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

What's it like in Japan?

[ronfar]

I'm wondering what work is like for game developers in Japan. Now, I know the Japanese are notorious workaholics, so I'm not sure what I'm expecting to be different, I'm just curious.

Re:What's it like in Japan?

[jasno]

After a 2 1/2 week stint in Japan a few years back, I came to realize that, at least as far as engineers are concerned, the Japanese don't work much harder than Americans. They also had about the same distribution of slackers vs. workaholics.

They did seem to have longer commutes, and they definitely partied harder, but work? Nope.

Cognitive dissonance

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I would really love to play Half Life 2, because I am a person who really enjoys weapons, blowing things up, shooting people in the head, shooting people multiple times with shotguns, watching them bleed, seeing them fall on the ground, writhing in pain, or better yet, seeing their bloody hamburgerfied bodies smeared on the walls.

But, I can't, because computer games are the product of human misery.

Re:Cognitive dissonance

[CommanderData]

If at first you don't succeed... Try again! Looks like your comment faired much better than it did yesterday.

For what it's worth I thought it was funny both times :)

Change of Mentality

[VGMSupreme]

This open letter does show a good point. A lot of the mentality of the new recruits that are passionate about working in the gaming industry (or any industry for that matter) is to work the extra hours or do the large amounts of extra work to prove to everyone they can do what others who are already in company are doing. If this mentality can be changed or proved to not be a driving factor, then we can get the companies to stop working their employees to the bone cause of a notion that has not really been proven to work.

There's something wrong...

[Alpha27]

Workers should not have to go through all these hours of developing on a regular basis to launch a product. If a product can not be made under normal working conditions (8-10hr days/5 days a week), then the product can't be made by the deadline set.

If the time schedules are constantly being scheduled so that I work more and more hours each week, where I essentially am working the amount of 80+ hrs in a single week, then something is absolutely wrong.

I have a life. I have a family. I need money to pay my bills, but I shouldn't have to work as if I had two jobs to pay bills for things, that at this rate, I hardly use. This practice of constantly asking (or demanding) workers to put in, above and beyond the call of duty, so many hours should be against the law, or at least with some vacation time to compensate. The human body can not take so much of this for long durations.

I've done the long hours in the web development field for years, fortunately not for long stretches of time. It's really not worth putting my life on hold to work at a company under these conditions. I had things in my real life slipping away and things that needed attention that I couldn't due to the long hours.

Overall, I wouldn't work for a company under those conditions, and would find employment else where. I would even go as far as boycotting the company.

Re:There's something wrong...

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Thing is, the US is backwards in securing workers' rights, mainly because of Americans' distrust of the state as a guaranteer of citizens' rights. In Europe, the 40 hour week is a basic legal right. If you work more, you have the right to overtime. If your company refuses to pay you overtime, you take them to court. If they fire you because of your refusing to work overtime, you take them to court, you win and you get a pretty good settlement agreement.

There was only one job that required me to work 60+ hours a week. It was hilariously mismanaged, had no direction and the CEO aimed for a Steve Jobs like aura that eluded him. I now own my own company and even though I have enormous responsibilities I manage to work 40 hours a week. It's not that hard. You just have to manage your time and be good at making realistic projections.

Re:There's something wrong...

[J4]

Uh, laborers get paid overtime, business owners are reaping the fruit of their own labor, cops, firemen, truck drivers and pilots all get comp time and have legal protection WRT consecutive hours worked. They're also union jobs (surely just a coincidence, right?).

Programmers get abused because they put up with it as a group. Think a bit on the whole "managing programmers is like herding cats" meme and who really benefits.

Re:There's something wrong...

[humblecoder]

A couple thoughts...

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.

Second, most places I have worked have rarely required putting in more than 40 hours a week. Ocassionally I've had times where I've put more for various reasons, but that has been the exception rather than the rule. This has held true at both small startups and large Fortune 500 companies, so I do have a good sample of companies to go by.

One common thread in these companies has been good project management. They realize that excessive schedule pressure is more likely to kill the whle project, rather than help it. If you are constantly in crisis mode, quality suffers.

I know that game companies like EA stress being able to ship by a particular date, but, as a consumer, I would rather wait for a solid product, rather than get something that is half baked. Take Neverwinter Nights, for instance. That game was constantly being pushed back for one reason or another, and the delays certainly haven't hurt overall sales. Actually, delays of an anticipated product seem to feed the hype and the excitement, with the added bonus of allowing developers to put out a solid product.

Finally, you can't really compare the number of hours a business owner puts in relative to an employee. A business owner is the one taking the risks and the one getting the rewards, so they have a vested interest in putting in insane hours. For some of the other occupations you mention, there are rules (at least in the US) about how many hours truckers and pilots can work. And "common laborers" usually get overtime for their efforts, so many of them actually WANT to work more hours. Code jockeys don't have any limits (other than physical ones) and they usually dont get any overtime for their efforts (although that may change pending legal challenges).

Personally, my feeling is that I have no problem pitching in with extra hours from time to time. However, if the extra hours becomes the rule rather than the exception, then there is a serious problem with project management and scheduling that needs to be addressed by the company. If the company's management is so bad that it cannot properly plan its projects, then it is probably a company I would not work for. That last point may explain why I gravitate away from such companies.

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:There's something wrong...

[humblecoder]

I've worked with a couple of refugees from the game industry, and the stories that they tell are similar to what you are saying. Based on my small sample size, game programmers are among the most talented programmers that I have worked with. However, they seem to "burn out" after a few projects and go into a less demanding area.

I wonder if game industry is shooting themselves in the foot by letting all these talented folks get away with their draconian practices. I suppose there are enough young, ambitious, talented people in the pipeline to take their place, but the one thing the companies can't replace is experience. Game companies have a big recruiting advantage in that it is "cooler" to work on a game than on some accounting system. However, they flush that advantage down the toilet with some of their practices.

I don't know if you've read the book _Soul of a New Machine_ which follows a group of engineers at Data General in their quest to build a state of the art computer. The engineers on that project work insane amounts of hours on the project, sacrificing their outside lives for the good of the project. It tends to glorify the manic single-mindedness of the team, but gives short shrift to the personal toll the project took on its participants. I think I remember reading elsewhere that many if not most of the people on the project left the company afterwards. That might explain why Data General is no longer around today!

Game programming is a vocation

[bay43270]

People don't get into game programming for the money and the good hours. Neither do priests, teachers, firemen, policemen or soldiers. Complaining about the long hours in the video game industry is like complaining about the color of the sky. Just deal with it or pick a different profession.

With half the skills an EA job requires, you could get a very nice low-stress job working half the hours. My job isn't especially interesting, but it pays the bills easily and it's very low stress. Plus, I can start working on my more interesting hobby-programming when I get home (between 4:30 and 5 in the afternoon).

Or if you can't settle for less than an interesting, high-demand job, then you must really enjoy what your doing -- in that case, shut up and get back to work!

Re:Game programming is a vocation

[startled]

Your response to the article is a non-sequitur. The point is, as the headline says, that quality of life issues are holding back the game industry.

Their assertion-- read the white paper for more on this-- is that these practices are resulting in worse products. Even if your attitude is "fuck it, I hate all of humankind, and wish for all people to eternally burn in searing pain", if your goal is good games, current practices are counterproductive. How is that possible? How can it be that demanding maximum hours per day from all employees could actually be counterproductive? First, clearly output quality falls as hours and stress increase. Perhaps more importantly, conditions are driving experienced game developers from the industry in droves.

In response to their QoL survey:
* "Only 3.4% said that their coworkers averaged 10 or more years of experience."
* "34.3% of developers expect to leave the industry within 5 years, and 51.2% within 10 years."

Do you really think driving away experienced employees is a good thing for the industry? Do you think the knowledge drain somehow benefits game production over the long term? If so, I believe you severely undervalue the types of knowledge that only come with long-term work in a field.

Do you want all your generals to be 25? Do you want all your priests to become atheists at 30? Should all teachers retire before hitting middle age?

Re:Game programming is a vocation

[nwbvt]

I do hope you were not trying to compare video game developers with priests, teachers, firemen, policemen, or soldiers. People choose those jobs because they benefit mankind. People choose to write video games because they think such a job would be cool.

There is no excuse

[kuwan]

There is no excuse for this kind of behavior in the gaming industry, or any other industry for that matter. If I recall, the gaming industry is expected to make more money than Hollywood this year. An industry with these huge revenues can afford to treat their workers humanely. In fact, I believe that it is the developers and artists that make a game successful, that these are the people that should be getting the biggest share of the profits. Not some nitwit CEO or other executive.

There are those that say that working in the gaming industry is a privilege, that there are tons of people out there that would die for your job, that these programmers shouldn't complain. Well, frankly there are tons of people out there that want my job or that want your job. That doesn't mean that they will do it better than you or I do our jobs. And that sure as hell doesn't give my (or your) employer the right to treat me like an animal and work me until I'm burned out.

Employers like EA need to change and they'll eventually be forced to if they keep burning through their talent.

--
Sounds like a scam, but it works.
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IT needs a Union

[helfon1]

Gaming is not the only area of IT that is treating thier employees this way. After 2.5 years working as a consultant at one of the largest consulting firms as an out of college grad I finally left to go to a smaller firm with less required overtime.
The consulting firm set what they called "stretch goals". Goals that were lofty and perhaps unreachable to force workers to work 60-70 hour work weeks.
People died for the 40 hour work week around the turn of the century. This is the reason for labor unions. Since the IT industry doesn't have a strong union companies will force their staff to work as hard as possible to make the most amount of money.
I can at least empathize with this person while sitting on the 40th floor of a downtown chicago building on a sunday afternoon in 98 degree heat (inside) because they don't turn on the air conditioning on the weekends. IT needs a union.

Re:IT needs a Union

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so let's say for the sake of argument that IT shops actually let their workers form a union. Then let's say that said shops actually let the union set a 40 hour work week. The shops that didn't get rid of half of their force altogether and outsource as much as they possibly could will probably fail, leaving everyone in the shop out of work. The workers will then take whatever job they can get elsewhere, union or not. Unions are fine when the shops don't have the availability of cheap labor like they do in IT, but now is not the time for IT unions to form.

Now, this isn't directed at the parent; I'm just ranting now. Nobody likes to hear it, but the idea that somebody would try to build a family on the income of IT employment and then be surprised that their jobs suck and they no longer have a job in 10 or 20 years is silly. If you want stability and predictable hours, working for someone else in IT is not going to achieve the desired result. Sorry. This industry is built on pioneers and if you aren't a pioneer, you may need to adjust your course or at least make sure you are able to save enough money so you won't be caught off-guard when you look around and the industry is in ruins.

the indie route

[BortQ]

Here's a discussion on the EA issue from the perspective of some independent game developers:
indiegamer.com forum thread about EA work conditions

A lot of the guys there are creating games and then releasing them for sale on the internet, totally ignoring the whole publisher/retail method. It's a real alternative for game devs. I am supporting myself in just this manner by my own game.

You're all a bunch of wimps.

[TheAdventurer]

You guys are such wimps! I work 168 hours per week. Every christmas I take a day off to sleep, but then I'm right back on the job. I ship four games per year and my supervisor has complimented me many times, saying that his golf vacations have become even more pleasurable knowing that I'm hard at work making his money.

Frankly, I think you guys just should just suck it up and learn how to be men. Real men sit in soft chairs for 99% of their life and stare at glowing phosphorus tubes so that adolescents can pretend they are football coaches. What did you expect from life? A wife? A sense of intrinsic happiness? A healthy body? That's not how it works.

Life is hell and everyone who doesn't enjoy that fact is wussier than me.



[for the love of god, note the sarcasm] =)

Congratulations, games are now art

[sien]

There is a push to get games recognized as art. Perhaps people should compare the working hours and the rewards of other arts like music, novel writing and the film industry.

All these industries have a common compensation scheme. Many, many people work very hard for very little money, a small fraction make a great deal of money. Read this for how writers make out. If you look there are countless other examples of this.

It is partly due to the nature of entertainment. Our tastes are fickle. Some Hollywood producer famously said Nobody knows anything about what films will be successful. (Check out William Goldman's book Adventures in the Screen trade for the quote). Who can really predict which one of the hundreds of projects starting this year will produce a great new game? Sure, EA can buy huge franchises and make a reasonable amount of money, but even there games like Pro Evolution Soccer threaten their name based primacy.

With music, in almost every town there are bands that are 90% as good as REM, U2 or whatever band you like. And they make very little money and work pretty hard and tend to be pretty smart.

Entertainment is not now, nor has it ever been stable. That said, working people huge hours tends not to produce inspired work. But making anything great, or even good, involves a lot of time and the economics of entertainment isn't likely to change either.

It is called "having a backbone"

[Safety Cap]

Workers should not have to go through all these hours of developing on a regular basis to launch a product.

If you let them get away with it, then they'll keep taking advantage of you, forever. If working crazy hours is the expected norm where you are, then you

1. Have incompetent (non-existent?) project managers,
2. Work for grossly incompetent management (who never read/don't understand The Mythical Man-Month)
3. Need never expect it to get better unless you do something about it,
4. Don't need the government to do something you can do yourself (do you honestly think they'll get it right?)

Take some responsibility for yourself and draw the line (diplomatically...), but if that doesn't work, then you have basically two choices, suck up or get out.

Understand that not every place is like what you describe. Where I work, I put in no more than 40 every single week, unless *I* want to work late. When management first squawked about how long the project was taking, I whipped out the work breakdown and said, "Okay, which features do we cut first?"

Uh, no

[Capitalist1]

Unions are for the benefit of those workers who want to receive multiples of the benefits of doing a job without having to actually do the job. Unions are also for those who have no problem profiting from this sort of institutionalized graft, namely politicians and organized crimimals.

The competent, valuable employees are never the ones who benefit from unionization, in any field.

Isn't there another alternative?

[CodeWanker]

I'm not sure, but I think there's another option open to people that hasn't been addressed here (or it's so unpopular it's been modded below my threshold.)

If you love the gaming industry and you've got a gripe, then you're probably just not in a situation that rewards the kind of effort demanded. But if you REALLY love gaming, then you've got a good game in you screaming to get out, right? /. has had good stories about how open source game dev yields less-than-stellar (and generally non-lifestyle-supporting) game projects. But what hasn't been covered is forming a startup to make your game and either 1) reward you appropriately for working insane hours or 2) prove what some people above have said about the optimum value of working a limited number of hours a week.

There's a lot of venture capital out there. People aren't giving it away on the street corners, but if you've really got a good game inside of you you ought to be able to find a marketing/business guy who loves games and will pitch your idea to the VCs because you've got a good game inside you. Ditto the art/creative people you'll need. If you can't build a good creative/technical/business team to do this you either 1) don't have a good game inside you or 2) don't have what it takes to make it a reality.

And before you rip my head off, you need to know that 1) I was the technical brain behind a startup that raised $750,000 in capital after the .com bubble burst and 2) I am making my first feature-length movie in my spare time in addition to working full-time as a software architect. People need to put up, shut up, or go to work coding the database behind some mega-store's on-line shopping cart.

Okay, NOW you can rip my head off.

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!

Well, that's PHBs for you

[Moraelin]

It's not just NWN. Diablo 2 took for ever to finish, but it sold like hot cakes because it was a good stable well-designed well-balanced product. Diablo 1 also came out of nowhere as a game that didn't even copy last year's best-seller, but it sold like crazy. Why? Quality. Or Epic and Id pretty much officially have "when it's ready" as a policy, and I you can't say they're going bankrupt because of it. Etc.

True, noone knows in advance the secret handshake that _guarantees_ a bestseller, but if you look at what did well and what failed, you notice a trend. Quality stuff tended to do a lot better than the buggy crap shoved out the door in a hurry.

Contrary to the mentality that hype is everything, quality does sell. People do talk to each other, and that's a big factor that works for the good games, and against the crap buggy ones.

And I don't even only mean code quality, but also design quality. If you look at some of the the things that, say, Blizard did right before, they include:

- very low learning curve (if you can click, you're already half-way to mastering Diablo or Diablo 2)

- well balanced (you don't end up stuck half-way through the game because you chose a class that dies even from a paper cut, or a skill that has no use whatsoever)

- just the right difficulty curve for the casual gamer (the majority of which do _not_ want to reload 25 times to get past a boss.) In fact, better yet, it let you adjust your difficulty curve by yourself, by going faster or slower.

Etc.

That's all things which aren't just stroke of genius, but I'll bet involved a lot of testing and tweaking. They're done well _because_ the games were not shoved out unfinished.

Especially balance _never_ comes from just a stroke of genius, and just writing down some genial numbers from the classes/races/whatever from the start. No matter how bright a designer you are, your first numbers will _always_ suck. Getting them right is invariably a matter of extensive testing, running simulations (e.g., how often does a halfling thief kill an orc barbarian, if you run all possible scenarios), and tweaking.

But somehow the PC game industry just can't get to take quality seriously. Basically they don't _care_ if they're producing crap, including, yes, by stressing the devs and driving away talent.

They just care about having some movie license, a design that's a verbatim clone of last year's bestseller (ironically: it often misses all the parts that made that one a bestseller), and having the game shoved out the door by christmas. Everything else can be fixed by lots of hype, right? (Wrong. But good luck convincing them.)

Its the software industry in general

[haplo21112]

I didn't realize what I was missing in my life until I meet my wife. As my GF and now my wife she has always been somewhat insistent that my job not be the highest priority and more often than not leave work (and leave my work at work) at 5:00pm. My life has been my better since.

Re:Its the software industry in general

[tf23]

Same here. The older I get, the more I see this happening. They settle down, get married, get the house, the kids. How priorities seem to change through those years with all that happening is amazing :)

The longer I've worked, the more I see employers trying to hire younger, single IT'ers (on the cheap). They promise them big raises over the next few years to compensate on the low-starting-salary. And the naive kids fall into the trap. :(

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.