentally flawed. If you can’t give your reports the information they need to be effective, you and the company are failing the people who get the work done.

Yup. Super common to see organizations habitually creating problems for themselves out of thin air and then becoming wildly inefficient as a result.

unless it is required by law, such as ITAR projects, a company intentionally siloing information from groups would be a huge red flag. I understand that with a company the size of Apple, that becomes a liability, and maybe thats why I prefer start ups. I need to feel like I can trust my coworkers for me to be most effective

The PHB is a line manager, not a middle manager.

> Middle Management is hard. Constantly being torn apart by top and bottom. You either have decent manager that gets your team a huge boost of productivity but stressed to burn out.

Because of this, managers are (intended to be) paid so well.

Can you explain?

If there are many people who love or can do a job, salaries typically decrease and vice versa (supply and demand).

Examples are:

- salaries for programmers are lower in game development

- the "everybody can program" hype is intended to increase the supply of programmers and thus decrease the salaries

- at least in Germany: jobs with a "social feel" like geriatric nurses are paid less, because these people are told that their job satisfies an important social responsibility

So, because middle management is so stressing, less people want to do the job, and salaries increase.

I'd like to see more evidence that the job is stressful; more than just 'it pays a lot and thus must be hard'.

Any chance you can provide some examples for issues you've encountered "behind the scenes"?

Not GP, but one example is protecting developers from pressure from higher up. When you’re a manager, you’re going to get lots of explicit or implicit questions like “you have X headcount now, why are we behind on this project? Developer Z was specifically hired for this - is he just goofing off?” And you know that the new dev has been on boarding and that docs aren’t so good and that his velocity is actually reasonable, and you basically stand in the gap between your engineers and the sharks in upper management.

That’s what it was like for me, anyway. I’m an IC again now…

Isn't that exactly what the OP is saying though. That's all fake work that's only done because the even higher ups are demanding it. It's not that the manager is bad because he's an idiot. It's that what the system asks of the manager doesn't actually make anything better.

The point is it's not fake work. In fact these types of problems just become harder the further up you go. When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. Imagine handing someone several million dollars in labor budget and just having to trust them that they're building the right things...I would be asking questions too. Coordination problems are tough.

> When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for.

If this becomes a problem, I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult.

That’s the nature of bigger companies. You can cut out middle managers and have each manager manage 200 people but… that would work exactly as you’d expect (via implicit leadership, which will go well or poorly based on mostly luck). The more people you have, the harder it is to know who and what is working well and what isn’t. Attention only goes so far.

> I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult.

Turns out the flat structure doesn't work out either; you will have a hierarchy, one way or the other (that is, planned or emergent.) I think us techies underestimate the necessity of coordination, and yet we paradoxically chafe at meetings.

at a certain size, it is inevitable.

you could not have a horizontal spunky start up land on the moon in the 60s. It is too complex and too much information to possibly transmit to everyone.

There are distinct issues and hard problems at each level of the company hierarchy.

its a lot like software architecture in a way. Getting up and running is easy in the beginning, one person can dictate how everything fits together and things are straight forward. Then as you scale, things that were easy and simple are now bottlenecks, so through refactoring, you create a more solid foundation, that if looking naively at the initial implementation is more complex and structured, but it allows a framework to handle bigger challenges. Success at this stage is how well the architecture lends itself to scaling.

Large companies require structure, and their success is dependent on how well that structure operates.

small companies need a group of smart people in a garage.

distributed systems are hard. if you're a techie worth his salt, you know this by experience earned in sweat, blood and tears. they're permanently broken in some fashion and there's a lot of work involved to just keep them running at all.

now realize that large organizations are basically distributed systems with more smaller unreliable components.

"shh" - The management

...sort of. I'm in this role myself, and I think a lot of middle management positions could at least in theory be eliminated. But it would require 'Developer Z' from the above example to have those uncomfortable conversations with management himself. Would that be a stressful distraction from the work he needs to accomplish? Almost certainly. Could it be a net savings for the company? Yes, iff the right processes/culture were in place.

Since taking this position I've started to think of middle managers as human lubrication on the gears of bureaucracy. The better the gears fit together, the fewer of us are needed. Unfortunately, we're not really incentivised to make ourselves useless, so designing better gears isn't something a lot of us spend time on. And I don't know how one could properly incentivise a whole class of mid-seniority people to work themselves out of a job.

If you've ever worked as a software developer in a small company you might have found yourself being both a developer and directly reporting to what constitutes upper management at a small company, often the owner or president of the company. I was in this situation early on in my career and managing the business side absolutely becomes a whole job, but also I think I did my best work and had a bigger impact of any job I had after because I was directly owning the outcomes of software I was writing. (Of course doing both well is incredibly challenging and often ends up resulting in poor software quality, or poor engagement with management) But it's pretty exhilarating if you can pull it off and maintain a high standard of quality.

Yeah, I think it's not so much the middle management that's the problem, but as you get higher and higher up a large company, and more abstracted from the actual work being done, there are a lot of demands for leadership. But our culture (at least in the US) kind of assumes that founders are special, ultra-people on the basis of them founding a company and providing jobs for everyone. In my actual experience, most of them are just characters ranging from the eccentric to the idiotic.

It does take a lot of vision and leadership to successfully run a large company. Unfortunately, I would argue, we tolerate a lot of unsuccessful companies.

> That's all fake work that's only done because the even higher ups are demanding it.

It's not, though. On the management side, you quickly learn that teams range from proactive (will get the job done without having to ask twice) to the most mind-bogglingly slow group of people you've ever worked with. If you're not constantly asking questions to understand each situation further, the latter group will abuse their lack of oversight to no end.

It doesn't make sense if you've always been responsible and ethical yourself, and you've always been surrounded by responsible and ethical people. But once you get into management, you realize that you can't count on everyone being honest like yourself. A small but troublesome minority of employees will take full advantage of any slack you give.

It doesn't mean you should make the situation bad for your high performers (common mistake), but it does mean that you do need to ask questions to understand what's going on when things are falling behind.

In the above example, the next management move would be to understand why the onboarding was so slow and to allocate some resources to fixing it so it doesn't happen again. Something that wouldn't happen if management hadn't started digging in to understand.

No it's not fake work, someone has to watch the organizational health, to make sure business goals can be met. Managers report up to other managers because one person can only do so much, and can't feasibly track the complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people.

> can't feasibly track the complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people.

indeed. i can't figure out what sort of organizations all of these "omg get rid of middle management" folks have worked for.

if you've got piles of middle management who only have a few reports each, well, sure, that's not great because now they've got too much time on their hands to pester you. but the other direction is no good, either.

i've seen a VP with 45 direct reports before. he didn't get much done, and shed bodies as fast as he could hire new ones. he didn't know anything about any of his people, and they didn't bother trying to take their problems to him, they just quit.

i totally agree with you. i think if you were a small product focused company, you could conceivably have engineers with a PM, and cut it off at that. why a PM? because talking to the customer and getting that feedback is a must, and potentially offloading that to someone specifically as their role sounds like a good separation of labor.

If I had my way, I’d get rid of the PM title and call them Customer Advocates.

It’s fine for non technical customer liaisons to have input, but putting non technical people in charge of a product doesn’t tend to work well in my experience.

> “you have X headcount now, why are we behind on this project? Developer Z was specifically hired for this - is he just goofing off?”

Is it protecting developers though? Or rather protecting higher ups from direct consequences of their crassness and cluelessness?

If in absence of middle manager, the upper manager said something like that to me he would have my resignation next day on his desk, along with a request for a raise and strongly worded demand to accept one of those documents.

Maybe you're a super in demand developer in a super hot job market. However for lots of people they don't have the option of quitting on the spot over someone asking a very direct question.

So yes the Manager is protecting them, and helping set expectations for the higher ups.

Replace higher up with Customer and you get the same system. Customer demands something unreasonable, that doesn't get filtered to the team that is working on that feature as it's just a distraction to them. Let them do the job and execute on the roadmap as planned.

I was just directly told that I was specifically hired to do this project that is behind schedule and important and they have no idea how to make it go faster (because they are bugging me) so they don't have another person that could do my job and they can't afford delay it even further to look for a person to replace me.

If there's a better moment to negotiate, I don't know what it might be.

Would hearing this be distracting for me? Sure it would be. But it's not me who would get to pay for my distractions. So it's 100% of protecting higher ups not developers.

And that's the point: It's much more efficient to have one person to run interference for a team of 5+ developers rather than having them all fight with the CTO directly. They are paying, in part, to avoid have to deal with you directly.

The higher you go with management, the more blunt the conversations. Things aren't sugar-coated and the questions are straight to the point. That's not necessarily an accusation, but it is a clear prompt for an answer.

One of the things I learned very quickly was that I was naive to assume that all developers were diligently working on their tasks with reasonable effort. At first I assumed everyone was working just like I did as an IC: Straight to work, focusing until the task is done, and enjoying the satisfaction of finishing things. Unfortunately, a surprising number of developers won't do any work unless they're constantly pressured by managers.

Junior managers often need help identifying the latter and understanding how to performance manage people. It was actually surprisingly common for a new or junior manager to hire an unexpectedly underperforming employee and not have any real idea how to manage their performance. Or worse, they might hire someone who become actively toxic to the team and not understand how to deal with it.

Stepping in to help performance manage, or eventually remove the problem employee, was actually very critical as it prevented all of the good performers on the team from quitting. Few things will destroy morale as quickly as a deadbeat showing up on a team and dragging everybody down with no consequences.

From the employee perspective: Have you ever had a teammate who didn't pull their weight? Imagine how frustrating it is if management is clueless about the person's relative lack of performance and isn't bothering to investigate why there isn't any output. Eventually you're going to get sick of doing their work for them.

maybe it can be worded nicer, but this attitude seems myopic. Business people need to do business. Accounting does not operate on the swe/self declared tech artisan mindset of taking offense to any questions regarding timelines.

just give them the information they want. If they don't like the truth, that is a different issue. They are asking you, because you have more intimate knowledge of the situation.

I'm not the OP but I'll describe a "behind the scenes" situation I dealt with.

I inherited a team of seven working on a project. They were led by a very strong personality who led the project based on his principles (he was interested in funneling as much corporate money into "free software" as possible while resisting delivery of business value). He'd been running the project for a long time by the time I inherited the team. One of the upper level folks gave me a call on Thursday and said, "In the operations call on Wednesday I'm going to propose killing that project because it's gone off the rails. We can use the money elsewhere. Just giving you a heads up".

I spent the weekend figuring out how to pivot the majority of the staff into other projects, use staffing as-needed to develop features for business need, and provide a minimal maintenance budget. I called the guy who wanted to kill it on Monday, presented the plan, and he said he'd sign off on it.

When I told the lead that the project will need to change he was outraged. He accused me of abandoning free software blah blah blah. I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team by working 32 hours on my weekend and finding them other work to do.

> I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team by working 32 hours on my weekend and finding them other work to do.

Save the day by investing your free time into making things work, then collect outrage anyway. Management in a nutshell! Great anecdote.

> They were led by a very strong personality who led the project based on his principles (he was interested in funneling as much corporate money into "free software" as possible while resisting delivery of business value).

I've dealt with someone similar. It's strange how certain people can work their way into management while actively fighting against the company's mission. Of course, it doesn't work out well for themselves, the company, or the team they manage.

> I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team

Why not tell them?

Not OP, so I don't have the full context, but here's an example I can think of where telling him isn't a good idea:

Depending on that lead's personality he may "go over your head" and start complaining directly to _your_ boss. Which means you'll be dragged into yet another 30+ minute meeting when your schedule is already packed with meetings.

Part of your job as a middle manager is to not only shield people below you from unnecessary drama, but shield people above and beside you from unnecessary drama also.

This is where you have to use your past experiences with each individual person to gauge how to act. Do this for long enough, and grinding leetcode an hour a night for 2 months and just going back to moving tickets left to right at a FAANG company for (oftentimes) more money starts looking appealing.

But then you have some days where everything goes great, a major project is shipped without any issues, and/or you're able to (finally) give a promotion to someone who deserves it which makes it all worth it.

I ended up switching into speaking/training. All the pros of management (mentoring people, getting to speak) all the pros of coding (coding training materials is fun and simple, zero tech debt to worry about) and less responsibility on both sides.

Budget cuts / pressure. Justifying headcount. Justifying value of the team. VIP requests for stupid reports / features / meetings. Questions about schedule, scope, etc. Politics. Stupid meetings. Stupid emails. Good managers will shield you from all of this. A good manager will let you work and create the perception that everything is ok above him, when in reality its a series of constant battles and high stakes poker.

Endless negotiations with higher ups, customers,... Finding a way to fill the gap when the guy who everyone relies on just left. Find some work to do when things are slow, and make rushes more manageable. Take estimates from different people, all unreliable, the availability for their teams, and make a somewhat realistic planning. Convert developer time into money and plan a budget. Find the correct methodology and customize it (doing things "by the book" never works).

The more I work as a developer, the more I appreciate the work of good managers, and the less I want to do it.

> good managers

And that's the key - good managers.

Now, I think that it's pretty hard for most people to identify good vs bad managers, and that's why a lot of people who aren't sensitive to the difference get into the mindset of "management is a bunch of toxic leeches who don't add any value to the company".

Interestingly enough, it's also pretty hard for most people to identify good an bad developers - but most people aren't developers. It's far easier for those that are.

This raises an interesting question - is it harder for managers to identify bad managers than it is for developers to identify bad developers? What about the ease of developers identifying bad managers vs managers identifying bad developers?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's harder to recognize good/bad managers - management is all about abstracting away the stuff under you for the next level up, after all.

But, I also wouldn't be surprised if the problem comes down to something else other than identification - maybe bad managers are more prone to keep bad managers around than bad programmers are to keep other bad programmers around...

It's at times like this that I wish that I had more experience in the corporate world...

I just moved back to IC from manager.

Communication between teams on feature alignment (read: tons of meetings), planning my team's sprint workload, dealing with other manager's politics/bullshit, dealing with Directors political bullshit, etc. It's a huge time sink away from actual engineering.

True, but I don't think it's the same for second and third level managers.

Basically, you as a manager do all the hard work.

The boss of your boss... he can do some hard work, or he can just rely on you and the other direct managers, and simply get the benefits.

OK.

- you manage managers of three teams globally with 6 employees each.

- you know that your best IC is about to go on parental leave

- three others are either leaving or moving to another team in the next year

- your european team’s manager is not meshing at all and there’s pressure from all directions to fix it

- after shuffling or firing the european manager (who you genuinely like personally,) you suddenly have 8 direct reports you need to meet with weekly and support

- new teams form with overlapping responsibilities and you have to create a relationship with that team and its leadership so no one steps on the other’s foot and there isn’t confusing ownership

- you hire a new european manager and now you have to fly overseas and train them, while at the same time handling issues for your home team and your own personal responsibilities

- in the middle of all this and while your schedule is peppered with interviews to conduct, some random high-visibility initiative with no owner and outside your area of expertise gets assigned to you.

I’ve seen directors suddenly get 30 new ICs three levels below them and have to somehow write their reviews. It ain’t all pretty.

Isn't it fascinating how many of the problems managers deal with are side-effects of a lack of good management?

People have babies, people change jobs, new hires don't work out. All of these things are known. You identified them as risks and planned accordingly, right?

> some random high-visibility initiative with no owner and outside your area of expertise gets assigned to you

Oh, I see.

I'm generally supportive of the idea that managers (and managers' managers' managers..) are in many places a value-add and it's hard to get to such roles by coasting, however I also am sympathetic with many of the cynical takes and think there's a lot out there in the world of open source and startups and small businesses supportive of less management. One take is I think management frequently create unnecessary problems for themselves that of course can only be solved with more management. Take for instance:

> you suddenly have 8 direct reports you need to meet with weekly and support

You really, really don't need to meet each of them weekly. Not even necessarily monthly. Depending on the individual, some you might need to meet more than others, but the idea that you need to meet each one weekly is a self-imposed problem that of course robs you of at least a full work day, and past a certain scale requires more managers to handle. This is ignoring the content of the meetings, which if you get into make the case even worse for management, because so often a short email exchange or even a short Slack exchange suffice for what otherwise would have been 30 mins to an hour. (One of my managers was rather skilled at digging out of me over the course of our 1-on-1s some of the minor problems/issues I felt were present with the team/company that I otherwise wouldn't have brought up in an email/IM (and if I did not more than once), but given that they never changed or went away in 6 years, and that I had already made peace with them, what was the point?)

Same thing with conducting a ton of interviews -- delegate to ICs of the team the candidate is likely to join! It's your own doing that you insist on having a screening chat with every candidate, or that you have this many candidates you're considering at once, or that you hire into a general "pool" where team selection/assignment happens later.

Same thing with the needing to suddenly write the reviews for 30 people -- the need for those reviews is entirely a self-imposed problem, and could be done away with or altered. (e.g. relying on ICs reviewing each other, or using objective metrics, or having an easier firing process than long PIP dramas, or just bumping everyone's pay regardless to keep up with inflation, or...)

Unfortunately system problems can typically only be done away with (rather than 'solved' with management work / more management) by someone at a higher level than you, whose higher role is in part supported by the problems existing in the first place.

> You really, really don't need to meet each of them weekly.

Somebody needs to. It's important to put in the time building relationships so that people are comfortable coming to you with concerns and so that you can recognize their patterns and notice when there's something they're not telling you.

Exactly. All of a sudden debugging human problem is 10x harder than trying to debug your codebase. Multiply that by the number of direct report. Not to mention managers that may not have actual power or have their own politics to battle with.

Have you been a manager of managers? This sounds like the same problem the GP described (the problems are invisible until you are in the role).

An upper level management job can be very stressful. You have very little visibility into progress or issues, but are responsible for setting direction and making decisions with many consequences. If you get involved, you’re called a micromanager. If you don’t, you’re out of touch.

Cross-organizational pushes become harder, with more inertia, and more perverse incentives dragging things down. You spend all your time debugging the mess of an organization, not on the things that brought you to the industry.

It can be a very stressful, unpleasant job. I am not trying to claim it’s harder, or that the pay is proportionate or whatever. But the idea that they can rely on the work of others, coast by, and get the benefits is not at all true from what I have seen.

I worked mostly in startups and FAANG, maybe other sectors are different.

> the mess of an organization

Management is responsible for the organization, hence why comments about how hard it is to deal with a messy organization tend to fall on unsympathetic ears.

Just as developers are responsible for the codebase. Yet folks seem rather receptive to the concept of technical debt. It’s not much of stretch to imagine organizational debt caused by pesky human problems.

I'm not denying the existence of organizational debt.

I'm saying managers justifying how important and difficult their jobs are by pointing to all the organizational debt they deal with are missing the point.

I agree that’s what happens in practice, but it’s quite silly. The right organizational structure depends on the problems being solved, but the business’s problems are always changing - either because of new technology, or competitors, or changing economics, or something else. Tech moves ludicrously fast, so the structure put in place 5 years ago is unlikely to make sense today.

It's not just structure.

A shocking number of managers don't even manage. They just run around putting out fires caused by a lack of management. Organizations can get stuck in this mode and it's really hard to pull them out of it, for sure, but just because someone's navigating a stressful and dysfunctional organization doesn't necessarily mean they're doing a great job at management.

This. Debugging the organization is a great way to describe it.

Oh I like this I am going to steal it from now on. I use Debugging human to describe it. But Debugging organisation is just so much better. This also follows Conway's law.

>Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

And reorgs are often the managerial equivalent of a code refactor.

I've worked in and with hundreds of enterprises, and literally never seen this in practice. As one gets further into management the work has longer-term deliverables, and many of those deliverables are invisible to managers and individuals below them. Put another way, the work product of a good executive is effective long-term decision-making. Of course it's harder to see the effects of this day-to-day.

The daily work of a senior leader is mostly communication, alignment, and politics (i.e., resource allocation). From the outside (and sometimes the inside!) this looks like "lots of bullshit meetings." Coasting at this level simply means that your priorities aren't fulfilled, your initiatives fail, you're cut out of important decisions.

Sorry dude, that's not true, and is very naïve.

When you're an IC, you have no idea what your manager does. You have even less of an idea of what your manager's manager does.

I know I was naive about direct management until I tried it and realized just how much they do that I never was aware of. And as I became a more senior IC, now working directly with senior managers (managers of mangers), I found out just how much they're involved with.

At high-intensity high-output companies (including gaming ones), it's very rare that senior managers end up just resting on their laurels and letting the line managers do all the work.

First of all, it's an all-encompassing job. You are effectively oncall for various escalations, personnel issues, priority/project issues, conflicting incentives - you are responsible for all the people underneath you, and all the conflicts that might occur that direct managers don't handle - they escalate to you. At that level, there is no expectation of work-life balance, you might get called in the evening/weekend to deal with something. While you're detached from the depth, you are responsible for way more breadth.

Secondly, line managers are still expected to be primarily focused on their technical projects and their people. Senior managers have to start dealing with Legal, Marketing, Sales, Facilities, office issues, christmas party organization, press release, etc. Sure, some of it is just coordination and delegation, but the point is that you have to organize all sorts of disparate considerations that frankly are not in technical people's forte. This arguably becomes 50% or more of the job, and this is where things get really tough. Do you want someone technical for this that will be MISERABLE spending time on 50% of their job, and not doing an amazing job at it? Or do you want some MBA type that will be great, but then have no credibility with their team, no ability to influence the techncial direction, because their people will sniff out their technical weaknesses and not respect them for it.

Naturally none of this is universal. There are exceptions of exactly what you're imagining - someone that just steps back, lets everyone else do the work, and they aggregate/summarize and take all the credit. But I don't think those are actually the majority.

> frankly are not in technical people's forte

Amusing to see this attitude on HN in the 21st century. Have not the last 20 years of startup successes having very technical founders successfully transition to more managerial roles more than demonstrated otherwise?

It would seem to me founders, technical or not, would be well suited to management positions with a lot of control/freedom since that is likely not so different from starting a business, except scaled up.

Is your suggestion that they wouldn't do well in more constrained middle management roles? Perhaps (I don't really agree), but then does coming from the other side with the whole idea of "technical managers" and ICs "retiring into management" (many later ending up as high as any level you want to pick with various domains of focus -- some even go get MBAs!) matter to you? I find it laughable to create a technical/non-technical dichotomy as it relates to predictive managerial suitability (programmers deal with absurd complexities in software, but somehow aren't suitable to organize a Christmas party?) and even fundamental preferences. The father of quality management (Deming, whom more people in software should read, especially managers) was himself quite technical.

Maybe you're right. My overarching point to OP who was doubting what managers-of-managers do, is that this a big part of the job, and it takes time, and effort.

There is also a big difference between doing these things as the CEO of a 100-person startup, where every choice you make is a reflection of you, a reflection of the culture you're setting up, and contribute to the legacy that YOUR company will have, vs as the Sr. Manger of a 100-person org in a huge company, where ultimately it's not your company.

No, absolutely not. Going from a beeing an expert into a new management role is almost a different career, and there’s no predisposition for « technical people » to succeed at it.

There's no predisposition for them to not succeed at it either on account of them being technical. That's my point, drawing a technical/non-technical dichotomy for who is best suited a priori for management (let alone organizing Christmas parties) is silly, and extremely old fashioned given the broad successes of technical people switching to management at every level from front line to CEO over the last decades.

I think management simply has way more variance, and maybe, I'm not sure, more expected returns.

as someone who is considering switching to a management role, what has been your experience as a prior developer, and now coming back, do you feel like you have lost any "edge" being an IC? Also what new perspectives have carried over? I think I'm hoping to get basic team building and management skills to one day start a business, my preference is to be by myself struggling with technical problems, but I see the value in the management skill set

A decent manager isn't so different from a scrum master in the agile world. A good manager is an intentional bottleneck; they are careful about what gets through the pipeline.

"hiding all the behind-the-scenes issues" that COME from the management/ops/marketing/sales layer. it's kinda like a snake eating it's tail.

Enough people seem to want to work on gaming, even under the extreme conditions, for devs to not be very valuable in that context.

Passions projects as a job can be very expensive.

While there are lots of people trying to break into the industry, the real question is how good are they? Building games is hard work.

It's just an anecdote, but one dev told me at the studio he worked on, his project had 22 engineers assigned, but just 3 devs ultimately contributed 90% of the code written. And while those 3 devs were very skilled developers, he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers. They've all since moved on to greener pastures doing work outside the industry making substantially more money.

>he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers

Well, sounds like they were more like 7x engineers /s

Actually since it was the gaming industry, they were probably 4X engineers. Which would also explain whey they went to a different industry, because that genre frequently seems to be on the brink of dying out.

Or maybe the other 19 were 0.1x engineers? ;)

Mythical Man Month in a nutshell no? He could have dropped 19 engineers and paid 3 engineers more money to make it work.

Oh yeah, 10x engineers. The kind of people who create an hostile and exclusionary club where only they can move around the mental maze they created. Personally I just call them 'complexity bubbles' and just like the real estate bubbles it's never those responsible who suffer the consequences.

Well depends on the definition. 10x engineers in my book, ensure that the system is maintainable, simple enough for the problem, well thought and readable.

Consequences also can be extremely subjective. I have the experience of a single team architecting/coding the core of the system to ensure nobody ever adds any kind of concurrency because "it's hard to reason with and we want nobody to spawn threads." Let us say the networking layer teams were not excited about this. Who is right and who is wrong: both teams had "consequences" to deal with.

I guess I was unlucky. The last two places I've worked with, taking shortcuts were the best way to get promoted. The rest of the team weren't '10x' because they spent most of their time cleaning up the mess.

Oh no, I unfortunately agree. Taking shortcuts and politics in a lot of companies is the way to the top. I guess my bubble has a more idealistic '10x'er definition @TeeMassive.

They wouldnt be 10x if they they were actually a net negative.

You were lucky enough not to work for people who can't see beyond quarterly results and with no understanding of what technical debt is.

It has to become a workforce that skews young and inexperienced, if older and/or more experienced developers (such as those with families) have options to go to the studios that don’t do permanent crunch time?

I’m getting the feeling from some recent AAA games (looking at you EA/DICE) that quality is going down with each released game while spin-off studios pop up indicating to an outsider that some “core” competence has left.

Yeah, a lot of big studios are struggling to produce quality games. Gameplay is recycled, graphics and effects feel tacked-on and too expensive for what they are. Ray-traced puddle reflections and 80GB of assets aren't a surefire way to an immersive experience.

All that seems symptomatic of under-investing in development, especially the exploratory & creative type of development, i.e. R&D. At least Epic has spent some of that Fortnite money on building great tech for UE5, it seems, and that will get proliferated through use of their engine and matched by competitors in time.

If you're unable to retain the people with the necessary skills, it doesn't matter how high the demand for the field is.

There are very few people with relevant graphics programming skills. Who cares if 10000 undergrads wanting to be game devs if none of them know C++, and even fewer know what a pointer is.

You may think I'm joking, but even undergrads coming out of the most elite institutions have no knowledge of these things.

How the hell you gonna explain compute shaders to a guy like that? You can only license out these problems to third party tools so much. Epic isn't going to come in and save you when you fuck up the release.

That's poor reasoning - there are several million people willing to be president, but 99.999% of them (possibly 100%) aren't capable of doing the job

I don't think it's a good comparison. There's literally one job opening for US President every 4 years. Ubisoft alone hires thousands of people per year.

I believe there are lots of people who have a strong desire to get into the game industry and will accept low pay, miserable work environments and uninteresting assignments to "get their foot in the door" because building games is a "dream job" to many young people going into software development. Little do they realize that there aren't very many people who get to single-handedly invent and code up the next big game hit. They're going to spend approximately 0% of their time creating kick-ass gameplay and awesome pixel shaders, and almost all of their time doing something mundane like being the expert on the "loading..." screen or figuring out why the menu animations glitch in this one weird scenario.

Large game companies make a significant percentage of their revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely people with an addiction control problem.

Most developers want to make games like they would want to play them. That means no grinding, no pay to win, no taking advantage of your players. But if you run your studio that way, you're way less profitable than the competition which is managed by greedy sharks and fully "monetizes" (=exploits) anyone who's willing to touch microtransactions. For stock market companies, having competitive numbers is a big deal or else you'll pay through the nose for borrowing the $200 mio that a AAA game will cost.

In short, "the market" makes sure that game companies become exploitative, and true believers leave to fund their own indie studio.

But that means I disagree with you that senior management adds no value. They do precisely what they were hired for, which is to make sure the studio has a good stock price and, hence, enough money to finance future games. It's just that most developers hate em, and for good reason.

> Large game companies make a significant percentage of their revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely people with an addiction control problem.

Yes but those companies are freemium or in-app purchases "games" which is AFAIK a completely different model than Ubisoft which sells $60 games once like FarCry or Assassins Creed.

Not completely different... The newer installments in both of those games have substantial levels of in-app purchases. To an increasing extent, the $60 purchase price for a AAA game is being subsidized by continuing aesthetic purchases, loot boxes, content subscriptions, and opportunities to buy gameplay capability.

It's probably not quite that black and white.

You need business smarts too if you want to succeed. Ion Storm is a good example as it was everything contemporary Ubisoft is not. It was a very developer-run shop that out of one office produced critically acclaimed Deus Ex, but at the same time produced flop-of-the-ages Daikatana.

It's a tricky balancing act. You can definitely have too much business influence over the creative process. Ubisoft would never produce a flop like Daikatana, but neither would it produce a gem like Deus Ex.

https://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/imagine-wedding-designer disagrees with you :P

Ubisoft is actually good at making crap games. For example they bought a Brazillian studio that was often contracted to do some cool hunting games. Then they forced the studio to pump low-score after low-score NDS games (Wedding Designer was one of them), there was tons of executive meddling, then they said the studio that was crap and closed it down.

Thing is, at the time it was literally the best studio in Brazil, and this incident caused some damage to Brazillian games industry :(

Ubisoft crap is another kind of crap compared to Daikatana crap. Ubisoft essentially produces shovelware, from their flagship AAA-titles down to their obscure NDS titles.

It's all sure bets with low creative risk, which makes every sense if you are primarily pandering to shareholders.

Some extra context: those two games were made by entirely different teams. Daikatana was built by John Romero's team, and Deus Ex was made by Warren Spector's team. I don't think there was much collaboration or even communication between the teams. Romero just bankrolled Spector, who happened to have quite a bit more experience, and was likely much better suited to the director role.

> very few companies actually value them accordingly

This is something that has definitely gone through waves a few time during my life time.

In particular I remember the early startup era (~2010) developers were treated very well (though I don't think they were ever treated that great in the games industry). Ironically they weren't paid as ridiculously as today, but they tended to play a much larger role in the company, and their time was treated as very valuable.

Back then startups would be a team of engineers, a designer, a marketer with all of the product vision coming from CEO or maybe as very senior product role (typically cofounder). The contemporary world filled with PMs would have seemed (and still does to some of us) foreign to anyone at the time.

The truth is industry tends to despise a "monopoly on talent", and so we've seen the bureaucratization of the industry. The rise of boot camps has worked to devalued the skills of a talented engineer (though it might be harder now than before to hire talent), interviews are formalized into a robotic screening processes, and the current structure of teams, largely driven by PMs/product owners, has radically devalued the input form engineers in the way the product is developed.

If you have been in the industry less that 10 years you'd be surprised how much say engineers used to get in at the start of the most recent tech boom, as well as how different the hiring process was. In 2011 the two biggest signals for interviews were a strong github page and especially OSS contribution. Passionate, curious software engineers were the most sought after people and they were considered very much a part of the leadership of a company, driving it's culture and success.

Today engineers have been more or less reduced to hot-swappable drones across the industry.

Interesting post. I think what happened was that there used to be an idea that good tech was an important competitive advantage. Therefore, highly competent developers were listened to. But the industry came to realize that it's not better tech that wins, but underhanded, addictive, and deceptive tech. Engineers in my experience aren't motivated to use their engineering power to deceive, so if your goal is to use software to monetize users by violating their privacy, you need someone else at the helm of that ship.

I think the industry has foiled itself recently through sheer scale. The number of niche roles has exploded and with it, so too the depth of the software stack. The good talent in any subsection ends up going deeper than they can be trained or evaluated for. The rest tread water and add noise to the pipeline. As a result there is an increasing sense of nobody knowing what's going on and compensation being poorly correlated with talent, meaning many orgs can't handle their technical challenges and don't know it until it blows up.

The actual solution would be to be suspicious of software as an end and relinquish more control of it to the open-source commons so that they can optimize their core business. But that can't happen if your core business is "being a platform," and as we know, platforms are where the big profits lie anyway. So it's going to go on like this until we cycle out of the current software stacks and move into ones with different social arrangements at their core.

... and inevitably, the C-suite is replaced by people with a management or finance background, and no game creation experience, who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has been the story of game studios since forever.

> ...who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has been the story of game studios since forever.

Has it?

Everyone loves to dunk on EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Blizzard-Activision, etc, for producing mountains of AAA shovelware[1], but the big players in the industry seem to undergo a pretty normal rate of growth, death, and merger for large companies.

It's entirely possible (Likely, even!) that under better management[2], they'd be more successful, but I wouldn't say that gaming firms are driven into the ground by managers any more frequently than they are in any other industry.

There's certainly a high rate of bankruptcy and death in small and medium-sized gaming companies, but I feel that has more to do with the incredibly speculative and inconsistent nature of cashflow, and the high cost of securing funding in the industry.

[1] Given that people have been dunking on these firms for that reason for the past decade, they sure are taking a long time to be driven into the ground...

[2] The bar for 'better management' is pretty damn low for some of the firms I've mentioned.

I'd argue that modern day EUSB etc. are what we see, precisely because they've eaten the corpses of the referenced failures.

EA today isn't EA of the late-80s / early-90s. It's essentially something named "EA" that managed to smartly buy assets of failed companies.

The funding difficulties and cyclical nature of revenue is real, but I guess that's why you see a similar model evolve in movie production.

Take a look through the developers during the early part of EA's history (for example): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_game...

There were none that I could find that hadn't gone through this exact pattern: (1) be bought by larger publisher, (2) lose key creative talent, (3) close as an entity and have remaining employees folded into larger corporate teams.

You'd think if average "big game publisher-developer" management were beneficial to developers, you wouldn't get subsequent failure so reliably.

The reason they were bought by a larger publisher is either because the owners got their exit, or, more frequently, because when you live publisher-paycheck-to-publisher-paycheck, all it takes is one flop to sink your development studio. Your publisher then buys your carcass, and its IP and team for a song.

I don't think you can blame the management, as much as you can blame the funding model. (And the funding model is such because banks aren't interested in lending money for speculative creative projects, and neither are VCs.)

> You'd think if average "big game publisher-developer" management were beneficial to developers, you wouldn't get subsequent failure so reliably.

I wouldn't say it's beneficial, but it's the only way that most of them can get the money to fund their projects.

The share prices and revenue numbers of these allegedly driven-into-the-ground companies seems to tell the opposite story.

Marvel movies are the top of the line financially, but they are all the same basic formula, and they're effectively film versions of old comic storylines.

When was the last time you saw actually original (as in, not based on last year's surprisingly successful novel), creative, non-"mainstream" movies at your city's cinema? Interstellar or (to a certain extent, given that the plot was more or less copied from Pocahontas) Avatar, likely.

Anything else is moved off to niche/arthouse cinema or straight to DVD/Netflix.

With games, it's the same. Innovation has been sorely lacking in many genres from racing to shooters - it's all remasters, microtransactions, free to play and advertising bullshit these days or the atrocity that Rockstar made out of GTA 3/VC/SA. Last actually innovative game in the shooter genre probably was Borderlands.

>With games, it's the same. Innovation has been sorely lacking in many genres from racing to shooters - it's all remasters, microtransactions, free to play and advertising bullshit

Sure, but that's just the thing, actually. Gamers overindex on what _they_ like, which simply isn't what the general public cares about.

"Video game players" as opposed to "gamers" really want two things: they want to play Madden or FIFA with the newest rosters and the best graphics. And then they want to take a break and play the Call of Duty game with the best graphics.

Why do these AAA studios need to innovate when this formula doesn't just work - it's doing absolutely excellent? We have indie studios to satisfy gamers' creative-game needs.

Avatar and Interstellar, both made with enormous budgets by overwhelmingly successful directors, are weird examples to use for "non-mainstream".

In fact, most of the Oscar Best Picture nominees from 2020 [0] meet that description better than the movies you cited (not sure what was in theaters last year, but most of them were readily available from a mainstream source; I'm sure that in a normal year most would have been in mainstream theaters).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Picture...

> When was the last time you saw actually original[...], creative, non-"mainstream" movies at your city's cinema?

Encanto (11/24)

King Richard (11/19)

Last Night in Soho (10/29)

The French Dispatch (10/22)

Great point, it does actually seem that these metrics don’t necessarily correlate with good products or even a useful definition of value unless you’re a shareholder.

It is almost the natural progression I would say. Steve Jobs talked about it with regards to Xerox in a famous interview where technology gets you to a dominant position, but marketing monetizes that position so there will be a natural progression in leadership favoring marketers who become responsible for much of the growth after a certain point over developers.

Just looking at video games, the most profitable games now aren't AAA games with super immersive graphics, worlds, stories and so on, it is the mobile gacha games with simple graphics and simple mechanics that are basically predatory in how they are able to ingrain and establish themselves into a routine while they siphon money away from a certain demographic of their user base. These days AAA games are mostly AAA in their cost to produce, few are innovative, or produce better gameplay or tell better stories than what is being made by smaller indie studios. Most are just pretty to look at if you have a beefy video card that can crank the settings up.

Well the most successful gacha game is a AAA game with a pretty nice story, a very large and detailed world, fairly complex mechanics, etc..., So it's clear those things still have a lot of value.

I always figured the gaming industry gets away with its treatment of workers because there's always a new crop of naïve people whose dream is to make games, so they can burn them out, and then just toss them away, and then suck in the new crop. Other sectors can't get away with it as easily because no one says, "It's been dream since childhood to make auto insurance more profitable."

This is what seems toxic about the entire "enterprise" (i.e. not indie) video game industry.

It's figuratively (and sometimes literally) the equivalent of someone cruising college bars looking for folks "willing to be paid for a few private pictures."

Take someone with hopes, dreams, aspiration, pay them the minimum you can get away with (that due to their stage of life seems like a lot), dress up the entire experience with pomp and fun and free snacks, tell them how they're going to change the world, extract every ounce of profit you can from them, at the expense of their life, health, and career, and then dump them by the side of the road and GOTO 10.

It's a fundamentally exploitive business, and it shows in the salaries (especially vs work volume expectations). At least MAMAA pay sufficiently well that it's a mutually beneficial deal to employee and employer.

Exploitation is prevalent in the indie sphere as well. Lots of people with little leadership or business experience pulling all sorts of shady stuff and paying worse.

I guess my perspective on the indie sphere is "well, that's what happens with random people."

IMHO we should all expect a 50+ headcount company to be better though. Like, have a business model that doesn't require screwing people over & have functional HR.

Yeah, the idea that major game studio is a toxic hellscape of harassment with HR being so incredibly dysfunctional, is really mind blowing, and yet that's exactly the state of the industry.

The "HR exists to protect the company" explanation for bad HR irks me too. HR exists to do whatever the C-suite tells them priorities are.

If leadership says "Decrease harassment AND protect the company," then that's a thing HR can do. Or they could not, or say "but make sure to give anyone that makes the company a lot of money a free pass," and HR doesn't try.

Yeah, that's my interpretation too from talking to and reading about people's experiences in the industry. (Disclaimer: I don't work and have never worked in the computer games industry myself)

Unfortunately it seems par for the course for many "flashy" creative professions. There's a much larger influx of people wanting to work in the industry than actual jobs, so employers take advantage of the situation to press down wages and treat people like shit (say, unpaid internships).

Unpaid internships should be illegal. Not only are they exploitive, but they also classist.

The ability to ensure you get “the right kind of person” is the probably real reason for them. It’s no different that legacy admissions really.

This is a major problem with the “one guy is in charge” model of running a business. All these employees care about how the company treats people but this one guy is willing to be a jerk and not apologize and now all these employees have little recourse but to quit.

Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote them as needed. Instead we get the mess that is Ubisoft.

I've always wondered why worker co-ops aren't more common in software. It seems like the industry would be particularly well-suited for it.

I think most importantly they are paid decently. The ambitious career developer on coke or medication became more common recently, but is still an outlier and not the type to start worker rebellions either.

Smaller developers work in very cooperative endeavours. While some form of work councils don't need to be antagonistic to management, there often is simply no need of something like this in smaller studios.

Game development is an extremely high risk endeavour in any case. A large developer like Ubisoft can dampen that risk a bit, but insecurity remains. This is a large driver while they will use established formulas much more often than smaller indie devs. A union does make sense in some industries, but tariffs would probably lead to worse conditions and leave the individual dev with less choice. Currently many employers do quite a lot to accommodate devs.

The two primary motivations for building a startup are money and independence/freedom. Why would someone with that priority go and constrain themselves with the whims of others?

Dont forget ego: "why would I give control over _my_ idea, over _my_ company that _I_ created to simpletons without ideas, without ability or will to execute?" This ego is also why software devs are allergic to unions.

Depends on your definition of startup but a lot of people want to solve a problem that is important to them and they are smart enough to set their ego aside and recognize that they will produce a better solution if they collaborate with others and ensure those people have an equal stake.

Silicon Valley has deep roots in individualist capitalism. You don’t get big US government contracts to design transistors in the 1950’s and 1960’s if you’re a worker cooperative. Silicon Valley was created under McCarthyism and anti-communism which also opposes labor rights movements. Since the 1980’s worker cooperatives have not been very popular in the USA, but they do seem like they would present an antidote to the worker-abusing poverty-wage paying mega corps we have today.

Union. If you can set wages and benefits you can also set business direction and other working conditions that effect company health. The history of business regulation is strewn with arbitrary policies examples set by "the guy in charge."

Unions are one solution but to me they seem inferior to cooperatives if we’re talking about ideals. A union has a somewhat adversarial relationship with management. Why not just have the workers be the management? Of course unions serve a purpose in that workers can’t own an Amazon warehouse but they could unionize one. But I seem them as transitional rather than the ideal.

> Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote them as needed.

So, when has that ever worked, apart maybe a small startup between friends?

I mean if it works for 82,000 people in the 65 year old Mondragon Corporation in Spain, I’m sure it could work for Ubisoft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Maybe what you mean is “if it works why isn’t it common” which is a much more nuanced question. I would say that McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the USA had a huge negative impact on the labor movement, and there has been a big propaganda push for individualist capitalism (which benefits the powerful) since then. People seem to think that if an idea isn’t common today, it’s not a good idea. But that ignores the possibility of an idea whose time as come, or a new good idea that hasn’t been tried yet.

Of course cooperatives are not new. Credit unions are member owned cooperatives. And of course there are many individually owned worker cooperatives. I’ll leave that for you to research but do see this directory of Bay Area cooperatives.

https://nobawc.org/

And then those friends are in charge and the new employees are just grunts.

https://mipmip.org/tidbits/boat-race.html

From my experience there's a bit more dynamics in there. In particular the publishing agreements(I've been privy to a few) are structured in ways that the developer takes a substantial amount of risk and very rarely gains the reward of a breakout hit. Things like the first royalty doesn't come in until all development + marketing costs(which can be as much as dev) are paid back. Caps on payouts for companies or individual employees, etc.

The structure is much closer to what you see in the recording industry contracts , there's even been cases in the past of publishers denying milestone payments during peak burn to put the company into bankruptcy to gain the IP + source and then re-hire the dev-team back at 70% salary. Combine that with an robust supply of fresh faces trying to "break-in" it's not really a surprise the industry is the way it is.

If you're on the dev side of the industry you've got quite a few options to exit, if you're in art there's less options since a lot of adjacent industries have similar conditions(I've heard from past co-workers that the animation industry is even more brutal).

It's really a shame since there's some really fun technical problems to be solved and a lot of creativity but that ultimately gets exploited into the state it is today. It could be a better industry but it isn't. For those that want to build games I usually recommend doing it as a side project, there's a high probability that you can work on a genre you like(I never did during my time in industry) and you aren't subject to the state of the industry.

That’s what I’m curious about - what does it look like to build a company for & run by engineers?

I used to think middle management was the thing to eliminate. But then I learned - middle managements’ job is to protect their team from disconnected leadership.

I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but I’m committed to finding out how to create a great place for engineers and their creativity. My co-founder & I created a company just to do that. Mostly it’s about avoiding inputs that drive exploitive management. We don’t take outside capital, we fire clients if they don’t treat our engineers well, just shedding anything that seems to be or proves to be exploitive.

We’re already finding out just how much it matters - the people we hire are having the most fun they’ve ever had.

The money we make is fine, but not really the point. cover salaries, do cool stuff.

Last I checked Valve is a game company with a pretty flat org structure.

They have their own problems but, last I checked most people like working there.

> "more than the value they add"

This sounds like a very biased perspective. Sales and marketing is not "non functional bloat" - it's actually far more important because if you don't have sales then you don't have a business.

There have been countless companies with brilliant engineers that no longer exist because they couldn't actually bring a product to market. Also managing people is incredibly difficult and easy to ignore if you've never done it.

> It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company

Clearly not true, especially in b2b enterprise where you can sell even if you don't have a product

I always thought this was an overhyped myth until I watched a relatively innovation-oriented enterprise purchase a database company... So many hilariously bad powerpoint slides, so much money on the table.

When we were instructed to use it, we discovered that the "database" (really just a custom prolog engine + storage container) couldn't support paginated queries. Would have to fetch millions of rows on the server, then pick only the 20 we were interested in to send to the front-end.

Most of the dev team spent the next few months doing little but dreaming up powerpoint presentations we could use to get millions, as every schema change required recompiling the entire db from source, so we had lots of sitting around time until management figured out how badly they screwed up.

That's incredible. Did they just... not involve any actual developers in evaluating the product of the company they were about to buy?

That sounds a little worse than the first database engine I wrote.

Finally a company with no cost centers, just idea men generating pure profit and making deals with other idea men.

That's called running a scam and that's not really comparable...

There are loads of criminals, but only the dumb ones are in jail

I know there will be a lot of comments about how "A good manager can do wonders". No one denies this.

The problem is that the industry is rife with bad managers who only care about themselves instead of the actual producers of output.

Truly surprising to see how many managers overestimate their role so much without producing any value.

Managers should be paid less than ICs and should really only be assistants to ICs (especially if ICs are syncing with product, marketing and doing all non engineering work anyway). The manager is only a paper pusher at this point.

> This is especially true in the gaming industry. Most companies start with great talent, but then more and more middle management comes in. Managers hire more managers so they can become senior managers. Non functional bloat starts coming in the form of sales, marketing, “strategy and ops” etc.

Once again, I have to refer to the excellent work "Bullshit Jobs"...

I'm sorry, but I don't see who in their right mind could look at the current developer labour market and say that companies don't value them (us). Even in gamedev, where I worked most of my life (but not anymore) salaries are not *that* lower and crunchtime is not *that* more prevalent.

I don't think anyone is embarrassed. If they are, they don't seem to act like it.

I’m not hyper capitalist but I do think that employees will be valued as much as they need to be. This unprecedented exodus will illustrate that: they will either be replaced with or without raising compensation and working conditions. We’ll have to wait and see.

How are you measuring value added? A great product with no sales adds very little value.

That argument works both ways though. What are they marketing and selling when all the devs leave?

Yeah, I am a developer, I believe I add value, but the question is about a pretty bold statement to other roles.

I read the OP as the situation when other departments balloon and more resources are not spent on dev. I’ve been there before: I reported to more managers than devs. And the company just tried to sell the same thing in new ways because they were incapable of making things better or building something new.

And marketing with no product has no value.

A great product sells itself.

You could start giving away gold for free, but noone will come unless you tell at least one guy about it, but likely he will not believe you. So you need to tell several people, maybe hundreds if it's not easily accessed. But likely you just have a great product, and you are not willing to give it away for free, so it will take much more to attract people! And there is also timing, if for example Google or Facebook would launch today (in their original form) they would have a very hard time acquiring users.

This is just not true.

Given extremes of "a great product sells itself" vs "well-marketed vaporware is successful," the former is more true.

> > A great product sells itself.

> This is just not true.

Minecraft is the best selling game of all time[0] and while it's been marketed more since Microsoft purchased it, the first million sales happened within 7 months of charging for the game. Just over a year after commercial release it hit 10 million sales.

This was not a period of Minecraft marketing. Most sales were due to people simply seeing others (friends, YouTubers) playing the game and wanting to try it themselves.

[0]: Wikipedia claims 238 million sales, vs GTA V in second place with 155 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Notch was posting about his game on 4chan and on various places on the internet. It didn't just go viral out of nowhere. He also gave it away for free until he started charging for it so calling those downloads sales is disingenuous.

Anyway sure, maybe there are apps that instantly go viral with minimal marketing but if you build an amazing tool, put it on the internet and don't talk about it to anyone I guarantee you it will get 0 sales.

It should be noted, Minecraft is an incredible outlier in a lot of ways.

The video game industry as a whole has been a notoriously bad place to work for techs for a long time. It is extremely deadline driven, technical decisions are often made by product managers (or worse, other business people), and on top of that the pay is often mediocre compared to other industries.

In the past, they've gotten away with it by enticing young people in (often because they loved video games growing up and want to make them) and burning them out. That seems to be a strategy that no longer works now that recruiters for all sorts of companies/industries have become so aggressive that you'll very quickly learn you're being taken advantage of if your linkedin profile is even moderately up to date and checked.

These labour shortages (in all sorts of industries) are really going to be fascinating to watch. It's been 40 years since workers have had this kind of power/positioning and it'll be interesting to see if and how companies will adapt and change.

I was reading an AMA with Todd Howard of Bethesda a while back and noticed he said they were hiring. So I took a look specifically in my specialty (ops/cloud ops etc). I hesitate to use the buzzword dev ops because all of our code is focused on automating operations, enhancing reliability and balancing with cost so my core devs can do their work better, faster etc.

Anyway. In Bethesda land it was called NOC admin or something with a very clear deadline of you becoming a developer only within three years or getting out.

It made total sense why fallout 76 has so many issues with their net code. They don’t actually want people with any experience in managing these things, they want guys to just hit reboot it seems and use it as a jumping block.

At my company it’s telling how little networking and systems stuff our coders and sql folks know and when left to their own, things run pretty bad. My company has learned from this and we have pretty good reliability as a result and have a unique ability to scale and automate, especially products that were done by different core teams since my team often comes in and makes it all integrate well.

Anyway, all that said it was pretty eye opening and while I still like video games here and there, and even Bethesda ones, I have no desire to go work in that industry. I’ll stick to my sector.

>That seems to be a strategy that now longer works now that recruiters for all sorts of companies/industries have become so aggressive

Companies are also becoming more and more willing to post salary ranges along with job postings these days as well, which makes jumping ship from game dev even easier. "I could make 30-50% more and only work 40 hours a week instead of 60-80, at the low cost of giving up games to write boring tax software instead? Sign me up"

> giving up games to write boring tax software instead

I don’t believe tax software actually needs people with game development background. The GUI is relatively basic, the code is not terribly complicated nor performance-critical, but probably needs niche skills like SQL and finance.

However, there’re huge areas of software with both problems and technologies being rather similar to videogames. These areas include CAD/CAM/CAE and many other non-gaming 3D graphics applications such as VFX and medical imaging, HPC, robotics, low-level multimedia, computer vision, some parts of AI/machine learning, professional audio, some parts of embedded, some parts of mobile.

You also will be working on boring tax software from 9 to 5. That gives you hours every week to build your own toy games, potentially even with friends making something cool.

The hidden cost is you will start to hate writing software.

agreed, I'm excited to see what happens. its taken those 40 years for globalization and women in the work force to be integrated and absorbed. we're just now seeing the labor markets plateau.

I think on top of all that, the two largest demographic groups, millennials and boomers, are no longer working together as the latter start to retire en mass (that's already been accelerated as many took early retirement during the pandemic). It will indeed be exciting to see what happens now...

> Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company's standing is comparable to its peers.

Pointing out that everybody else has bad ethics too is not a compelling argument. That’s like saying “hey, we are as bad as the others”. Yeah well, okay, but try and improve?

Whenever a company’s leadership tries to gaslight employees by trying to fudge numbers like this, it’s loudly saying that they’re not interested in finding out why employees are really leaving.

To be clear, they aren’t necessarily lying, just presenting facts in a way that doesn’t address the problem. While attrition overall might be similar to other companies, if their most senior developers leave, they’re fucked. But they won’t talk about those numbers.

Anyone still at Ubisoft: better start looking around. Statistically it’s just gonna get worse.

To be fair, most large enterprises use 'industry-standard' metrics like these because it's all they have.

"Pulse check" survey companies aggregate data across whole industries or verticals and then provide their customers with comparison numbers so they can get a sense, across their industry, on how they are doing, without revealing specific numbers for a given company.

There are many factors - shit working conditions and bad pay being only some of them - that affect churn, and if you think the people in charge of this stuff, HR and people management, are smart enough to really parse those factors - let alone come up with their own useful metrics - you are giving them too much credit.

It's not that they're not interested, it's that they have no idea how to figure it out. They would love to know, but have no idea where to even start.

So they say "we're doing comparable to the rest of the industry" because that's all they know. They're not fudging anything, they literally have no other insights to give.

This is of course not ok, but this is a very textbook case of "don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence".

> It's not that they're not interested, it's that they have no idea how to figure it out. They would love to know, but have no idea where to even start.

Maybe. I would think the human factor is also involved here, namely that it's hard to admit you're doing terrible (in this case: losing a lot of good talent) so people kind of get into an echo chamber where they and their club pat themselves on the back for how well they're doing "despite adversity".

It's quite pathetic really but that's Homo Sapiens for ya. I've been guilty of the same in the past. To finally understand how wrong did you get various factors is honestly like traveling to another dimension. Most people can't and will not ever do it.

> This is of course not ok, but this is a very textbook case of "don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence".

90% of the time I am inclined to agree but not sure about this case. There's a lot of money at stake in the gaming industry and I'd be inclined to think the higher-ups at least are quite aware of what they're doing. They simply surround themselves with deluded people that will allow them to coast on deflecting blame for as long as possible.

And finally, I could just be paranoid and I am not claiming anything for a fact, it's just how I am viewing it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I would think the human factor is also involved here, namely that it's hard to admit you're doing terrible (in this case: losing a lot of good talent) so people kind of get into an echo chamber where they and their club pat themselves on the back for how well they're doing "despite adversity".

100% I agree with this for sure.

I understand most of the point you're making.

> It's not that they're not interested, it's that they have no idea how to figure it out. They would love to know, but have no idea where to even start.

I don't think they would love to know, though. Its not like employees won't give them feedback (anonymous, if its a toxic environment). Exit surveys are another tool to learn why some of your most senior engineers are leaving. I would bet that they aren't doing this, or at least not in a serious way. From the article:

> Said another now-former Ubisoft worker who was disappointed by directives from the company's Paris HQ: "There's something about management and creative scraping by with the bare minimum that really turned me away."

I mean, if the industry standard metrics are not showing a deviation, it should tell them that those metrics aren't really reliable.

What it seems like as an outsider (and as someone who's hear similar things from leaders where I worked) is plain apathy and a lack of desire to work with the engineering organization; the latter seems like its being hollowed out.

> I don't think they would love to know, though. Its not like employees won't give them feedback (anonymous, if its a toxic environment). Exit surveys are another tool to learn why some of your most senior engineers are leaving. I would bet that they aren't doing this, or at least not in a serious way.

Sorry maybe I worded it wrong, I am sure they would love to know, but that doesn't mean they would do better with that information.

I just meant that like any other business, having as accurate information as possible is of course desirable.

Yep, they're basically using evasive language to admit defeat but also try to deflect blame and distract attention to another matters. Standard stuff, sadly.

On the other hand, it shows that they're not outside the norm. Perhaps these kinds of problems are endemic to game development on a larger scale?

Yeah, unfettered corporate greed is endemic indeed. :(

"Our TPS reports are the same length as everyone else's!"

It's a great market for senior developers in Canada right now.

A lot of companies are moving to full remote for a large portion of their developers. Especially important is that this includes some Bay Area big names. These companies are willing to pay well for talent and don't care where you live.

Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal have historically paid senior developers poorly compared to what the Bay offered. But we devs chose to be here instead because we like Canada, want to raise our families here. Sometimes because of US Visa issues, but not as common as you'd think.

But now we are being offered the best of both worlds. Better pay than anyone previously offered; you can stay in Canada; you can even work from home every day and avoid commuting.

And it's not like every developer leaving Ubisoft is going to Instacart (though I'll bet a few are). The market on senior developer labor is just suddenly more competitive. Every dev with more than 5 years experience is reevaluating their current total comp and listening to recruiters offering more.

But don't worry, says Ubisoft, we replaced those very senior ICs with a bunch of new people. As long as developers-in is greater than developers-out, I'm sure it will all be fine.

Working for US compagny with not HQ in Canada can be a lot of problems. You have to pay for everything, insurance etc ... it's a lot of complications.

One doesn't work for the US company, just a Canadian subsidiary. Which means Canadian HR, who handle all of that stuff for you. It's a long-solved problem you're worried about.

Also: It's Canada. Health insurance isn't a big deal here because we have a first world health care system. Sure, additional health insurance is useful, but most people don't need it.

As we never tire of pointing out, health insurance is less of an issue in Canada.

Considering the fact that I made half a million dollars this year, I'm sure it was worth not having dental insurance

letsdeel.com

The numbers quoted look in line with the rest of the "Great Exodus" in the IT industry... Is there any special proof that there's something more going on than the post covid resignation spike (following record high retention 2020) we're seeing across the rest of the industry?

Sorry but what exodus in the it industry?

Here in Germany if you can code "hello world". You will get a job.

Also all of my peers and friends around Europe are still working in the industry.

So I'm just wondering.

Can you point to any source? Is this maybe something that happens in the US?

I think they mean that devs are leaving companies in higher numbers, not leaving the industry as a whole.

> Here in Germany if you can code "hello world". You will get a job.

Maybe I need to learn German, because this definitely doesn't apply to UK from my experience. You need to invest at least 4 months full-time before getting a junior role that pays as much as retail. Then you need to spend your evenings and weekends for the next 1-2 years before earning average salary.

Why is that?

Too much local supply and global competition. Companies big and small are hiring devs in low cost places like Portugal.

It's also about about techies jumping jobs for more money, not just leaving the industry entirely. It is US-centric and not limited to tech.

https://www.recruiter.com/i/no-post-pandemic-the-great-job-e...

But I'd also say the common wisdom in US tech is to jump jobs every couple of years for a raise anyway, so losing 1/4 of engineers per year seems in line with expectations.

But isn't it normal to change you work place every X years?

Even here in Europe. If I ask my current boss that I want like a raise of 1/3 of my salary he laughs but when I leave to a new company I laugh.

I worked in Germany, Lithuania and Norway.

Basically you are forced to change your job if you are a good developer and want to get more money.

And for me a lot of gaming studios which I loved in the 90's and 00's have lost all the glory. Just look at Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft.

It really worth looking at the history of EA and why it even exists.

Americans have always done it in larger numbers though, because in times of economic slowdown they don't try and prop up existing business employment using furlough schemes, and it has been extremely easy to move and get a new job throughout the history of the country. (EU freedom of movement was inspired by the US which has always had it at a continental scale, and it's a lot more practical since nearly everyone's first language is also the US's lingua franca.)

This leads to upsides and downsides. Generally speaking, a lot more people lose jobs during US slowdowns, but the US tends to bounce back a lot faster as well since the labor market is flexible and responds rapidly to changes. One concern with furlough-type schemes is that they keep people at "zombie" firms that the economy may be pivoting away from.

> One concern with furlough-type schemes is that they keep people at "zombie" firms that the economy may be pivoting away from

That's a valid concern, but IMHO market forces can still correct for that ( if other companies are doing better they can provide better salaries which could entice employees at zombies to switch jobs), and there are limitations ( of time). And from what we saw during times of crises like pandemics, furlough schemes are drastically better than buggy localised unemployment schemes unfit for the scale of the labour shift, and checks in the mail, which heavily distorted the US labour market.

The issue with zombie firms is not really furlough itself but the fact that anything that prolongs a zombie firm's life will mean that firm is still sucking up things like credit and capital that would inhibit the ability of new firms to take their place. And firms that are clearly dying take a long time to finally die; even in the US, where firms are not really supported, department stores like Sears and Macy's limped on for a decade or two.

The extreme version of the sclerotic economy is probably Japan, with an honorable mention for Italy. Policymakers desperately want to avoid falling into a zombie trap, because there hasn't been a country that has made it out of one yet.

I can do quite a bit beyond hello world, speak German and have right of residency. What are the salaries for such programmers? Do get in touch if it's really that simple, I am ready to roll. The job requirements on the job pages are all a bit ridiculous with the requirements, am genuinely curious, if you reply with an email I can contact you I would love to have a chat. Danke vorab.

I've used the term because that's what the media uses to talk about the spike of people quitting their jobs for new positions.

Yeah, the fact that just any amount of basic coding skills will get you a job is proof for it, not against it.

Companies are hurting for talent.

In Europe there is a huge number of open positions for the lowest end of qualifications: testers, junior developers, web designers etc, but a very small number for senior developers, architects. This correlates with salaries, jobs with entry level salaries are all over the place, but not the higher end. Again, this is in Europe.

Europe where? In France the market for senior architects, SRE, DevOps, etc. is extremely hot on both sides - i recently went over a job search over a few months and got multiple very good proposals very quickly; and on the other side, i talk regularly with people involved in recruitment, and there are a lot of open unfilled senior positions. Heck, i get 2-3 recruiters with legitimate job offers weekly on LinkedIn.

Eastern Europe. I am hiring in several countries and also looking out, the number of quality applicants is abysmal and I get dozens and dozens of weird calls for impossible jobs (that require a team of 5 to cover) or "entry level" senior architect with 15 years of experience (not kidding, it was a German company coming with that requirement). Probably the meaning is entry level pay for senior level people.

I guess that makes sense. Recently i got an email from a VMware recruiter for a conference aimed at Bulgarians living outside of Bulgaria, to talk about opportunities at VMware Bulgaria. They must be pretty desperate for talent to make such reaches, even if it makes sense from their end, they can offer something rather unique.

They bet on hiring cheap people in Bulgaria and finding that the supply is not infinite, so they are trying to source some. All the companies with offices in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine etc are looking for cheap workforce, preferably very skilled and experienced but accepting to work for 1/4 to 1/8 of SV salaries. These days even India is quite expensive and the value proposition (cost-benefit) used to be better for Eastern Europe (similar or a bit higher cost, much better quality and results), so they are hiring in this region as much as possible.

The exodus refers to churn. Resignations are high but hiring is also high.

Maybe it is meant to be more people changing companies now? I don't see people leaving IT industry either.

It’s a great exodus to greener pastures because developers are a pretty scarce resource in those wild times we’re living

The gaming sector has already been struggling with a (relative) lack of AAA content and incomplete releases with quality issues.

I can’t help but wonder if we’re in for a rough couple of years in the market with all of the additional tumult.

Granted much of the tumult is a direct result of the conditions that caused quality issues in the first place.

I’ve often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable. (Not that I mean to excuse poor management as a leading factor).

Perhaps we’ll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?

The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming worse overall. In order to be taken seriously as "AAA" a developer feels like they cannot choose not to use the hardware to its fullest. Modern hardware means that we can have huge, open, living worlds, so every AAA game must have a huge, open, living world, enormously inflating development costs both in terms of scale and complexity. Likewise, modern hardware means that we can have beautiful, photorealistic graphics, so every AAA game must have beautiful, photorealistic graphics, massively inflating the budget due to hiring so many artists to make those assets, resulting in games that can't afford to take risks because of how much investment has been put into them. The temptation to do this has always existed, but now technology (and gamer expectations) has advanced far beyond the ability of game devs to scale.

> Perhaps we’ll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?

How about a different point of view: the 90s originated this problem. The advent of 3D hardware meant that every game had to be 3D. The shame is that with the prior generation (SNES et al) we were just mastering the art of 2D games, but suddenly all that gets chucked out the window (or nearly all, see Symphony Of The Night as the exception that proves the rule) in favor of crude, clunky, first-gen 3D adaptations. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that the advent of modern indie gaming would pick up the thread of 2D games, resulting in some of the best gaming experiences I've had. Maybe ten years from now AAA studios will at last feel free from the obligatory burden of pushing hardware to its limit and will content themselves with putting out games that are less technologically ambitious (and put some fraction of the saved effort towards something else, like storytelling or game mechanics).

> The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming worse overall

Perhaps this is like induced demand with road expansion projects. All you are doing is making the pipes/scalars bigger. You aren't fundamentally changing the nature of the equation or otherwise solving for some bigger creative problem.

Constraints are the path to high quality experiences. Fun emerges because we impose artificial limits on our reality (i.e. game logic). A totally unconstrained simulation without any rules would get boring very quickly.

Imposing real world constraints on those developing games should also encourage more creative solutions that will more likely be experienced as novel and fun by the user.

No one ever had a good time simply because a player model could be rendered with 10e8 triangles rather than 10e7 in the prior iteration.

I sometimes wonder if open worlds have become the norm because, now that they’re possible, they’re easier. Not in a raw effort sense, but in a creative sense. They solve the question of “what will the player do?” by giving the player a carnival of map checkpoints: shoot some targets here, do a scavenger hunt there; it pads out a story that could otherwise be played in 6-8 hours into a game that can be marketed as a 40-60 hour AAA adventure you can “play your way”. They’re not easier for the creatives, but they’re easier for everyone else.

Of course, the continued existence of games like Dark Souls, and the meteoric success of games like Among Us and Phasmophobia tell me that players don’t always want to “play their way.” There’s plenty of demand for games with a finite amount of well-made content with a satisfying gameplay loop.

I completely disagree with this take. The worst offenders recently have been games where the developers were determined to continue supporting outdated old XBox and Playstation hardware as well as trying to offer a next generation experience to PC and next-gen consoles.

There were incredible games like Hades, Cruelty Squad, or 13 Sentinels that released recently and didn’t tackle the induced demand of next-gen hardware.

I think the parent commenter is suggesting that when studios look away from technical showcase, evocative and new work comes to the forefront.

I'm not aware of this happening to any game other than Cyperpunk, can you name others?

Valhalla is a good example. It's a great experience on the modern platforms with SSD/NVME drives, but really rough to play on the older HDD consoles.

Battlefield 2042 is the latest example. All of Ubisoft's games. The new Call of Duty WW2 game. There are lots.

>The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming The advent of 3D hardware meant that every game had to be 3D. The shame is that with the prior generation (SNES et al) we were just mastering the art of 2D games, but suddenly all that gets chucked out the window (or nearly all, see Symphony Of The Night as the exception that proves the rule) in favor of crude, clunky, first-gen 3D adaptations.

If we don't do anything new, how do you expect things to get better? SNES games wouldn't exist if Nintendo decided to remain as a trading card merchant on the basis that electronics would piss away a century's worth of hard work in "mastering" the trading card market. And besides, early attempts at 3d on the N64 were a success. Super Mario 64 is still one of the most influential games to this day.

I think the shift to "games as a service" or calling a game a "platform" is a reflection of what's happening here. To my knowledge, Halo Infinite, Roblox, CoD, Battlefield, and Fortnight have called their games platforms. Riot is doing something kind of similar with funding indie studious to build on their tech and IP. What they generally mean is that they're moving away from releasing new games/versions every N years and instead continuously updating a single release with new content, modes, and so on.

From a product perspective, this makes a lot sense to me. We're past the era when new releases diverge significantly from their past versions. This approach of continuously updating an existing game has already been happening for a while with Fortnight and CoD, and it's led to a lot of variety with much less friction to getting the new experience.

From an economic perspective, I assume it's a lot cheaper to develop updates than new releases, and a lot of them can monetize with cosmetics.

If we're doing platforms, I'd love to see modding culture make a big comeback this way - more of what Roblox is doing, but with something aimed at adults. The old days of Halflife and Warcraft 3 mods were so huge in my childhood, and I feel like it's a huge missed opportunity by these studios not to tap into this more.

Doesn't really scale, as you mostly have one or two games per genre that will become dominant.

I fear this approach would actually kill any user generated content. The king of user generated content are probably still the elder scrolls games, but I doubt they will develop anything like that ever again because it fails to make a business case against something like fortnite, even if the probability to develop the next craze is quite slim. I believe their latest online versions don't leaver many possibilities for modders

> I’ve often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable.

The most recent AAA game that I have attempted is Battlefield 2042.

I managed to force about 7 hours of that game in, and probably won't be able to convince myself to go back for more. I had maybe ~15 minutes of fun across that interval. You could probably flip a coin to determine if my experience was adverse because of rushed buggy garbage, or if it was a bad gameplay concept to begin with (i.e. ridiculous scope).

I still find myself playing older games like Overwatch, League of Legends and Minecraft with far more frequency than anything else out there. Maybe I've become jaded or burned out on gaming, but something in my head keeps saying that these studios just aren't trying anymore.

What is it about one of these "older" titles that can keep me playing for 5-6 hours per day that we cannot seem to capture and move into newer titles? Maybe this is just me and everything is fine...

New AAA games feel like what you get when you digest a previously popular title through "What did you like?" focus groups, generate a list of checkbox features, write a game spec from that list, and then make that game.

And at no point is anyone in the room asking "Is it fun?"

> And at no point is anyone in the room asking "Is it fun?"

Would it be economically infeasible or otherwise unattractive to investors to propose a new game development business where "Is it fun?" is the only question that matters?

Presumably, you have access to this entire marketplace of exiled ubisoft/blizzard/et.al. employees, so maybe the formal business plan starts with acquiring some of this talent and determining what projects they might want to work on.

Essentially, that's Nintendo's first-party business model (or at least as close as it gets in the industry).

But the "acquiring some of this talent and determining what projects they might want to work on" is the standard bloodletting that happened every few decades in the game industry.

Usually, this resulted in the next Blizzard, Westwood, Dynamix, etc. being founded, growing, and then dissolving into the next wave of smaller companies.

But it's been screwed up the past cycle though, as the investment required to make AAA-level games was only available from large publishers, who set terms that generally resulted in development studio bankruptcy and subsequent buyout-by and incorporation-into the publisher.

Which is how you got your Activision Blizzard, EA, Take-Two, Ubisoft arrangement.

Nintendo is that company, so it seems like the concept can exist and satisfy investors. Satoru Iwata was big on this mindset. I guess he’s been gone for 6 years now (good lord, how could it be so long ago?), but I think they still do a good job in this area.

> ...acquiring some of this talent and determining what projects they might want to work on.

That's largely what Valve does, and their games (when they make games...) are usually regarded as some of the best in the industry

Valve, a division of Steam Inc

I'm a massive battlefield fan, I've played every game they've released in the past 15 or so years and battlefield 2042 was so actively not fun I got a refund for it.

Almost every major game developed during the pandemic has been like this. Even Halo, a really good game, had massive swathes of content cut from the game because it was unfinished.

It is partially you, but not in a general "You are different than everyone else" sense. Nostalgia is powerful - the games I played when I was younger will always win out in my head compared to newer games.

You're comparing one AAA to known massive hits. I don't think its fair to say its a trend just from that.

What is it about older games? Survivor bias.

Except Nintendo games I only play indie games.

They are like the games in the 90s or 00s.

So yeah we have this market its just not were these AAA companies play.

Some cool indies: - Shovel Knight - Hades - Deep Rock Galactic - papers please! - unnamed goose game - Probably more which I forgot

The huge 30% commissions charged by Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Nintendo, Apple, Google are a huge negative factor to the potential profits of the industry. On top of that, you have sales taxes from every country in the world, which are creeping upwards globally. For every $1 of customer spending, typically only 50-60c reaches the developer.

In most other Tech sectors, you can go straight to customer, without platform commissions or taxes, and the profitability and salaries reflect that.

All of the profits in Gamedev are taken by platform holders.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UBSFY/ubisoft-ente... lists "Annual Gross Profit (Millions of US $)" => 2021 $2,217. I think they're doing fine.

The market is large enough that I don't see why its important in any way. If one company you like has a major failure or even gets bought out by a larger firm, there are a lot of alternatives who can compete for your time and attention. What constitutes a 'rough couple years' for the market?

The guard changed and like hollywood, the accountants and inbred corporate boards are in charge forevermore.

Massive gamer expectations don't exist in a vacuum, they exist because the AAA game space is heavily marketing for the purpose of building hype and expectation. It's on purpose. once in a while there's an anthem or cyberpunk level implosion but why do they care when they're raking in billions in microtransactions? That's just the cost of doing business.

The companies release incomplete low content games because people keep buying them and the profit is massive. There's too much money to be made in microtransactions and repeat fees like season passes. There have been a few large notable failures but their net loss is much smaller than the massive income through microtransactions.

We will never return to a 'sustainable market' because the market is all about companies trying both the existing things and new things to maximize profit and minimize cost, and others copying. The market is thus always in tumult and is never sustainable, with some firms failing and some firms succeeding at different times based on the ebb and flow of whatever the current events are at the time.

As a gamer, I can say we are a fickle bunch. We’re no different that pop-song listeners at this point. We love it when it’s a hit, and we’ll play it out until we can’t stand it anymore and never look back. If you make an indie game or a big budget one, you are vulnerable to this fickle crowd. You are better off hyping the living hell out of a game and cashing in the initial few months than you are to build a modest game with a community that will stick around.

It was never really like this, I’m not sure what happened. I really don’t know where it all went wrong.

It’s a hits driven industry at this point.

I'm a non-gamer, but my impression is the opposite.

We programmers expect all our tools and libraries to be not only free, but open source too, and then will bitch if they have bugs.

Gamers, though? AAA games release with loads of bugs, clunky DRM/anti-cheat rootkits, often have cheat problems anyway, hundred-gigabyte downloads, online services going down on christmas day, online voice chat full of race hate? They'll pre-order before a single review has come out, at a cost of $70.

These are some of the least fussy customers in the world.

We’re a little different in software because we are apart of the ecosystem. We get to ‘add value’ to open source for our employers. All the more reason to give back for sure. But imagine the gaming industry, where millions of consumers have no ability to establish equity (not even in the form of a career). You won’t be able to add anything back to Call of Duty, other than you playing it (as if it were Facebook, and you were just a profile). That’s all they have, and they pay for it.

We on the other hand, can use the open source thing, or roll our own, or pick another thing that’s freer. That’s why we don’t pay 70 bucks.

Some of this exists in open source projects, where you'll see non-coders or novice coders demand that their most wanted bug be fixed, and they'll storm around the Github issues harassing people for not prioritizing their needs over the project as a whole.

But in general, yes, there is an heir of entitlement in the gaming space right now.

The most harmful, IMO, is the knee-jerk visual shaming of every game. We can criticize the devs and publishers for focusing on graphics over fun, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem. When every game trailer or demo is immediately torn apart for "not looking amazing enough", and every non-critical visual bug of a player model's hair clipping into her face is turned into a meme, it shouldn't be a surprise that the focus is on screenshot worthy visuals first, and gameplay can be "fixed later".

It is a hits driven industry, but the stakes for making that hit are high, and often times the things you need to do to get buzz before release is mutually exclusive with the things it takes to keep the player base after release.

There's also the reactive demands to "just give me this game mode" or "just nerf this weapon" without realizing how much work goes into implementing things in a balanced and fun way. If you've never sat down with a game idea and coded a demo with stick figures before, then you've probably never had that moment where you realize the idea you had in your head just doesn't work when implemented. Or, conversely, how you can then tweak a couple variables and make it unexpectedly fun in ways you never would have thought of otherwise.

That said, I would LOVE a return to modding and more open source extensibility to gaming to converge the two.

That said, I would LOVE a return to modding and more open source extensibility to gaming to converge the two.

There’s such a good case for this when you realize two of the most profitable game modes ever emerged as shitty custom map mods in StarCraft and Warcraft (Tower Defense and the entire MOBA genre). Counter Strike was a mod as well.

The industry has sort of turtled and sheltered itself away from this. In pre-CS:Source/Global Offensive days, players made weapon skins/models/sounds and distributed it for free. Instead of making a marketplace and platform for gamers to create assets, the industry monopolized asset creation and cornered the market in these spaces so they are the only ones that can sell content. This is true across the board, gamers are not being given a chance to take place in the marketplace and effectively shut out. The new map, skin, game mode, all come from the game company only.

Roblox is kind of the only forward thinking platform at the moment because they serve as a platform, but even that is not enough. You still have to be a developer to take advantage of their platform. I don’t think their tools are the same as well designed map creation tools, model creation tools, etc. There’s no effort being put into this, and I believe it’s mostly because there is simply more money in monopolizing content creation.

Weirdly, I think the rise of the Sandbox game (your Minecrafts, every survival game) is an offshoot of the dereliction of player created content. That, in the absence of this initiative, what you have is an admission that the players want to contribute to the game in their own way. Instead of giving them the well thought out tools and monetization platforms, you instead give them a half-assed open world where they construct their gameplay, with no chance of ever making anything more of it (like a whole genre, skins, models, game modes, to share and take credit for).

It really depends on where these players live. A significant number of them read Reddit and Steam reviews, watch YouTube gaming channels, hate Activision/EA/Blizzard/etc big companies and swear against buying their games... but there's tons of buyers outside of the Internet who don't listen to all that. Lots of people just buy games from companies they know. Moreover, lots of these people are parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles who know nothing except the company name, and know the names of stuff their kids are talking about... and they go buy those games for Christmas. The latter buyers are often disconnected from the real players of those games.

Yeah, I don't really get why some people buy all this hype and even preorder stuff. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just don't care anymore for most of the new stuff, no matter how fancy the looks. I downgraded my PC and only play indie / decade old AAA nowadays, with only few exceptions which are mostly niche strategy games.

Funny enough, those niche strategy games are, IMO, a great example of middle ground that I think is missing in the industry.

We have a thriving indie scene full of pixel art action platformers, RPGs, and rogue-likes, often built by a couple dozen developers at most. And we have the AAA scene that is expected to eke out every bit of performance and effects out of your RTX 3080, often developed by hundreds of people.

What about something in between?

Some of the newer strategy games have great, polished visuals with some modern sensibilities, but they aren't super high budget productions with infinitely detailed high res textures and countless objects filling every scene. But neither are they going for some C&C or Dune 2 inspired pixel retro look.

And the player base is just fine with that. As long as there is a certain sense of polish and creative direction to the art, then the most important part is "is the game fun?", "does it have solid gameplay systems", "is it balanced", those sorts of things.

This space doesn't really exist much for first person shooters or third person action games. There have been a couple of examples (Yooka-Laylie, A Hat in Time, Pumpkin Jack?) and certainly some rogue-likes like Strafe or Ziggurat that come close, but the market seems small and spotty. I'd argue in part because player expectations don't allow for this as much in the FPS space as they do in the strategy space.

Games has been a hit driven industry really since it started. Having a longer tail is really a very recent trend. That’s why everyone wants an evergreen GaaS setup. Get a steady annual income and you can float about burning money. You might not even need another hit for decades.

I'm going to go ahead and guess platforms like social media/twitch/etc encourage us to keep looking at the next thing instead of looking at what we have. Meaning the previews look great but they dont translate into lasting experiences.

One of my best friends from college days ended up at Ubsioft Montreal and he spent around 8 years up there. He left last month due to changes in management. About 3 months ago they hired some new manager and this person had no clue about programming, or software development in general, yet she was in charge of the whole team. After a whole lot of infighting, my friend decided to leave after they refused him a change of a team. He ended up leaving for another AAA game publisher. At least 4 other members of his previous team also ended up leaving after him.

I'm often reminded of the old adage: people don't leave companies, they leave managers.

> One programmer told Axios they were able to triple their take-home pay by leaving.

Tripling is pretty impressive - but as a developer who used to work in the game industry you'll definitely see a significant bump leaving - I personally saw a 50% bump and I'm still not in a particularly high earning tech sector.

I was about to say, some of it is due to the high demand for devs, but a lot of it is just down to the video games industry being incredibly exploitative.

The triple-A gaming industry in general seems to be in a bit of a crisis. Quality of releases for the past couple of years has been abysmal, and creative direction seems to be now entirely in the hands of overpaid, unengaged executives who are totally disconnected from the gaming world.

Games are routinely being released in a half-baked state. How could a developer with a real love for the medium be happy working at organisations like this?

Ubisoft is one of the worst offenders (especially in terms of creative direction) so it's no surprise that they are the most affected.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is an absolute gem in all terms and it was released in 2019, not so long ago. Shiny new Halo Infinite is very nice too. There were failures like Cyberpunk 2077, but such cases were always present in the industry. What abysmal quality are you talking about?

>The triple-A gaming industry in general seems to be in a bit of a crisis

Aren't they making more money than ever before? Why is that a crisis? Imagine you're the most profitable you've ever been even with the quality issues - why is that a crisis at all?

The purpose of the companies is to make money and they are. The games are just the widget they're selling. If people keep buying widgets, whether they're subscription widgets or microtransaction widgets, the business is working.

It's kind of like saying Hollywood is in crisis because mid-budget fresh IP movies are almost extinct because the studios only want to make comic book movies that pull in a billion dollars at the box office.

From a creative output standpoint it is probably true, but the only thing that matters in Hollywood is money and by that measure they are doing fine.

yes exactly. There's no crisis if only mid level hot dogs aren't selling. cheap hot dogs and expensive hot dogs are making huge money, ergo there is no hot dog crisis. There is perhaps room for someone to figure out how to make mid level hot dogs profitable but that's no crisis.

> Why is that a crisis?

For the exact reasons I stated in the rest of my post? I didn't say "AAA companies aren't making money".

Neither management nor shareholders are in trouble, so people in charge don't care, so its not a crisis and nothing will be done.

That's like saying there's no housing crisis because landlords and property developers are making tons of money.

Who isn't making money? EA? Activision Blizzard? Lots of big companies are making money.

You are literally responding to a post where I said 'I didn't say "AAA companies aren't making money"'.

Between the sexual misconduct scandal, the more recent NFT Quartz PR nightmare from both the outside and inside, as well as a general shake in the AAA industry due to similar sexual misconducts, allegations of racism and discrimination of minorities, physical abuse, toxic working environments, crunch culture above and beyond what is standard for other industries, mass layoffs after record profit years every year... It is no wonder that people are tired, or that we see more and more big names devs leave and form their own studio alongside with friends every other month. (An example being Activision-Blizzard who keeps bleeding big names and new studios keep forming).

There's no apparent effort from the leadership of the industry to change all the above, as well as a continuous push by publisher for more monetization methods on top of pre-existing ones at the cost of the studio's PR (NFTs being the most recent). Combine this with a general lack of care for the quality of releases at launch or guaranteed long term support for the titles, which leads to animosity and lack of trust from consumers.

There's also the fact, that all of this leads to developers and staff, being harassed on social media by people who don't and don't want to understand and simply want someone to blame.

Also worth mentioning that there's a on-going pandemic for the past 2 years, that has left people both mentally and physically exhausted. So... that probably doesn't help at all when paired with the above.

EDIT: Also worth adding, is the fact that CEOs are earning multi-million dollar bonuses on top of very large salaries (especially when compared to CEOs from other industries) when people are getting paid so poorly that they can't afford to eat (https://www.gamerzunite.com/activision-blizzard-underpays-em...) or get layoff during a record profit year.

> An example being Activision-Blizzard who keeps bleeding big names and new studios keep forming

If there's anything good coming out of all of this, it's this. We need less consolidation overall, and new studios emerging with this level of experience can only be a net-positive for the world.

> Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company's standing is comparable to its peers.

I think he's referring to Activision Blizzard.

And being comparable to any of those big names isn't something I would brag about. It's more an insult than a sign of quality.

Good, I hope they learn a lesson.

Anecdote: i know a fintech that fired their last per developer, while about 30% of their payment processing systems were written in perl. They tries to press a friend of mine into fizing it when it broke 'again', and he quit on the spot with 'someone has to take reaponsebility for the braindead decisions around here'.

Seems like it will probably have snowball effect. With this many leaving, the remainder have more work to do than before. And assuming the rumors about game dev are mostly true, the company will react by forcing long work hours and other unpleasant new policies, etc. Which will make more want to leave. Rinse, repeat.

I've seen bad press about game developers for quite a while, and I've increasingly seen that the explanation is corporate greed. But if its greed, why are game developers able to get significantly higher pay and quality of life by working elsewhere? Why are video game execs more greedy than any other software company? Is the tech/entertainment industry more scummy than the tech/business industry, at least among its leadership?

I know nothing about this industry, but it seems like the margins for a game are extremely low. People balk at the $60+DLC prices, but you can get high quality games for $20 or less if you just pretend to live a year or so in the past. Is this not a confounding explanation for the shady stuff the game industry does, like lottery-style mechanics, repetitive franchises, and poor work-culture?

Having said all this, developers should absolutely get more bargaining power at their studios. If this increases the price I ultimately see, so be it.

Employers will pay what the market will support. People will accept lower pay (and even allow themselves to fall into a lot of bad working conditions) for making games because its actually pretty enjoyable a lot of the time. Not to mention the starry eyed kids that will accept just about anything to work in games.

The optics of leaving half way through the development of a big project looks much worse than leaving after it's completed. Hiring managers question why people leave. I would be surprised if there wasn't a large number of people moving on in their career after working on and launching a big title like AC:Valhalla or FC6. That seems like the ideal time to find a new role at a higher level, using your latest credit to leverage a better package somewhere new, especially if you're a "top 25" person on the team.

Ubisoft are no better than Activision or EA. Absolute scum. They ruin every game they touch with their greed.

> Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company's standing is comparable to its peers.

The brass has realized they don't need to be good, just competitive.

Reading all comments criticizing some modern AAA games: If you are into simracing, we are entering a new golden age.

Particularly with Automobilista 2, the latest update is amazing, and the developers, called Reiza, are more of an indie studio instead of a big player. But the end result is nothing short of AAA quality.

Other titles we enjoy are Automobilista 1, rFactor2, iRacing, and Asetto Corsa Competizione.

IMHO, the results possible with modern open source tools are really amazing. I think a lot of the "cost" of AAA are inefficiencies in the pipeline, and issues of scope.

A racing title seems especially easy to limit scope in. Compare your titles with the F1 games. There's no fancy campaign with voice acting and 3D modeled faces. But it plays really nice and the used assets are pristine. Indie no longer has to imply "2D pixel art".

Speaking from experience, it's not that hard to teach some artist friends how to use blender. Then it's just a matter of compensating them fairly and you're off to the races. Plus it's fun. If you haven't tried 3D art, it's surprisingly intuitive. Like a sculpting with magic hands and clay that isn't annoying.

I haven't played anything by Ubisoft in a really really long time (nothing against Ubisoft per se), but I have to say based on reviews/walkthroughs [1] of Far Cry 6 on youtube that it must be a masterpiece. Not because it's any good, but because it unintentionally is so hilariously shitty.

[1] see e.g. the ongoing walkthrough by Mighty Jingles

Never, in about a million years, I would have expected The Mighty Jingles referenced on Hacker News. My internet career now absolutely went full circle.

Happy to oblige. ;)

Ubisoft have been on my personal veto list for years for a host of reasons. Dreadful launcher, bland padded-out content, lack of after-launch updates, key activation problems. The juice was consistently not worth the squeeze, so I just don't touch anything they're putting out nowadays.

This explains why the year late Prince of Persia Sands of Time remake is probably not going to come out any time soon. :/

I wonder if the Splinter Cell remake will fare any better...

SC has a lot of goodwill from good memories and not having the blood wrung from it yet, so my bet is that it will sell well regardless of the quality.

Also, we now have HDR OLEDs so when a guard shines a flashlight at the player we can experience this:

https://youtu.be/Zp2EjsIYIhQ

Oh no! I really enjoy Assassin's Creed, and I wish the quality of the game will not deteriorate. Assassin's Creed is especially good for a layback gamer like me, who does not like time pressure and would like to take their own pace to finish the game. The fabulous view and handy tutorials and guides along the way helps too.

I think a significant amount may also be pull from FAANG companies which are now getting a lot more into 3d content creation. I don't have so much visibility on the games side, but at least in film and VFX I am seeing a lot of former colleagues at studios moving to those companies for much higher salaries and job stability.

I don't think it's unique to them

"Here" (Eastern EU) almost all software people I know did change / are changing / strongly consider changing jobs

various experience level, various industries, various salary expectations.

When companies pay "market rates" for their developers, there should be no surprise that there's high turnover. They'll easily get a better deal going somewhere else simply due to the variance in those market rates.

Here's one easy solution: pay the people at your company more so they don't want to leave for an offer that will certainly be less good than what they have with you.

Good software engineers are hard to find. You should be paying them their weight in gold.

It certainly showed in the hot buggy mess that was AC Valhalla.

It is really saying a lot when asked about workers complaining the top management starts shoveling numbers instead of facing the issues. This is how far removed management is from reality; it's all numbers and analytics to them, acting like robots.

I really want to break into the gaming industry doing game development even though it's a step down in pay and working conditions - I just applied because of this. Hopefully they're desperate enough to hire a mediocre developer like me :)

Blizzard seems even worse.

Poor Blizzard. Even a few years ago, with the Overwatch release, it still looked strong. With some stains but strong.

Alas.

I was recently fired from Ubisoft, mainly because the human resources people were not familiar with the type of visa I had.

This type of visa allowed me to work outside the country - it was not the regular working visa, but rather something very close to a permanent residentship. I had to use this option when a member of my family died and I had to return to my home country to take care of things and the rest of my family. This was agreed to and approved by my manager and I asked him to take care of personnel issues - he said sure and I left the country. At the same time, he got approval for my transfer to another studio in another country.

A few weeks ago, I received a threatening message from a human resources person claiming that by leaving the country, I had put the studio in danger and so on. Turns out they had lost my visa information and decided to shift the responsibility to me. I tried to fix it, sent them everything they needed, but it didn't work. They decided to fire me because that was the easiest way they thought it would be.

So they fired me. They gave four reasons for firing me in the termination letter. None of those reasons were stated in the policy or in my contract.

As a cherry on top, the HR officer blamed me for what happened, ignoring the facts, ignoring previous email threads, ignoring my manager who told him that everything was actually handed over and everyone had been informed and coordinated. The HR person lied to upper management (both HR and IT) and presented me as if I had left the country without informing anyone. As a result, I lost the opportunity to be transferred to another studio.

Remarkably, no one in IT or HR management (except for my direct manager) spoke to me during the process to hear my side of the story. They ignored my manager as well.

Another fun fact - when I came to the company, it took them 1.5 months to make sure I could actually work on this visa - it took me 10 minutes to call the ministry and get verbal confirmation, and another 2 minutes to find the relevant information on the government website. It was definitely a red flag, but I unfortunately ignored it.

F*k them. It was one of the worst experiences in my carreer. The way it was communicated, the fact that noone even tried to listen to me, it was just so humiliating. Had they communicated it properly, I would have quit myself and waited for the transfer. Instead, they presented me as an enemy and kicked me out of the company.

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