“Only” a third of them were working more than 10 hours a day, six days a week (for an unknown length of time - but based on personal experience, somewhere between two and six months)?
Of course, that was also only during the previous two years. Game development cycles often last more than two years, most games get canceled, the developers might not actually have been working that whole time (given how common layoffs can be), etc. leading to that two year window including some period of lesser activity or total inactivity. I suspect the number would increase significantly if you looked at a five year window.
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More or less my career has been in Enterprise. I can’t complain about the pay, but I wouldn’t say I’m a pure dev.
As well, I cannot prove, but I strongly suspect that women are treated much better over here than in gaming, or in the vanilla software industry at large.
Here’s why: there’s 100,000 kids who want to grow up to be game designers, and only jobs for 100 of them. But it’s not like the NFL, where only one person has the skills to be Brett Favre. All of those other kids are just as talented as you are. The only way to compete is on price. Deliver more for less and you got the job. It’s a classic race to the bottom.
When I was a kid, you solved this problem by starting your own company. That way, you can still work 80 hours a week for peanuts, but at the end of the day, you get all the peanuts. Does anybody do that any more?
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True - I was never told exactly how much the pay would be - it was all drunken skype conversations, and his concept of “good pay” could be very different from mine, or anyone else’s for that matter.
Hundreds of people. See: explosion of indie games
Put it another way - do they get any peanuts for it? For every Fez or Braid, there’s hundreds of games that get ignored or languish on Steam Greenlight.
Yeah, and the vast majority of them seem to be terrible. I’ve been following Jim Sterling’s random walk through Greenlight on YouTube and most of the randomly selected games he picks (remember, these are supposed to be curated) are terrible.
Not necessarily. I mean, just due to how long some processes take, I often put in an hour or two over the weekend, but my managers are good at scheduling, and crunch comes up seldom, and only when something genuinely unexpected happens. (Doing R&D, it’s inevitable that unexpected things do happen, but crunch isn’t built into our planning or schedules.)
You can basically swap “video game industry” for any tech industry. Same expectations.
Video game industry is worse. I’ve worked both inside it and outside it.
Part of the problem is that people - especially young ones like I used to be - want to do something cool and are willing to put up with a lot to be where the cool stuff is.
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I am reminded of this passage from Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow:
Children suffered no discriminatory treatment. They did not complain as adults tended to do. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves. If there was a problem about employing children it had to do only with their endurance. They were more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency. In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed; they had to be counseled to stay alert. In the mines they worked as sorters of coal and sometimes were smothered in the coal chutes; they were warned to keep their wits about them.
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really? I always thought the monstrous “crunch time” concept was only from the videogame industry.
Yes! Thank you.
Movie Special Effects industry too. Then there’s the practice of firing everyone after a project is done to save money on down time. It’s brutal and has people uprooting their families each couple of years to look for new work.
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This is definitely why indie games are becoming a more acceptable approach for game developers. I would think there would still be crunch time, but not as crazy as a large development house.
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Yeah I have talked to 3D designers that have worked on films and they get paid garbage to work horrendous hours. Worst of all they put together one tiny item per person that we see on screen. Granted they spent tons of time on it, but still seems a bit crazy.
Depends. Some studios are great, while others take even more of an advantage of it’s employees.
It’s a general problem in creative industries, I think; I used to have to deal with it in my job in the marketing industry as every mail pack neared its deadline, before we got a manager in who understood the utility of a properly managed workflow. Unfortunately he was too good at his job and got kicked out after a boardroom putsch, and the directors started to unpick all his good work.
You could try to support developers that don’t put their employees through a “crunch” for every release. I’m thinking passion projects and indie devs, where they make it clear that taking the time to make a great game is more important than breaking your employees’ backs to hit the Holiday 2015 launch window. One developer that comes to mind is Cardboard Computer, the folks behind Kentucky Route Zero. The game is divided into five acts, with Act I released in January of 2013 and the last two Acts still in development. These guys have no issues with delaying the release of a new Act if it will make for a better game (while still being able to live their lives).
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I’ve worked in gaming (at EA even) for 11 years, but not direct development. The crunches I’ve experienced in gaming pale in comparison to the crunches I experienced managing a retail store at Christmas.
I think I’ve been asked to work at night or on a weekend maybe a couple times a year. I do after hours work frequently, but it’s by choice.
I also can work from, have a lot of schedule flexibility, and time off (I’m actually approaching my second sebbatical).
I see more of my family in this job than I ever had previously.
I’m not saying crunch isn’t a problem, and can’t actually speak to working conditions at other companies*
*Except maybe Zynga, where I considered interviewing until a recruiter tried to sell me on the hot meals they provide free for dinner every night, thinking I’d see that as a plus.
On the women in gaming, again, it probably varries wildly from place to place, but I work with women in significant positions of power here. At a leadership summit I was invited to, the 22 person summit was 12 women, 10 men.
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