If I didn't know the game was released and well received, I'd say there's no way in hell it would be possible to put it all together on time, on budget, and without major flaws. Damn impressive.
It's easier to be on time and on budget if you break rules like 8 hour days and proper remuneration of the workforce.
Consider this situation: You've spent most of your life training yourself as a game developer, only to find out that every company you'd like to work for will drive you like a slave. 50+ hours per week is not merely an option, but a necessity if you want to remain competitive. And since everyone wants to be a game developer, that means your salary is less than in other types of compsci jobs.
So, that culture stuff you're speaking of? It's bullshit. Ultimately it's a method of getting you to do the bidding of others. It's not about you at all. No one is looking out for you, and while you may feel like you're part of a team, that team has no loyalty to you. If you stop performing at peak level for even a couple months then your prospects will be severely harmed.
Employees get to feel proud they've literally sacrificed part of their life to help someone else succeed. And you're supporting pervasive lawbreaking in the name of "that's just what it takes"!
If game companies are finding it hard to recruit talent, well, that's probably because people are finally wise to their ways. You won't find anyone who was more in love with the idea of being a game developer than I was, but the reality of the industry is abhorrent. The shared culture has utterly decimated any hope of work-life balance in the gamedev industry in the US. My options were to work elsewhere or to move overseas. And by working elsewhere I get more cash, get to work on problems that are more interesting, and I learn more.
European developers seem to have figured out how to develop next-gen games without any of the bullshit methods of control you've described. Maybe US companies should start caring how.
> Employees get to feel proud they've literally sacrificed part of their life to help someone else succeed.
Your tone suggests outrage but you're just describing the nature of competition. You are agreeing to trade your time and skills for money. "Getting you to do the bidding of others" is a cynical way to put it, but if a certain type of team building yields good results why would a company not go down that path? Of course you're going to be replaced if the you aren't producing the results you were hired for, this is the nature of competition. There is no fair or unfair. Employees are not sacrificing part of their life for someone else, they're trading their time to someone else. No one is forcing anyone to be a game developer.
That's a fine-sounding statement but in reality if you want to be a game developer in the US then you'd better be willing to live a life where you wake up, go to work, get home sometime later than 8pm, spend ~2 hours unwinding and maybe visiting with your SO, and then go to bed. Repeat forever. A lot of times even on weekends. The studios I worked for all made it regular habit to make pizza available in the evening and then refuse to allow devs to leave. Crunch time became a way of life. Anyone who dared not to like it risked ostracism. Those who were fired for it severely harmed their career prospects, precisely because every other employer has the exact same culture of insanity.
Put that way, it's more than a little bleak. If I sound outraged, it's because it's outrageous that it somehow became the norm in the US and that nobody bats an eye because "that's just the way it is."
It's not about fair or unfair. I'm not saying anyone should force the companies to change. I'm saying the companies had better change themselves before the nice little train of momentum they've built up from legions of starry-eyed young developers finally runs out when those developers realize they could be going off and starting their own companies rather than playing by your rules.
Why not?
What if game developers were to unionize? Or we were to strengthen the 8-hour work day laws? Or boycott the most egregious companies?
What's wrong with those or other ways of forcing the companies to change?
Unionizing is only effective in situations where employees can band together into a shared social framework. During the industrial revolution this was facilitated by the massive size of workplaces. But at each studio there are usually less than 30 devs.
I think ultimately the solution is to start our own companies imprinted with a culture of employee well-being and work-life balance. If it's a success, and it's located in a gamedev hotspot, then all of the top talent will want to work there. This synergizes well with free market aims, because competitors who don't get top talent soon go out of business.
The relevant California law is that computer professionals are exempt from overtime law if they "mainly perform intellectual or creative work that requires independent judgment in the design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing, or modification of systems, programs, software or hardware. In 2012, they were required to earn $38.89 or more an hour ($81,026.25 or more annually, or $6752.19 or more monthly)."
My modification to that law would be to raise that to $75 or more per hour. What might be reasonable "horrific unintended consequences" of reclassifying programmers thusly?
"But at each studio there are usually less than 30 devs"
You don't know much about the history of unionization, do you. That's okay, neither do I. But I do know a bit more than you do.
The early unionizations include unions that came out of the guild system, not the factory system. For example, Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), which settled that unions were legal in the US, dealt with the journeyman shoeworker Jeremiah Horne, who charged less than what the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker’s Society required.
It was legal for him to charge less, but then the Society would have called for a walkout. The master of the shop "would not wish to lose five or six good workmen for the sake of one", so fired Horne instead.
So we have a union which is effective even against a shop of 10 "boot developers", as it were.
Why do you think that unions are only effective in large factories? Do you mean to disregard the history of craft unionism, or are you speaking mostly out of a lack of knowledge?
They have no real incentive to optimise their workflows to be more productive in less time because they could simply crunch their staff until they burned out and then bring in a fresh batch of recent graduates.
It is true that people work voluntarily but on the flipside it is still important to highlight these things so that potential game developers can make informed decisions before deciding to invest heavily in this career path.
Thankfully, there are still a handful of game developers in Dundee. One of the original designers on GTA now runs Tag Games in Dundee, which does some quality mobile games.
That's what we are interested in knowing. Everything else you are writing is speculation and propaganda.
[edit] I'm not talking specifically about Rockstar or games companies - this is standard practice in many sectors.
And I don't even live in a first-world country.
You can easily find this story, like on Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RockstarSpouse/20100107/4032/...
I can only speak to anecdotal evidence, but I've hired several engineers who previously worked at Rockstar in the UK and haven't heard anything outside of the ordinary.
EA's sports game studios, or Korean/Chinese outsourcing/free2play sweatshops are places where it really sucks.
So either it is 100% male OR the female staff are either unmarried or do not have the same complaints.
If I write a blog post about how I feel I'm being exploited by my employer, that doesn't necessarily mean my colleagues don't feel the same.
See also: silicon valley startup culture.
Suffice to say that after reading those stories I'm never touching a QA/tester game industry job with a 10-foot pole.
I cannot comment on quality of work for Rockstar tho.
If you're offered a bottom-level job at a great studio, these are often presented as a stepping stone to said dream, so many people end up there and stay until they're drained.
Again, I can't testify that this is the case for Rockstar, but I know it's the case with some other major studio's.
Anyone else notice the nod to Vangelis' Blade Runner theme in the first part?