Why Game Developers Keep Getting Laid Off
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As a game company owner myself, I've found a way to do efficient damage control (with regards to morale) on this - announce the "cuts" as early as project pitch! It's not incomprehensible that you know how many people you'll need for the game's upkeep and how many for development stage. Throw an "if game is successful" and "if game is !successful" clause in there, and that way everyone knows what's the playing ground for your game.
I've noticed that these policies of mine have attracted fast-moving employees, the ones that will find it perfectly understandable if I, right now, scrapped every project and said goodbye to everyone. Which, in game industry, is a frequent occurence.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that game developers did not used to be hired for one project in the past. It is a thing of last years. They used to be hired by company and worked on multiple games there. Bad development practices used to be norm all the time through.
Which does not apply to parent who is up front about the whole thing.
But, yes, that's the nature of business. This, to me, is a bit like complaining how war-time journalists don't get to spend enough time with their families and are at life risk. It's the biz, and, I'm sorry to be slightly verbally violent, get tougher skin or gtfo. Plenty of sustainable software/design/management roles in various spheres for you if you can't take it.
IMO, Pixar is probably the most sustainable model for a hits industry. At a minimum you need a multistage pipeline, rock solid management, and a focus on customers.
(Genuinely curious, by the way.)
I came close to firing one, but we've managed to find a consensus and we drastically reassesed him and reassigned his responsibilities within the projects/company. It was a good decision - he's probably the most productive person on the team now.
Thanks for your interest and notification though.
Your profile information link is 502-ing. http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/wlievens.html
:D
But the truth is that the practices of industries are often based on what the employees are willing to take. Employees in the game industry will come back after being fired ... and fired again. They won't quit their job even though they work 80+ hours a week for months on end. In other industries, this would never fly, and practices that assume you can do this to employees would have never caught on, because the employees in (many) other industries won't as consistently take that abuse.
The practices of the gaming industry have, over the years, formed around this fact of nature about the employees. None of it would be this way if employees weren't willing to take the abuse in the first place.
Bingo. Too many people think being good at playing games means they are good at making games.
Edit: Although QA probably gets treated the worst, and many programmers/designers use QA as a way to get their foot in the door.
This would also make it much easier to rehire people who worked for you before, providing continuity to the games, and increasing level of code reuse. I know it's not a steady job, but perhaps it's a fair compromise. Also, this would allow the video game industry to keep older talent, as developers would be able to have a more flexible schedule and live in more family friendly suburban neighborhoods.
Just an idea....
One possible problem with this is what's already been happening with contract CG people in the movie industry. Their work is becoming increasingly devalued so there's a race to the bottom in terms of charging, such that situations like Ang Lee's Life of Pi, where he said something to the effect that he felt he paid too much for CG (I can't remember offhand the exact quote) and the CG people were barely making ends meet. They also aren't being acknowledged at awards, which for some can be a disincentive.
Imagine what a product like Facebook or Mac OS would look like, if after every major release, 2/3rds or the entire team were laid off, and a fresh batch of bright eager young talent was put in the chairs at a cheaper wage than the last crop, unaware of the doom riding on the horizon.
Do you know why every EA franchise seems to tank over time, until it's eventually killed? Because the people who made it originally are gone, replaced by a bunch of guys who are told "Make it work like the last one, but the market says it needs to be more action-y, so do that too." The people on the new team weren't there the first time around, and so they wind up making a faded copy of a game trying to imitate the predecessor. Eventually the game loses all of the heart, passion, and competency that made it a great game in the first place.
In the software world, we know the benefit of building a strong team. People learn to work with each other, and people learn to work with the product, knowing it inside and out. They're able to make the product the best it can be. That doesn't seem to matter in the world of games to publishers. They see the people who build the games as disposable fodder, because as you say there will always be a new generation whose greatest desire is to be a game developer.
Sure. Publishers don't see layoffs as a problem. It's become part of their business model by now. But from where I sit, you can only disenfranchise so many people, until you've killed your golden goose who makes building the product for you possible in the first place.
And this is directly why we've seen the rise of indie games. Every time they piss one of us off, we slowly start to realize we don't need them anymore.
-- A laid of game developer, with a foreclosed home.
They are _the_ problem. See Dead Space's decline until it was given the ax. See the constant eb and tide of Need for Speed, as they play developer hot potato with the title. See the rambling incoherent mess that are Medal of Honor and Battlefield, the original marquee warfare titles, that don't even know what kind of game they want to try to imitate anymore because they forgot what they were.
In my mind and experience, these can all be directly attributed to EA's policy of killing everyone at the end of the dev cycle. It's like every sequel is started from scratch, when you have to spin the new team up every time.
But that's ok, because "when they get older and can't stand more this" they'll move on, right? You mean six to twenty-four months older, depending on when they joined the project. If they're lucky, they can parlay that experience in to signing on with another developer. But the constant layoffs mean that not only is your pool of competition for the job full of young bucks fresh out of Guildhall and Full Sail, but also full of desperate people just like you. People who felt safe enough in their so called tenure to dare to do things like try to start families or own homes, to live a life to accompany that dream.
Lay offs and the ideal of living the dream of games are creating an over-saturation in the market that is going to have some dire consequences down the road. We already see this today in real time, as the money continues to consolidate at the top, and developers are left dead in the ditch. Terminal Reality. Lucas Arts. Vigil. Time Gate. Studios with long rich histories, full of talented people who made a lot of great games, many of whom I knew... gone.
Stand here and tell me lay offs are not a problem, when I've had to listen to their pleas of what they're going to do now with no job, and a baby on the way. When another great game is taken from the world, because the focus groups didn't respond the right way, so you all can line up at the unemployment line. Stories and worlds we'll never be able to enjoy, because someone decided that they had enough of trying to live this way, and the dream died with their career.
Explain to me how that is not going to have a long and damaging impact on this industry, when the people who make fun aren't having fun anymore.
Only a fraction of big games makes money. Big game studios are falling right and left. The thing is, if you can develop games, you can develop other things too - and those jobs invariably offer much better conditions and pay.
Yeah, but I guess you miss something important: people make games because they enjoy doing that instead of social apps or server-side applications. And the fun factor also has value that is not always related to how much you make.
I've seen the same thing in other industries: people with high tech skills quitting and going to a complete different occupation where they actually make less money, just because they see it as a more worthwhile pursuit.
You always have the option to go indie if you can't stand the larger industry practices. But then you realize the benefits of being an employee even if you get laid off once in a while. Being Indie is even harder, and only a very small fraction of indie devs actually make money.
To be fair, studios like Lucas Arts were long dead before they closed their doors. They had not made anything I would call remotely good in 10 years or so.
I think you are painting a too bright a picture as well. You seem to hint that one great time will always make great games, but even back in the 80s and 90s where game devs were only working in small teams, you could see them going from a great title to a meh one. There's always ups and down and it's not just because of the MAB guys at the top, but simply because there's no "formula" to guarantee that people will have fun with your game, every single time you create a new one.
Most sequels are never on par with the first title because they are not 'new' anymore to the eyes of the gamer. Sometimes they fare better than the original, but mostly less, and it's natural that people get bored when playing the same stuff over and over again. It's actually good to see some IPs die so that we can hopefully see new stuff coming out.
I pick on EA for their sequels specifically, because I can smell the stink on the disc. I'm a fan of Need for Speed. But I know I'm taking a gamble on each one I buy, because I don't know what corners EA decided to cut this time. It's not simply a case of the same thing being boring the second time around, the game is literally weaker than the predecessor. Skate is another example of an awesome game that shook up the skateboarding genre, and put Tony Hawk on the ropes. But sequels should improve in some way, not just better graphics, but better features, tighter gameplay. Skate and Need for Speed go backwards in their sequels. You can play the games side by side, and watch the gameplay get worse. Things that worked in the last game are now mysteriously broken, because the new dev team wasn't there the first time around. They don't understand or own the product in the way the original team did. By the time (if) they make it to the third game, it's a copy of a copy.
Games can be a lot like television shows, in that they may have an over arching story that spans across the series. And much like a television show can lag in the ratings and get cancelled, games with a story to tell wind up never getting a proper ending. That is the case with Dead Space, a deeply engrossing world that just kinda... ends. No real resolutions to tie up the plot. As a fan, over time you may become worried to invest in EA titles, because you know they're eventually going to be left to die, with no real ending. Why engross yourself in a world that you know is just going to disappear? Why watch a drama that is just going to end on a cliffhanger, and never get a 4th season to wrap it up? Would you read a book that just stopped in the middle of the page, paragraph, or sentence?
Yeah, that's certainly a problem, even though it's far from being the worst problem of the Game Industry. I still wish I'll see the end of ShenMue one day (even thought it will probably never happen, and if it ever does, it won't be by Suzuki) - the way I react to that is that I just don't purchase games which cannot stand in their own right anymore. Games purposely made to be in episodes have become big red flags for me, no matter if the first one is good or not. Hell, EA games and Ubi games in general have red flags all over these days, I don't even consider them anymore.
> But sequels should improve in some way, not just better graphics, but better features, tighter gameplay.
Not necessarily, and especially not if you want to sell millions of units. The more you make a game complex, the more you cater to a niche audience who has seen the ropes of all the previous titles and you incur the risk of not having wide appeal. If Need for Speed had improved more and more from the first episode it would be a very serious simulation game by now (the first game on 3DO was very close to being a no fun, serious simulation) and nothing "arcady" like it has become. It probably would never have made it past a few episodes then, as you can see most serious simulation games completely died in the 90s (this is where you see that educated folks did not constitute the majority of gamers anymore).
> They don't understand or own the product in the way the original team did. By the time (if) they make it to the third game, it's a copy of a copy.
Yeah, but it's natural. Most people of the original game team don't want to do the same game for 10 years of their life. That's hitting you hard over the years. And when you have teams of 100-200 people on major games, of course MOST people are going to move from one version to another, just like in every other industry out there. Nobody's married to a series of games.
> It's not simply a case of the same thing being boring the second time around, the game is literally weaker than the predecessor.
It's not about being boring, even when people have full creative freedom and almost unlimited money they just sometimes FAIL completely to make something good the second time around. Or even later. Take Richard Garriott, he peaked at Ultima 7 The Black Gate and this was probably one of the (if not the greatest) RPG ever made, and the follow-up, Ultima 8, was a massive disappointment, inferior in all aspects to its predecessor - a massive setback. If even the best game designers out there fail miserably from time to time, you cannot just expect average game designers to hit the right button more often than not.
The only people making the real money are the ones deciding who gets laid off.
There's a joy in seeing your work inside of a world. Knowing that, in the sum of parts that is the entire game experience, you made that potted plant. Or you decided it goes right there. Or you wrote the routine that makes it tip over and break when you bump in to it. No one will ever know, or even necessarily think about all of the little things that go in to the game. But you know.
Plus you get to go to E3. It's like setting foot in the holy land. You could only watch the coverage from afar before, as an outsider. But now here you are, standing at the precipice and waiting for the gates to open. You made it. You deserve to be here. You're a developer, and this is your three day exclusive industry only arcade parlor full of games no one else can play yet. It doesn't matter if you worked on Modern Warfare or Farmville. On those three magical days in LA, we're all equal. Brothers and sisters, all here because we love this industry, and all the things we are able to do.
Weather or not you want to go, can go, travel, logistics, boarding. Sure.
But you're allowed in the door. You get a golden ticket if you want one. It's free, and your birthright by being a developer, you just have to show up with your badge.
With all of the Hollywood Accounting that goes on at the publisher level to ensure a development team gets fucked out of as many royalties as possible, there is a lot the games industry could learn from the Unionization of Hollywood.
That they can't use the keyboard, cuz the union says only the typists can use the keyboard?
It's not too weird. This was how factories used to work on a regular basis. Guys would work for 8 months, get laid off, get unemployment for 2 months and lay around the house bugging their wives, then get called back again. Repeat until retirement. The supply chain techniques have improved so that doesn't happen very much now.
These companies can replace their entire development staff regularly. That is, of course, the successful ones can. Developers at smaller places are laid off when their studios are bought by the sharks or fail to achieve any success in the market.
His response?
"I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."
This isn't a tale of fat cats getting rich at the expense of the little man. It's a brutal industry where most games don't ship and most games that do ship still lose money. All of us who work in the industry are mildly insane to do so.
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I'm honestly curious. What businesses are these and what industry do they work in?
...because the industry as a whole, on average, surely makes enough money to actually keep people employed even for the short periods when they aren't needed. What the OP describes is simply exploitation.
The only alternative conclusion to draw would be that the game dev industry attracts more talented programmers than it can support, but this sounds like a dubious claim. I doubt talented programmers are so attracted to game dev to actually saturate the sector with cheap and high quality labor...
I just got hired as a junior programmer at a large studio(one of the largest in the world in fact) and I make ~$30k a year - wonder where they get their numbers from, or if maybe the market in the US is better(I am in the UK).
Where about are you based?
I guess it depends on your priorities. Are you learning a lot? Do you enjoy it? etc.
I believe in Austria the legal minimum (from the Kollektivvertrag) you can get paid as a programmer is 2.1k €/month, 14 times a year (so €29.4k/year) and most people start above that minimum.
This makes me sad,especially since some of my friends decided to stay at uni to do their PhDs, and their stipends are higher than what I am earning,and they also don't have to pay tax on it. So I think I have chosen the worst paying career a programmer can choose.
Like a senior dev in the UK is about £45k outside of London, which is $76k, much less than the $1xxk you often see bandied about here.
EDIT: I personally think there are two reasons:
1. Cultural - we almost can't imagine paying employees more than managers, regardless of skill levels
2. Demand - We ran out of developers later, the UK hit 'peak developer' a lot later than the US because of the BBC micro and the archimedes in schools meaning there were more people capable of programming available. Developer pay has ramped up fairly rapidly over the last few years
I'd add a third point there though - better public services (e.g. no healthcare costs) means there's less demand on salaries.
Developer pay is certainly ramping up, especially for good cross-platform folk.
Programmers just aren't considered proper professionals in the UK. Graduates in other professions can get senior level programmer salaries for their first job.
In tech companies it's quite common to have a period of 'inter contract' between two missions where you can do trainings or even self training. Is the video game market hostile to this kind of organisation or has it just not been tested yet ?
In-house developers work for a flat annual salary, and IIRC most game development companies don't pay overtime whilst demanding devs work overtime during crunch time.
But game dev extortion is a known problem, and the other problem is that people take it. Working in the video game industry is a dream for a lot of people, and they're willing to take a lot of shit for the perceived privilege to work on the things they love.
And the weirdest part? The actual development of a video game is often only a small part of the total cost package; iirc, games like the Call of Duty series cost more in marketing than the actual development.
to go on,go back,go off,go around,go by
have a different meaning...that's the most difficult part of the english language imho,now you can use a different verb for each expression,but it wouldnt feel idiomatic.
At the same time,it makes english composable and easy to extend,it cannot work with my language.I wonder if other languages work like that too.
I live in Ontario and like a lot of other place, Ontario gives pretty large tax incentives to video game companies. I've interacted a bit with some small video game companies here who basically seem to only exist because of the various tax incentives (both federal and provincial). I've pretty much decided these aren't a good idea, but politicians think video games are cool.
I once asked him why game developers don't get any royalties, since there was a time when that was at least not unheard of. He insisted that it would just cause people to game the system, with lazy people trying to get on the money-making teams. Personally, I fail to see how that's not always the case, everywhere, anyway. I think he's simply drunk the Kool-Aid and bought the line that upper management fed him in order to maximize their profits.
Yeah... this isn't exactly news. You work in the gaming industry because you love video games. It's not a career. It's a job you do when you have youth and health and minimum entanglements. When you get married or get older or get just plain sick of working around the clock for not much money then it's time to look around for something more stable and remunerative.
It's ridiculous to compare video game industry jobs with Big Grey Financial Company. If you want comparisons, look at the movie industry, where people get together to work on a project and then all get laid off when it's done.
The tools people use in the movie industry are commodities with relatively slow innovation. People can get by on more or less the same skill set they had 15 years ago, and once the movie has been shot, virtually nobody has gained any new knowledge.
The game industry has to considerably up their game (no pun intended) with every new release. The only way they can keep up the movie-style cycle if a company producing a new game can pick up developers just laid off by someone else.
I doubt if that is sustainable in the long run. At some point hiring new devs with very recent experience will become more expensive than retaining knowledge.
The game industry will always have more dramatic cycles because any company is as successful as their last game, but the current state of affairs just reeks of immaturity.
Well at the same time the technologies you used to make the game you worked on 2 years ago are probably going to be obsolete in the new game you'd be hired to work on. There's only a few jobs in the game industry where highly specialized, technical people are valued and retained. And there's a ton of talent pool to pick up fresh people from out there who are decent at what they do - probably more than there are jobs for them.
Look at Mercury Steam, they had no experience doing a AAA game (unless you consider Jericho one of them, but I'd say it was rather average in scope), and yet they managed to convince Konami they could do a reboot of Castlevania and they did it pretty well without much prior experience in the similar genre or scope.
I'm pretty sure you can only say that because you do not have the slightest insight into the movie industry.
I don't think that's true at all, particularly with the amount of CGI they're putting into modern films. CGI changes pretty quickly, too - an effect that was good enough last year looks dated if you put it in this year's release.
How does it compare to smaller studios, for example those which use crowdfunding (inXile, Larian etc.), or even bigger ones but self sustained, not relying on external publishers such as CD Projekt Red for example? Are their practices better than those of the big and nasty companies like EA and Co.?
There's little incentive in keeping your staff - there is never a shortage of younger people who will work for next to nothing and stay at the office till midnight, doing 80 hour weeks. You'd think that the owners would realise that more senior devs doing 40 hours would be a better ROI but we are talking about people who plan for crunch - it's not done in an emergency, it's planned for, literally, like in a spreadsheet.
They had financial difficulties in the past. They wrote how they almost went bust a while ago, while developing the Witcher 2. I don't think that's the subject of this thread.
For example open world games usually center around vehicles to move around vast amount of map-terrain. You can make the driving physics (the central gameplay element) arcady and fun (like GTA San Andreas) or realistic and still fun (like GTA 4 or Mafia 1+2). Or you don't care and get the driving mechanics mediocre like most such games (GTA V, Watch Dogs, Sleeping Dogs, Need for Speed, etc.)
What many do not see is the rapid commoditization of the low-end of the market, fueled by OSS RAD tools.