Quality of Life Issues Holding Back Game Industry

zenrender writes "With all the craziness regarding EA_Spouse's blog entry, it looks like some more organized groups are starting to chime in: Open Letter from the IGDA (International Game Developers Association). See Also Quality of Life White Paper, also from the IGDA."

Comments

Re:There's something wrong...

[EkkiEkkiShiwaddle]

Not everyone is like you. I have a life as well. I have a family as well. I no longer need to work to pay my bills, because working hard enough for the past few years has landed me in a very easy situation.

I work two jobs a day (2x8hours), work after hours as much as possible, sleep 4-5 hours a day. I work weekends as well. In doing so, I save huge amounts of money not spent on other stuff, which I invest to get even more money. The purpose? Trying to get rich. Quick. While working, and enjoying what I do.

I don't mind working overtime, as long as they pay me.

I'm mid-20s now, and already I do not need to worry about money ever again. By the time I'm 30-35, I'll stop and retire to enjoy my life while you still need to work to support yourself.

Re:There's something wrong...

[Scorchio]

First, maybe I am just not superhuman enough to work in the game industry, but I find that if I work insane hours for more than a couple of days, the quality of my work suffers dramatically. I have noticed it isn't just me either. I've code reviewed programs that were written under extreme schedule pressure, and most of the time, the code was terrible.

I wonder if the 80+ hour week mentality is self-propogating in the sense that long hours leads to more bugs, which leads to more long hours to fix them, etc.

Games programmers don't have superhuman qualities when it comes to working long hours, even if they think they might - and yes, the quality of work suffers as a result.

I remember one game I worked on, we needed a demo producing for an internal review. Just something for a suit to look at. It was required for the Monday lunchtime, and needless to say, the team was in all weekend. When midnight passed and we were into the early hours of Monday morning, I told the project manager I was going home to sleep. He begged me to stay a few more hours, but I told him I'd just spent the last two hours unsuccessfully trying to fix a bug because my brain was fried. I left, got some sleep and returned at 9am.

When I got back into my office, I found my co-worker still there attempting to work after 24 straight hours. He was tripping after consuming an unknown quantity of caffiene pills, and was sent home. It took me about 45 mins to clear the rest of my bug list with a relatively clear mind, and spent the rest of the morning fixing the bugs my co-worker had introduced through the night.

Sustained long hours are a false economy. Fatigue will slow you down and introduce errors, and you will end up taking 12 hours to accomplish what you could do in 8 if you weren't so damned tired.

While a lot of the problems can be pinned down to poor planning, design and management, there are still those developers in the industry who let their ego get in the way. One guy I was unfortunate enough to work with was assigned a lead programmer role. He took an unusual approach - he attempted to write the whole game himself, and when he got bored or stuck on a particular section, he'd hand that section off to one of the other programmers on the team.

While the work he churned out early in the project made him look like a hero, it came back later to bite him on the ass. He'd made himself the critical team member for every part of the project. He was having to fix problems in his code throughout the entire game, working silly hours trying to keep on top of it all. Eventually he cracked, left the office in the early hours one morning, and disappeared for several weeks. He returned for a while doing light tasks, then quit. You can imagine the mess this left the project in.

Re:Isn't there another alternative?

[CodeWanker]

Wouldn't you know it, there's a Dummies book for it. The steps are to
1) write a business plan that clearly explains what you need to become a money-making venture and what kind of money you expect to make. These expectations have to be documented, preferably by using real-life independent MMORPG projects (Non Sony, Non EA, Non BLizzard... You know, niche MMORPG creators that people like Penny Arcade talk about) that have made it to profitability/viability. You also need to explain why your venture will be superior to the existing ones so you can have a chance to poach from other MMORPGs and draw new people to MMORPGs.
2) You need to locate angel investors and Venture capitalists. Believe it or not, they list themselves in the yellow pages. Find them there and then go to their websites. Their sites should tell you what kinds of things they invest in and what format they like. If it doesn't, please call them. They're there to answer your questions.
3) Get your presentation together. Oddly enough, this is like looking for a job in that you're providing a resume, work samples, and are interviewed to determine if the product and team you've got has what it takes to get money out of the investors.
4)Remember that "Venture Capitalist" is not a monolithic structure. Some are professional investors. Some are tech people who made a pile and want to make another pile backing a winner instead of going through the pains of product development themselves. Some are doctors and dentists who have realized they hate doctoring and dentisting and want to find a good investment so they can change careers.

The book I linked to above is a good place to start. It's best if you can convince a successful marketing professional that your idea is good enough to go get venture money in exchange for a piece of the action. But, if you can't or don't want to do that, you can do it yourself.

And don't narrow your search too much. Our primary investor turned out to be a Malaysian real estate tychoon.

Good luck!

The problem is with the publishers.

[voodoo1man]

From what I understand, currently the problem with forming game start-ups isn't with finding capital or producing the product (god knows there's enough amateurs out there), but with the publishing end. Even established firms with hit titles (for example Troika, and I'm sure there are others that I don't follow) have trouble negotiating agreeable publishing agreements. Just look at the squeeze Vivendi tried to put on Valve over Steam. Big publishers have retailers locked down when it comes to distribution (read David Sheff's Game Over for an account of how Nintendo used to strong-arm stores in the late 80s/early 90s, something that eventually earned them an antitrust lawsuit). Distributing games over the Internet isn't yet feasible (maybe Steam will change that, but it does have it's downsides). And of course this is talking about the PC market only - if you're developing for the consoles, you have to shell out big bucks for development kits, pay a hefty sum on each game sold to the console maker, and be subject to major distribution restrictions (more than one Gamecube game has been sacked after Nintendo deemed it too violent). There was hope a few years ago that Internet and cell-phone minigames would bring about a sort of developer's Renaissance, but so far it seems the margins and the markets are too small and there is too much competition for any real success stories.

It's not as bleak as it sounds though. There is at least one mom and pop game developer that's been successful making and selling games independently over the Internet for a number of years. Maybe some more operations can follow their formula successfuly.