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Developer Stress Crippling Game Innovation?
hapwned writes "Jason Della Rocca, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), looks at the big picture of the grim, dead-end careers of game developers. From the article: 'More fundamental is the notion that immature practices and extreme working conditions are bankrupting the industry's passion - the love for creating games that drives developers to be developers. When the average career length of the game development workforce is just over five years and over 50% of developers admit they don't plan to hang around for more than 10, we have a problem. How can an industry truly grow, and an art form evolve, if everyone is gone by the time they hit 30?'"
A sucker is born every minute.
Now, granted, this only refers to designers and sort of the front end folks. You don't lose your spark as a programmer at age 30 or anything; you probably are just beginning to start using good engineering practices by age 30. But for the designers and some of the principal developers of the UI and stuff, I'm not entirely sure how you could expect things to work if they didn't work the way they do now. Games are quite possibly the only field in which this sort of employee overworking makes any sense, though.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You publish an article that software designer is the one of the top 10 jobs to have :)
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
If more of the source code to these games were open, developers could be contributing not only to games with short lifecycles (and often dead ends before release). They'd also be contributing to systems usable for other simulations and telecommunications. Other UIs, networks, interaction engines. Their work would contribute to the overall telecom industry development. And their own skills would continue to be relevant to the actual platforms used throughout the industry, rather than going down the one-shot drain. And of course developers would have to spend less time learning unique platforms and environments for each project.
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make install -not war
The question seems retorical but I'll answer it anyway. If the people being hired are all 25 years old, the problem will remain. I have seen more and more offerings or game developer educations. Most of these are reduced computer science programs at universities, which frankly doesn't solve the problem. Recruiting earlier will require a lower education program which teaches programming. Perhaps special programs at high schools, or more likely compartmentalized education from certification schools. I'm not sure if an option like these would help developers or not, but it seems logical for it to be an option if publishers want better developers to work with.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I can honestly say I don't want what 99% of these people make in their 5 years at the grindstone in full time game development.
Now these people must have got into it initially for the love of games - and even if they jack it all in and get a 'real' job, I assume they'll still like games.
We're going to end up with a huge glut of people with real jobs (i.e. can do whatever they want) moonlighting in the evenings making quality mods, small games for online distribution etc etc.
Much more what I want to buy anyway and should be a nice bit of fresh air
How can an industry truly grow, and an art form evolve, if everyone is gone by the time they hit 30?
Oh, this is way too easy. The answer is by making sequels!
Suckers! Obviously, they haven't heard the big news!
From TFA of that "top 10" list, they say that the stress level grade for a software engineer is B. I can't imagine a software development job where the stress level would be B, but it must be a very cushy software job. Most I'd say were stress level C at best, especially game developers. Sure, technically software engineering pays a lot of money because of supply & demand, but many positions pay a lot because of how stressful it is.
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This doesn't just apply to game developers, but most software developers as well. It's a risky business, and for most innovation developers are forced to put their career, money/life savings on the line whenever an innovative product is developed. How can we be innovative when we can't pay our mortage payments?
There aren't enough investors out there to put money on risky software development projects, so we are often forced to take big risks ourselves when it comes to ideas we are passionate about. And frankly, people with lots of money often don't understand what we're doing.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
Just like the Atari devs split and founded Activision... I think that a small company is the best for game development.
I grew up wanting to be a game developer. I spent a lot of my free time as a kid in front of a computer writing code, designing my own games. But as I get older and am actually out in the workforce the thought of working 80 hour weeks making a salary on the lower range of what programmers in general make has turned me away from the industry. The next step, once the majority of CS majors have been scared away from game programming, is the farm the work out to programming "sweat shops" in other countries to make rehashes of the same games that have been coming out for years. Unless there are some major changes in the game industry the only real innovations are going to end up coming from indie game developers who work some other job to make a living and develop games in their spare time.
Like the old, OLD Activision method of a single developer designing a game and actually getting credited on the product packaging. When someone figures out how to implement that design model again, you'll have the next craze of video games.
It appears there's a correlation between the "famous names in game development" and the "career-minded senior developers in game development." Correlation isn't causation, but which end is wagging which? Is it because they're a rare breed to stick around so long, or because they're a rare breed who have excellent gaming ideas? Maybe they're just rare because of the career stress. The likelihood of making a name for oneself in the industry is pretty slim. The industry is incestuous and churn after November (after Retail Christmas) is a big problem. If you have to start your career over every year or two, who wants to keep up that grind forever? But maybe it's just a matter of a group of people who like instant gratification in their games, who also want instant gratification in their career path, and they usually don't find it. Ninety percent of everything is crap, and that goes for the workforce in any industry too. There may only be room for a few bright spots to float to the top, while the rest continue to wallow below.
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Could I just ask if anybody likes that god-awful escapist web site?
I don't mean the content, I mean the design - I'm convinced they'd just had an FTP of PDFs if they were allowed.
Aesthetics are good - but the damn 'click teeny next button for the next sentence with a huuge great random bit of clipart' is just so 'should have gone bankrupt in 2000'
Suppose I hire the kind of people who are creative enough to create a good game, and then I hire people that are able to code that creativity into a functioning product. Isn't this a much better model than hiring 50 super-coders to bust out YAJMF? (Yet Another John Madden Football) Game development is expensive to get right, but if you have a team that can make lots of good and different games, games good enough to develop franchises from (i.e. Zelda and Mario), then you will win. If you take one painfully stale idea and re-release it over and over, it will cost you more each time in order to generate the same sales, because PEOPLE GET BORED. It should be real obvious how to manage creativity, but apparently few want to take charge and do it. There's such a ready supply of young kids looking to "code games" that they can be duped into thinking that "some company" is cool when in fact it's a slave ship. Any gaming company that leverages creativity over slave hours and slave pay will be the champion in the long run, bar none.
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And here I thought cloning the same old games year after year was the problem... my bad. Well that and the fact Duke Forever isn't done yet...
"Humans are considered to be primitive, the third smartest species on Earth"
Seems to me that having fast turnover should increase the amount of innovation, if only because you have so many fresh minds looking at every problem.
How can an industry truly grow, and an art form evolve, if everyone is gone by the time they hit 30?
Outsourcing. They'll hire people who don't think complaining is a job skill.
Seriously, it's a huge industry with tons of money. I bet someone figures out the answer, makes great games, and gets a lot of that money. I don't think they need Slashdot's help (or whatever it is Slashdot apparently thinks it has to offer).
Useful article on what's wrong with game development appear in Game Developer regularly, in the "postmortem" section. Those are worth reading. This is not.
The early burnout problem is a major issue at Electronic Arts. But they're not even in compliance with California labor law, and there's a class action on their unlawful nonpayment of overtime. That one (for artists) has been settled, with EA paying $15 million, and two other cases are pending. That's real news. This article isn't.
Sorry for the wrong formatting choice on that.
It'll happen when the media starts focusing the mindless masses towards gameplay, not the latest and greatest graphics. Then developers could focus on making compelling games, instead of just trying to dazzle with the eye candy. Ever wonder why Tetris is still fun to play, while your copies of Doom3 are sitting on the shelf? That's why.
This is so two years ago. More and more game companies are adopting sane schedules and better production schedules. There is still a ways to go of course, but it's getting better by leaps and bounds. My last project I only crunched a combined 2 months. Much better than the 14 months of crunch I did two projects ago. The REAL problem with innovation in "big" titles is that the development teams are getting too large. On a 60 person team only a select few actually get to give design input on what the game is. There just isn't enough time to get input from every team member that wants to share their ideas. You can't afford to prototype enough to get to everyone's ideas, so to be fair no one's ideas are prototyped. Back when a game could be made with 10-20 people, every one could go crazy with ideas and everyone could contribute. That just isn't possible now. Except of course with the small teams making the flash games and things like that.
I think games need to be drien by a vision and that vision has to come from a small group of people (otherwise you get a focus-group deciding what minor variations should be included in EA SPORT XX).
As technology marches into the future, the number of people required to make a game has increased - there's simply more work to be done. This doesn't mean the proportion of people required to make creative input has increased in line with the overall rise in the team size (nor should it).
Perhaps these "burned out" developers/designers can start up new game companies and change the business for the better. After all, people who've worked in the business knows what the current companies did wrong. Hopefully these new companies goes back to the roots of the 70s and 80s, were the developers/designers got time to test out new territories instead of just hearing "deadline, deadline, $$$, $$$".
A lot of this has to do with the suits being in control of the company and driving their talent into the ground. Whether that's because of poor planning on their part or artifical deadlines, it doesn't matter.
I'm not saying the t-shirts would do any better, but at least the t-shirt folks understand what the heck the development team is actually doing. The suits usually just see t-shirts as interchangable warm bodies.
As my profile states, I'm a reformed game programmer. I've written a couple of bitter posts on Slashdot about working in the game industry. I'm better now. :-)
But the stress caused by poor quality architecture and code cannot be understated. Coders begin to hate the designers and artists after awhile and that, as you can guess, really causes problems. If the designer wants that really cool scene or feature or art, but the coder is stressed out the kazoo with debugging the last 3 new features and hasn't seen his new born child awake since it was born, you can imagine how he would react to the new feature.
The solution is a self-learning development process. A.k.a., CMM. I met some game developers who've only worked in Game Companies who sneer at that kind of talk, but the more seasoned veterans (working 10+ years) actually liked the idea. When you reduce the stress on the developers, and improve productivity, they can spend time making stable code that can be used to build cool, new features on it.
More importantly, it will rebuild the relationship between coder and artists, designers. That is the single most important relationship in the game process, IMHO.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Or prehaps a move to GPL games. More game play, more story, and less blingey graphics. How many of us would help with code or art if some one came up with a good idea?
We are the Borg...
Why do all the ideas - 'fun' bits, as TFA calls them - have to come from overworked, stressed developers? A company dedicated to listening to its constituency of customers is far better equipped to put out a good game, because the people who will be purchasing the software can contribute the ideas they want to see implemented.
Back in February I stumbled on Galactic Civilizations 2, then in beta. I pre-ordered after reading the website, and how they'd been in a beta for a year just implementing features people suggested on the forums. Even 2 months after release, the game is receiving more attention patch-wise from the developers than any other software I've ever bought, save for Windows itself. And these aren't just bug fixes we're getting for our $40 - we're getting UI tweaks, new features, and improvements on already stellar AI.
And the best part is that the game was mostly self-financed, through pre-orders and online distribution. Sales have been stellar, the game was sold out for its first production run - mostly from word of mouth - and no major publisher was ever involved.
GalCiv2 should be a wake-up call to developers - to make a good game, ask the gamers what they want.
Fragging my father since 2004
There are tons of great flash games coming out.
check addictinggames.com or the games section on collegehumor.com
2D games can still be lots of fun and they don't require teams of musicians, artwork, modelers, or motion capture to produce.
3D may get there with the open engines that are around, but it still takes a huge team to get a 3D FPS mod out the door. At least you can contribute your own skin, but to create your own mod would be a real bitch.
I would love to see more cool stuff done that is creative but still uses neat 3D power, like tetris on acid or pacman but new concept. The FPS and 3D animorphic gets lame, the top downs strategy games are nice but eventually lame.
There is a game construction software package out there geared for kids, I have not tried it out. I think it is mostly 2d. As the tools improve, maybe 3D stuff will be easier.
It's precisely this type of stress that causes things to evolve. How can the game industry HELP but evolve? As always, the ones that survive will be the ones most adapted to the conditions.
Geddy Lee Doesn't Change Facial Expressions
OK what have we got here? Overworked developer. Inadequate tools. Unreasonable deadlines. Exponentially increasing content. Parallelisation problems. Increased competition. Increased Expectation. Aaaannnd... C++....hmmmmm.
OK. Looks like a classic case of square peg in round hole syndrome. Take two courses in Lisp and read up on a fractal generation algorithims.
And for Christ's sake kid, lay off the coffee.
May the Maths Be with you!
Sure its going to sound like console bashing, but look at the market. When you make a product more accesible it becomes very tempting to try and maximize that even further. As businesses grow and the market evolves, publishers are under greater pressure (mostly greed) to abuse that market. The easiest way is to ignore innovation, create broader appeal to already existing franchises (often through dumbing down) and pump it out and make it available for anything that moves. As an example on what's being done to something like The Sims. You can trash it all you want, but its a prime example of a very popular franchise. Initially they announced 7 EPs. Its a lot, but the market is there. Then they announced they'd start putting it on anything that could play it. Consoles, phones, handhelds, etc. Get a smart watch, Maxis will port it.
Now they haven't saturated things enough, they're releasing mini-eps in between EPs. Why? Because EA has reportedly been sucking out, except for The Sims franchise, its their cash cow. The game isn't going to innovate.
You can see it in the underlying structure of the game. People who have taken apart the code and looked at it call it disgusting, the little things are missing. Problems that have existed since the original game, but instead of fixing those to produce quality, they're going to pump out 3 more platforms and another 2 expansion packs. If EA could market a gaming device who' sole purpose was to play The Sims, they would.
That market is changed, and if you want quality, I really think you have to stick with small developers who are in it for the love of the game.
You mean game developmers are humans? That by the time they are 30 wise up and aren't willing to slave away 12 hours a day for someone else?
Wow.
And you mean companies get rid of people once they aren't willing to work 12 hours a day because they have a life and don't like being treated like slaves anymore?
Amazing, really, it is.
Welcome to reality for the rest of the world. At least here in America you get to wise up and have a life at 30. 90% of the world will slave away until they drop dead.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Why not unionize, like the movie professionals in Hollywood did?
I don't understand people who go after this career because they "love games." It always concerned me when someone told me they want to become a programmer because they like games. HELLO! Everybody loves games! You're joining the profession for all the wrong reasons! Sometimes I'd ask the person if they've ever even programmed. Answer? "Nope!" I admire the willingness to fight for a dream, but I frown on the lack of research before committing a lifetime to it. Why programmer instead of another facet of game production? Oh, the money, you say... Notice how programming itself is not mentioned as an interest in any way here? Yes, it concerns me too.
The games people love are nothing like the process of coding them. Anything that is remotely fun and exciting in programming has nothing to do with what makes Madden fun and exciting. The average consumer can love Final Fantasy -- no, I'd even say there are many, many hardcore fans. But the vast majority of those that love that franchise are not meant to ever, ever become game developers. It's apples and oranges.
Playing games is exactly that -- PLAYING. But coding a game is no child's play. It's work -- and hard, hard work. If producing a graphical manifestation is the only joy you see in coding, I'd seriously reconsider the profession. There are other ways to contribute to creating a game without being the code monkey. There's marketing, story writing, graphics, concept designing, testing, and even managing.
If those don't appeal to you any more than coding does, then why choose coding? What? For money? That's a whole different can of worms that I'm sure you can already see is a repeat of what I just finished saying.
In my humblest opinion, programming is fun on its own, and it really doesn't matter what it is you're coding so long as it is challenging and stimulating. Sure, coding games can fit that, but to start on this path without actually loving the path itself seems risky at best and a terrible, life-long mistake at worst. In short, don't choose a path that makes you walk through shit and garbage. That path just so happens to be the rest of your life. You better damn well choose a route you'll enjoy every minute of.
I thought it was a lack of imagination that was killing the game industry.
MadOgre.com
I'm of for the day for an interview for a game developer position tomorrow. Here's what they had in my application allready: Professional Enviroment, competent colleagues, room for creative initiative, professional workflow and solid & fair payment. Tomorrow I'm going to add 'no standard overtime' to that list. 2 Pro's with a proper workflow pull more in 8 hour days than 6 people with 12 hour days. That's the simple truth. I'm not subventioning stupid management with my mental and physical health.
...
They've gotten to me by a headhunter bureau and wanted an interview right away, so they must be desperate. But I'm not gonna be a fireextinguisher for an overdue project (my spider sense is tingling that way somehow) in some messy enviroment that has no version control, no OOAD and no designers and coders working together and a no boss that give enough rope and is open for ideas.
I'd rather work as a barista and continue developing my own game in my spare time than being the assmonkey for some idiots with an overdrawn budget that were to stupid to do it right in the first place. And probably wouldn't have listend to my advice because of me having no degree in CS or something.
Then again, maybe they are the cool shop I hope they are (the dev on Linux exclusively - can't be that bad) and I get to meet some very neat team tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed that all goes well - one way or the other.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The Escapist is at least decent for seeing what folks like Warren Spector have on their minds. The articles (especially the EVE Online coverage) sometimes contain stories that veteran gamers agree are implausible. They get written because something sort of cool actually happened in an MMOG, but then the writer's fantasy takes over and the rest is a sci-fi story. This is a bit harsh, but some of their articles do deserve this criticism. As for their layout... I must agree with the poster above who called it trashy. I like to use ctrl-mousewheel a lot to increase text size. Unfortunately, Escapist Mag's presentation is the type that gets completely destroyed by the slightest text-increase. Still, the magazine is developing into a bit of a MMOG meme nexus, and while it does some annoying things (layout, exaggeration, etc.), it does have its finger approximately on the thoughtful-MMO-player-group pulse.
How do you earn a living in such a scheme?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I wonder if the sentiment is true on the other side of the earth? Do the Japanese devs feel this way too? From what I've read, Nintendo devs are a very proud bunch and lots of them have been doing it for a long time. I don't know for certain, but I wonder if they're under the same time pressures as, say, EA? We've all read stories about EA's marketing dates dictating everything. Is that true for Nintendo? If it is true, I certainly wouldn't have noticed, cuz all their games seem so polished. SSBM? Wind Waker? All top notch (in terms of quality). Can't say the same for EA. I actually bought the first Sims game for gamecube way back ... 10min into laying out my house, it froze on me. First time I had a game crash/freeze on me (on a console). I haven't bought an EA game since.
Anyways, I'm rambling. Just wondering if the japanese devs feel the same? Anyone have any insight into this?
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
not just INNOVATION but Video Game Innovation!!
you'd be a fool to read into this tripe.
This is a common problem that plagues every booming industry... especially advertising. Your bean counters arrive, and apply their "insight" and "wisdom" to running the business and increasing productivity. The end result is deadlines, avoidance of solutions that are too difficult to schedule (or understand), reuse of code and concepts that should be trashed... in all: a bad work environment. Game developers, like myself, strive for the cutting edge. The idea of mandated shortcuts pisses us off.
Game development is a creative art. You can't rush or schedule that kind of a process. No project management book or body of knowledge can overcome this. As long as game publishers drive for more efficiency and output, they will burn out their staff. Game development is a business that needs a bit of fat (free time). You need more freedom to develop and burn code to test new concepts. Investing in throw-away code is almost always a business "no no."
Business folks expect that all problems in computer gaming have known solutions. This idea is false. There's a ton of R&D for just about every algorithm. There's not necessarily a "one size fits all" solution to any given problem. And even a solid algorithm can often be implemented in over a dozen different ways.
I've worked for a couple of places that tried to run game development like regular software engineering projects. They did not succeed. Sometimes, entire industries need to ditch the MBAs and embrace what got them to where they are in the first place. Operating efficiency is only a good thing, so long as it doesn't negatively impact your staff, quality, and sales.
Building games is completely different that any other kind of software development. It needs to managed that way... special needs in mind.
Software Developer is the best job in America: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/0 4/12/1353238
How can an industry truly grow, and an art form evolve, if everyone is gone by the time they hit 30?
First, games are not an "art form", except in a very general sense. Games are games. Board and card games have been around for thousands of years, and no one's ever come up with the boardgame or card game equivalent of the works of Matisse or Beethoven.
Second, even if games were an art form, the youthfulness of the developers would hardly be any kind of a hindrance. There is plenty of good pop music written and performed by people under the age of 30.
Video games don't need to be art, and they don't need to "evolve", the rules of basketball haven't changed much over the last century or so, and people still enjoy watching and playing basketball. Video games need to be fun. That means engaging gameplay, decent graphics, and having most bugs and glitches cleaned out. World Of Warcraft and the Grand Theft Auto series are fine examples of game crafting at its best.
The Quake engine isn't given away for free.
Is he talking about only American game developers? Or developers from all of the world?
One possible explanation is that something like 50% of the games in the world are produced in Japan, where 10-12+ hour days are pretty typical at EVERY company, and game companies are no exception. A lot of the stuff the Japanese produce is crap that never makes it out of the home market, but there are definitely huge, globally competitive companies like Konami, Capcom, Square, Namco, etc. Since this is what the American companies have to compete with, it's not really surprising that game developers are overworked.
Per ardua ad astra.
Check out Mount and Blade, it's a fun little game even though it's lacking the polish of a AAA title. It was made (as I understand it) by a couple from Turkey. They've sold something like 80K copies at $10 or so a piece...not bad especially for that area of the world! A good game, plus word of mouth, and internet distribution is a good formula for having many great years of PC gaming to come!
I've been thinking about this issue lately, and I'm stuck with a conundrum: Why are people so interested in modding commercial games, when they could use a Free game engine instead and have their work more widely available?
There are a couple of possible explanations for this:
However, none of these reasons seems to provide a complete explanation for why there isn't even a single example of an extremely popular GPL game. I mean, there's no reason whatsoever that the next Counterstrike couldn't be built on Cube or the GPL'd Quake 2 source... so why isn't anyone doing it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Now that game budgets are approaching the budgets and crew sizes of smaller Hollywood productions, why not look to movie studios for the organizing methodology for bringing in a multi-million dollar production requiring immense creative input on-time and on-budget? The budget-busting fiascos we hear about aren't common, they're the product of big stars/directors/producers with too little studio control. The more common case is a fairly rigorous process that moves through well-defined stages with constant oversight, without ever becoming what we call a death march; the end result is a solid financial vehicle that makes money for the investors and also produces creative content that can be judged on how it works as a piece of art.
It's also a system that rewards talent and money-making ability with money.
You want to make a multi-million dollar game? Hire a movie executive to run the process rather than a 30 year old EA graduate who thinks 90 hour weeks are normal.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Since I have not seen anything new in the gaming world in 10 years or more, it's no wonder. All games are the same old RPG, FPS, or racing. No real innovation has existed. Just different looks, different quality. I'ts no wonder that the whole game industry is burning out.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
You're being exploited because you let yourselves be. That's the harsh truth.
If you want a life, you need to control the business aspect where money is generated. Otherwise the machine is going to use you up and spit you out, if there's one thing conclomerates like EA have shown, is you can beat programmers stupid and (new) ones keep coming back, begging for more.
Get involved with the business, own the IP, sit on equal footing.
Yes, business sucks sometimes. Coding sucks sometimes too. If you're able to distingush people with the clue from those without, use that to outbid people. Yes, there's big budgets involved - but there's also people with big pockets who will fund things that look like they'll make money.
Entrepreneurs: See the above? Find some really good programmers and PARTNER with them.
Otherwise? Well.. I'm sure there's a fresh crop of programmers to burn out next year.
..don't panic
I worked in the games industry in PC game development for about 5 years coming out of college. Some good things. I had my own office, there were pinball machines and game consoles in the break room, you could get pizza billed to the company delivered any time after hours etc. Also I learned some very important things about software development. Things like designing self contained code that can not break/interfere with unrelated code. Also learning that just because an app is more or less code complete means very little in the overall completion of your product, the real work is just beginning when that project hits QA. We had a QA lab inhouse and it was interesting to get perspective from interacting with those guys. Also the job made me better at testing my own code because if I did not test it well, I was just going to have 20 entries in the bug tracker when i got to work the next morning. Now on to the bad things. 60 hour weeks were very common. When there are milestones or internal project reviews or E3 or some gamign conference require special builds it is more like 70-80 hours with no weekends. When you have a team of 8 programmers and on any given day 4 of you are still there at 9pm it psychologically does not seem so bad because everyone is going through it together. Likewise when you show up on a Sunday and you see all the familiar cars in the parking lot you do not feel as though you are getting 'screwed' on your weekend. It is kind of amazing what you can get used to but in the end it does feel like young single programmers pretty much are the fuel of the gaming industry. When they are tapped out there is always more fuel waiting to jump onboard. Over time you realize all those perks are just lures to keep you at work as much as possible. When you are 22 some of these sacrifices are not so bad and you are constantly learning new things. When you move on to your second and third projects you start to realize that the problems are no longer new and being at work 60-70 hours a week for a salaried job is more annoying that it used to be. It is annoying things that change over time like hardware technology and machine API's relearning these things over and over every couple years is not intellectually rewarding it feels more like a chore. You can make a good living in games but most places pay a fairly modest salary and then have project completion bonuses that can be VERY rewarding if the product does well. Unfortunately programmers are just one part of the equation on whether or not a project sells well but we ARE the only part that does 20+ hours of free overtime every week for a couple years. Unless your product does great it is entirely possible that you walk away with the equivalent of 5-10$ per hour of bonus money for all that OT you worked which is really a raw deal. Ive been out of games for about 5 years now and would not consider going back. I do not regret my time there because I learned a great deal, but leaving the industry yields more money for fewer hours of easier work. Not a hard decision in retrospect.
There's nothing wrong with an up or out mentality in an industry. Both big law firms and management consulting firms employ this strategy. Having a revolving door of fresh blood may be what allows the industry to flourish with new creativity instead of stagnating with aging dinosaurs.
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[insert funny
Technical innovation has been raging in games, screenshots are ever more beautiful year after year, sound is terrific, and physics are improved. It's the content and themes that are stalled in a never-ending regurgitation of last year's offerings, and this is a result of producers wanting a "safe-bet" for the stakeholders money.
Its hard to really care when you're an artist working on games. All you hear is, "the game industry makes more than hollywood" and all you see is very low wages incomparison to hollywood fx artists, insane deadlines, tons of tedious work, little control over idea because it came down from the suits, no room for advancement, and it sucks the life out of you.
The industry supposedly makes so much money and yet the salaries are like 40k to 60k, while the work days are 12 hours.
Its not a fun job.
The days of garage games are pretty much over due to the amount of time it takes to make a good 3d game.
The game industry was great for artists and programmers, but then the suits came in. Yup those vultures from the entertainment buisness, such as the movie and music industry decided to get their hands on the gaming cash.
No longer are the days of the garage game developers who make millions making a hit game. Now you go and work for the suits if you want to make a game. You get shit pay and thats the way it is.
How much money did Halo make? How much do you think the guy who animated Master Cheif made?
Peanuts.
It's a shitty buisness thats been raped by the buisness majors.
which is why i've decided to leave it and go into film and advertising.
When CNN/Money claimed that working at Entertainment Arts was the best job in America I figured they were either being sarcastic or jobs in America really suck.
We need a supply of developers in their 20s.
It's hard to be a hardcore coder AND a hardcore World of Warcraft / EverQuest raider. 12h coding + 12h of grinding xp/pharming/raiding doesn't leave a lot of time in a day.
Somehow, I really really don't think that more flying limbs and more photorealistic war crimes will bring the joy and passion for games back to jaded developers....
-- Sig down
Stripclub owners! Not many strippers make it past 30, but strip clubs are still thriving. The key is to keep drumming up new talent. Maybe even open a school for aspiring strip^Wgame developers...
The problem with the industry (or at least as I experienced) is that most of the stress comes from the looming spectre of "Do what we say or you will be replaced." You make the games you're told to make, and if you don't there's 10,000 other pimple faced kids with a copy of "Making Games for Dummies" ready to take your place for half your salary. Want to be creative? want to be innovative? Tough. As the story a couple days ago about Wal-Mart pointed out, The stores are looking for publishers who do what they are told.The publishers are looking for studios who do what they are told. Studios are looking for designers who design what they are told, and designers are looking for programming teams that do what they are told. Everyone who "dreams" of being in the business is just so happy when they get an opportunity that they just get taken advantage of, and become another cog in the corporate machine.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
A GPL game involves art, music, code, story, balancing, game play, and the list goes on and on. This involves work, time and effort. Most people who would want to get involved don't have the time to. If a GPL game was to work big time, it would need backers like OO.o or Firefox has. The problem is Firefox and OO.o provide the backers with something they can use to make money, a GPL game would be fun, but game companies wouldn't make any money off of it.
We are the Borg...
I came to the same understanding a year ago, and I've been reading business books ever since. The hard part was to get started, but now when I got some 20 books under the belt, I feel very comfortable and confident talking business. Know your value!
;o)
Thanks for an excellent post, xtal. I wish I had mod points, but hey... Anonymous Cowards don't get those...
However, there are some good GPLed 2d games. Battle for Wesnoth is one. Another one that is good is crossfire
I do, but not so much that these are the things developers want to create, but everyone wants to be successful, and game development is a great risk. Some ideas are sure fire hits, while others fail and developers are looking for work. I think most developers want to create something that shows their talents to the largest possible audience. If nobody buys your game, you cant do that.
I worked as a game developer for several years. I loved the work, but I was underpaid and it definitely hurt my personal life (i.e. I had none).
During my last project, we were actually told by management that a 60 hour week was now mandatory (with all of us being salaried). That's when I gave them my 2 week notice.
Note that I often put in more than 60 hours in a week before that. But it was my choice, sort of. I needed to do it to get the work done but no one was saying I had to punch a clock.
This sort of jackass management behavior went on through every game project I worked on. Not only are the devs on a 5 year burnout cycle, but the game industry seems to attract some of the most juvenille and inexperienced managers I've ever seen. These are the wannabe corporate ladder climbers who couldn't get jobs at real companies. They promise deadlines to publishers that they can't possibly hit and then work their devs to death in an attempt to meet them.
The only other time I've seen such incompetence was with some of the dot-bombs of the late 90s. But in the game industry this goes on more often than not.
Contrast that with where I am now. I'm a senior dev working on a lot of technically interesting code. It's not games anymore but guess what? I work 9 - 6 and I make 2x what I was paid as a game developer.
Sure game dev was my passion but mismanagement has a way of changing your priorities. Would I professionally work on games again? Sure. But only if I owned the company.
Ten years ago I fled my passion of game development to the much dryer realm of chip design because I thought the game industry wasn't going to be kind to the middle aged, married with children crowd.
My friends that stayed confirm. It really sucks, because the best programming I did and saw done was coding games.
The scale of today's games makes it much more difficult for a small, private company to make much of an impact-- which is about the only place I'd want to work.
Look at the interactive fiction community--lots of great stuff is getting put out for free, and there's a non-trivial amount of coding involved in putting out an IF game.
But getting from that great story/gameplay to a 3d graphics-and-sound fest that would draw in casual gamers is a *huge* amount of work that would require many developer hours, and very little in the way of artistic creativity.
I think that this parallels a wider trend one sees in Open Source where interesting projects tend to be extremely succesful and dull/monotonous areas tend not to be addressed so well. Creativity is not lacking in open source games, as the IF community shows, but marshalling the resources necessary to make compelling 3d graphical games is beyond the community, due to the monotonous nature of the work.
I guess it was easier for Pete Cooke and the rest when coding a game was a single man effort besides the mandatory stunt doing the music score. Then they started adding more and more people and now it sounds more like making a movie. I don't necessarily see the amount of people involved as a problem per say but often people have different agendas and it's hard to have them all sold on a well defined vision. Too often the way to go is to offer something for everyone in the process diluting the original idea if there ever was one. It seems like marketing has become the king even when it should be content and the coders are stuck in limbo between the utopia of what could have been and commercial values. "Forget the plot lets make really good looking screenshots" I doubt the soulless but pretty end result inspires coders much. For example Arcanum wasn't that pretty but it had an excellent main plot with multiple possible endings. Add five years and now we have Oblivion which looks really pretty but the plot seems like something Steve Ballmer came up with between his rants. Apparently it's more profitable to spend the cash in marketing than giving some of it to someone who knows about fantasy plots. George RR Martin, Robin Hobb et al spring to my mind. A really good plot might inspire the coders or it might not but it would certainly make games more interesting and something of that would have to trickle back. People will always complain about their jobs. At least most aren't digging graves in Finland.
If game companies get away with overworking or underpaying their employees, it's only because there is apparently an oversupply of coders eager to work in games. This is a lot like professional acting or singing. Everybody wants to do it, and those who aren't the best at it won't get any great reward, but may still be happy to be involved on some level. Sooner or later, the invisible hand will set a steady scale rate for developers with the requisite experience. What is probably most needed are HR people who are able too weed out the enthusiastic but mediocre from the pool of qualified candidates. Working a clueless hack to death isn't going to do anything to help your quality or release date, and as the industry matures, I think compensation levels will as well. Too much money is at stake to play Monty Burns with the workforce.
besides the Stones and a couple artificially propped up bands, not many "new & different" sounds come from old geezers. If I had the energy I had 20 years ago, I might give a career in music a try.
Sig Hansen?
Oh, cut me a break! Yeah, I'd say it's a different timescale! I've never heard of a fast-food employee working for 40+ hours, straight, sleep an hour or two under a desk, then pick back up and do another 12 hour day before going outside to sleep in the car to get enough energy just to drive home to sleep, then come back and repeat! I've done 100+ hour weeks for months. At $50k/year salary, I think that works out to about the same amount I'd have made working equal hours at fast food.
Working that sort of extreme schedule has a price. First of all, you never see your family, sleep at the office 3 nights of the week, don't get exercise, eat whatever you can get quickly, have no time for recreation, etc. It's called "death march" for a reason. Constant headaches, blackouts, racing pulse, dizziness were common symptoms among the engineering team. My symptoms mostly went away within six months of quitting and returning to a normal 9-5 career, but my formerly coal-black hair gained an amazing amount of grey in two years! I was 25 years old. Most of the 120 person company, excepting senior management, was under 21 years old.
Game development is like pro sports. You're either 100%, devoting all of yourself and sacrificing your personal life for the team, or you're out of the game. Sounds stupid, but it's true. I know an ex-pro American Football player (lineman for the Vikings) and he once called game development "nerd football -- except you guys beat up your bodies from the inside out." He has a point.
Fast food, no matter how stressful, is over when you walk out the door. You don't go home worrying about the bloody hell you're going to pull off the impossible and invent some new process tomorrow in time for the next investor deadline. You just do your job, then leave. Additionally, the stress on a game developer follows him home because due to peer pressure you're never really allowed to be "off duty." You feel like you're letting your colleagues down by not working all night, or both weekend days.
Luckily I got out while I still had a marriage. Many of my colleagues chose their job over their families and got "the call" while at work. (meaning wife calls to say "I'm leaving you and won't be here if you come home.") When you're not there, you have no marriage.
Shipped a PC Gamer "Game Of The Year" title and made a ton of money for my company and our investors (not for myself) but it almost cost me my marriage, made me miss out on two years of my kid's childhood, and certainly impacted my health. Was it worth it? In retrospect, no.
In a way I'm glad I did it but I would never, ever do it again. Not for five times the salary. Seriously.
--"Jack"
Posted anonymously, for obvious reasons.
Four. I don't even personally know anyone who has been in the game for 10. 2-3 is the norm, and I eeked out one last year.
It is a fast-paced, high-stress, thankless, low-paying, non-creative field. It didn;t used to be this way, bottom lines and the almighty dollar used to still play a big part in things but now it is just insanity.
I have personally witnessed more innovative and fun titles get axed to move the talented folks on the team to work on some budget title or licensed product to meet a deadline than anything else. It is disheartening for everyone involved, and crushing to many. Who wants to work like that? Not creative talented individuals, but code pushers who just work in the confines of some pre-built engine and collect a meager check.
I really want to see the Revolution make good on their claims of open/indie development for the system. Online distribution and a free/low cost accessible dev system would produce so many great and unique games. Xbox 360 is still too expensive and has too many barriers to really take off in this area and will just be a haven for ports and such, the Revolution has a rela chance to break into new territory and if they do I think a real revolution will begin.
The industry needs to collapse and come down off of this Hollywood emulation they so desperately cling to, it has become derivitive, immature, inaccessible, expensive... and for what?
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
"I've been thinking about this issue lately, and I'm stuck with a conundrum: Why are people so interested in modding commercial games, when they could use a Free game engine instead and have their work more widely available?"
How about because they're thinking of making money with their mods. As for commercial being better? You be the judge (wmv)
Yes! Working in the gaming industry, I have seen first hand how over-zealous publishers* have cut development time by 4 weeks, demanded many more features, and constantly threatened us with "We are going to pull out unless you fix 200 bugs a day." Because of that, our game (name withheld), whose title/brand already has a decent history of success, sucked. They did not allow for us to finish balancing the game, art, and mechanics (such as physics, UI, etc). Consequently, that title got a very low score by virtually all game reviewers. The publisher was too concerned about getting it out the door than actually making a good game.
:(
*Publishers: Big companies full of suits usually more interested in putting a game on the shelf rather then making it actually FUN. They usually hamper/change design, but don't actually make the game (though they claim they do). I'd say more, but they might sue.
> Modders start out as players; they are only interested in the game they're familiar with
Perhaps modders have a sense (whether true or not) that potential players are more interested in a game engine they're familair with. So, since they want to do mods that will be successful, they stick to commercial games.
In other words, if modders think there is more demand for a commerical mod, that's what most of them will want to create.
>However, none of these reasons seems to provide a complete explanation
> for why there isn't even a single example of an extremely popular GPL game.
No explanation.
How about a nice game of NETHACK, though?
If a GPL game was to work big time, it would need backers like OO.o or Firefox has.
The engine isn't the only intellectual property associated with a game. A company could make a game's source code available under the GPL, but still sell the art, models, levels, quests, music, and other associated bits that turn an, "engine" into a, "game".
I can't decide if this post is interesting, funny, insightful, or flamebait.
I've been thinking about these problems for a long time. I want to go into game development, preferably either game design or game programming. I'm working on several projects in my spare time right now (see URL). I'm going to college for software engineering with an emphasis on games this fall.
I've read articles and comments like those on this page, and they all say the same thing to me: Game companies underpay and overwork their employees, and this is creating both terrible games and burned out programmers. After thinking about it, I thought of what I think the problem is and how it can be fixed.
Here's my bottom line: Games are too expensive to develop. Like the parent poster said, innovative ideas don't get any of the funding they need to thrive. We're talking millions of dollars with today's development budgets. The only games that get funding are the already-proven, sure-fire (at least, according to the bean-counters) games. This makes sense - why spend millions of dollars on something that might crash and burn?
So the problem isn't with people unwilling to fund games, but rather with the game development cost itself: if the cost was a few thousand dollars instead of several million, a small group of people could probaby fund an entire project by themselves! I compared today's games to the games of the NES and SNES eras -- why are we hearing so many horror stories of low-paid, overworked employees working on unoriginal games that suck? In the NES/SNES days, practically anyone could get in on the action because it wasn't a huge risk with millions of dollars at stake. Having so many developers working on so many games really opened the door for innovation. Look through your favorite NES collection and see how many different developers there are: Hudson Soft, Virgin Interactive, Camerica, Mindscape, Taito. Now look through your favorite current-generation games; many fewer developers with hits that you love: Nintendo, maybe Bungie or Rockstar, Konami...
After identifying the problem, I tried thinking of solutions. What can we do to lower development costs? One thing stands out beyond all the others: graphics. It takes many weeks to create a model and all of the poses and animations that go along with that. Not to mention all of the level design that goes into adding the third dimension. I think it would do the industry a large favor if it started encouraging 2D games more. Handhelds are a good market, though they are too turning to 3D-only games. Now, I'm not saying that 3D games don't have their place -- amazing games like Ocarina of Time, Halo, or Metal Gear Solid would have been impossible without 3D -- I'm just saying that we should encourage modern 2D games (think Cave Story) more than we do. In short: bring 2D back to the gaming world.
The other costly factor is distribution and marketing. While I think this was a "problem" back in the NES/SNES era as well, we now have the tool we need to nearly eliminate this cost. The internet is the perfect distribution platform. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but hear me out. If we could get mainstream console developers (the "big three") to support downloads of smaller gamedev companies' games onto their consoles, this would lower costs and be a huge boon for "indie" companies. Look at the PSP's homebrew development community. Amazing work going on there. Now imagine if independant developers had the power and the market penetration of mainstream consoles like the Revolution or the PS3. Obviously, the big three would have to open their dev kits to smaller developers, too.
I think the thing that could *really* revolutionize and recreate this industry is low-cost, digital downloads of (what I'm going to call) fourth-party games -- games created by companies that don't have the means to hire large development groups and sell their games in Wal*Mart. As an example, Nintendo could charge fourth-party developers a small monthly fee to have their games put up for sale on their online service. Custom
That argument is the equivalent of "if Hitler was bad, they wouldn't have let him raise to power." Oh wait they didn't and we ended up with WW2. People, organizations and industries paint themselves in a corner all the time, and that's what Jason Della Rocca and Warren Spector explain about the games industry in their articles.
"As the link mentions, the "difficulty" of Lisp, has lead to its sidelining all too often. The fact is, it is a very, very powerful language and definitely worth a look given the obstacles modern game programmers are running up against."
The difficulty against Lisp is that most programmers have been using Windows most of their lives, and have trouble moving to Linux.
Because at the time during which CS was initially developed, the HL engine it used was rather considered rather advanced. In the year 2006, the Cube and Quake 2 engines are not advanced by any stretch of imagination.
Let's see:
GTA vs. the Pieta
Halo vs. Romeo and Juliet
Myst (remember that?) vs. the Sistine Chapel
The list goes on. using computer games and art in the same sentence simply goes to show how irrelevant art (REAL art) is in contemporary society, where a proud and important tradition in human civilisation has been buttraped by the entertainment industry to the point where something as pathetic as playthings for emotional adolescents and other spiritually stunted consumers and sheep can be seen as "art".
Next thing you know, programming a tomagachi will be held in some artistic regard.
Stupid stupid people.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
of game programmers as illustrated by the well known example of Mr. John Carmack.
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
You seem to have all the answers - let us know when your first product is out.
Perhaps the open source idea of havings thousands of eyes, and encouraging anybody to jump in and out of the code making changes, is incompatible with the process of creating a game?
I don't know of any open source applications that are "finished", or even try to be - their early releases are at least slightly useful, and they are always releasing new versions and adding new features. And there always are new features that can be added, each of which will improve the application, so people can work on their favourite features and the project will continue on its path of continual improvement.
Traditional games don't work like that. They're barely recognisable as a game for a large part of their development time - during that time, there has to be a vision for the finished product, and everybody on the project has to work towards that distant vision. It'll be years before anybody can really see the results of their work. That's not very enticing for somebody who can only be certain of spare time for the next couple of months - they would rather work on something much smaller, like a mod or a tech demo, just to get visible results.
And unlike most open source projects, people can't just add features they think are cool and useful - everything has to fit into the overall design of the game. You cannot simply add features without considering the consequences on the whole of the rest of the game - and you can't consider all the consequences unless you've already spent months working on the game and getting a feel for how everything interacts.
For professional game development companies, they get people working towards the vision by simply paying them to do so. That won't work for community-based open source projects, so they need some other way of doing it.
But I don't know what way that would be. I've been working on a "freeware, hobbyist" game instead (0 A.D.), which is a full 3D RTS with its own game engine, comparable in scope to commercial games (or at least to those of a few years ago) - it's making use of various open source libraries (SpiderMonkey, Vorbis, Xerces, etc), but is not itself open source. And I think that's a factor in how it has kept going for so long: 'membership' is still open to anyone who has the right abilities and dedication, but that means there is a strong concept of membership - we're part of a team and feel some responsibility towards making progress, following the design, and seeing the game through until it's finished. I don't think that feeling would be as strong if we were primarily a loose community of people who are just poking around the code with no commitment, which is how I perceive most open source projects.
And programmers are only a small part of game development - you need artists, designers, sound effects, music... (We have historians too, though that obviously depends on exactly what game you're making). They're far less likely than programmers to jump into an open source project - it's much more comfortable to jump into a well-defined team.
In any case, we still have a long way to go before our game is actually complete and released, so we don't have much more tangible results than the many open source games which haven't been finished. But I don't see how we could have got as far as we have done, if we didn't have the organisation that we do :-)
Wait, so you're saying that it's a good thing that people who get into a business for their love of it are being mercilessly exploited by the publishers/etc. and driven to do something else? That's just silly.
Sure, much of what is produced by the games industry these days is crap, but maybe things would be getting better if the folks with experience and passion weren't being abused out of the business after just two or three titles. This stuff is actually pretty difficult, maybe having some experience under their belts would help delvelopers.
Besides, when is it ever good that someone is being abused and taken advantage of?
Behold the Power of Cheese!
So, are you saying that the problem is marketing, and that mods succeed where new programs don't because they can rely on the existing base of gamers for "word of mouth" advertising?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
How about ending the absurd practice of incestuous hiring? Surely there are many, many very talented and experienced designers, programmers, and artists who are interested in working in the game industry... but it seems that having shipped a game title is a minimum requirement for jobs in this industry... that or take an entry-level job. How many creative and experienced people have been refused positions of appropriate seniority because they don't already work for a game company?
It's not "no family life". We call it "commitment to the job" or "hard worker".
"which is why i've decided to leave it and go into film and advertising."
That's why I went into these kind of games. A lot less pressure with all the fun.
Check out the GPL DarkPlaces engine and Nexuiz, which uses it. It's a bit of a weird engine, some of it is as good as Doom 3, some of it is more of a quake 2 standard. Doesn't run incredibly well on older machines, either. But still, I'd say it's of near commercial quality.
Certainly, in the bits where Nexuiz looks bad it's because they don't have good artists (and zero art direction) rather than the engine's fault. Some of the levels look amazingly good with all the effects turned on.
(Disclaimer: I don't work in the games industry. This is speculation.)
So what is the solution, besides scaling back the size of games?
Doing games reminds me of doing graphic artwork. A lot of people want to be involved, because they can try out their ideas and the end result is entertaining. However, in graphics, one guy can try out his own ideas. If you want to make a full-blown game, you need more than one person to perform all the implementation work to try out the set of that one person's ideas. That means that there's no way for that one person to be as creative as he wants.
The solution is better game-building tools and toolkits. Game development companies all seem to reimplement their own graphics engines, for example. That may be cool if you're a programmer with an interest in seeing new, pretty things, but frankly...writing code to cleverly do level-of-detail -- the same thing that's been done four hundred times before -- drives up the cost in human labor to produce a game.
So my first guess would be to use existing libraries as much as possible. If you want to do game design, see if you can avoid doing low-level work as much as possible. Use Crystal Space or some other pre-existing graphics engine. There are *plenty* of libre and gratis graphics engines out there, and frankly, the player's experience is simply not improved that much more by a 10% improvement in how many polygons you can put on the screen with a given number of CPU cycles. Sure, if you're making a content-laden game, you want your game to look unique -- but you can do that by writing a small amount of high-level code to spit out particles flying out along a differently-shaped path, rather than building yet another particle engine.
Same thing goes for sound. I doubt that OpenAL in and of itself can be used as a full-blown game sound engine, but it's probably a pretty worthwhile foundation at least. I would assume that there are some gratis and libre game sound engines built on OpenAL, but a quick search of freshmeat didn't seem to turn anything up.
If your game fits into one of a certain set of games, there is already a game framework with all this done for you already. If you're writing a shooter, there are scads of Quake-type engines available (and game developers *have* been using these). I'm unaware of any major adventure game or RPG engines that are freely available and support all the features that current games are being released with.
As for content -- artwork and audio -- this I'm totally in the dark about. I would assume that there is some sort of archive of intended-for-game-use content that someone sells (and probably even good-quality gratis stuff out there somewhere), but I'm not aware of any such. I should ideally be able to, if I add a cat to my game, be able to search for "meow", get back a bunch of audio files, try them out rapidly, and then simply add the one I want into my game.
Modelling -- again, I'm not familiar with what resources are out there, though I have seen gratis archives of models. I think that rapid modelling is one of the areas that software developers could vastly improve. Right now, when I think of a "building", I need to sit down and start modelling, and even if I'm good, it takes a while to build such a thing. "Buildings" are common things to make. Really, modelling software should have vast amounts of templates such that they can easily build a stock building with nothing more than a "create templates.skycraper" command or a menu choice, and then allow high-level changes to various parameters -- window shapes, water stains, grime, etc. Terrain modellers exist -- I was quite impressed with how much Bryce sped up terrain modelling, and I'm sure that there are probably better terrain modelers available (though a search on Freshmeat was disappointing). Modellers that allow rapid modelling of an area, that can cut
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Apparently not that many, because there are hundreds or thousands of GPL game projects on SourceForge, and most of them are dead (or never really got started in the first place) because there weren't enough people to make them. Surely some of them had to be good ideas!
Marketing is one big one. Have you played Battle for Wesnoth? HoMM and similar series would be the closest commercial equivalent, and Wesnoth is at least in the same neighborhood in the content arena. Its gameplay is pretty popular.
Everyone I know that has tried Wesnoth has liked it...but they hadn't heard about it.
I mean, there's no reason whatsoever that the next Counterstrike couldn't be built on Cube or the GPL'd Quake 2 source... so why isn't anyone doing it?
Quake 2 *source* does not come with the textures and so forth, which are still under copyright (I'm not complaining -- I think that this is a pretty good system). If you mod for the current, commercial Quake, you have a set of graphics and audio all ready for you, and you can work on high-level gameplay issues.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Speaking as a software vendor to both industries, yes, Hollywood FX artists can get a bit more money than a game artist. They also get insane deadlines, tons of tedious work, little control over idea because it came down from the VFX Supervisor, no room for advancement, and it sucks the life out of them too.
And then there's the downside. As an AC already pointed out, in an established industry, especially a perceived creative one, everyone else's opinion is far more important than your own - egotism is rampant.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Apparently not that many, because there are hundreds or thousands of GPL game projects on SourceForge, and most of them are dead (or never really got started in the first place) because there weren't enough people to make them. Surely some of them had to be good ideas!
Consider the following points:
* I think that a lot of people that want to write games are younger folks -- the idea of writing a game is one of the things that I remember people doing in high school when they learned to code. These folks have less experience to draw on, and possibly a harder time with project management issues. If a project is your first, you have to make all your stumbles and do your learning on it...and so there are probably a lot of games out there that go unfinished. Also, a lot of these folks go off to or leave college, and it drastically affects their schedule.
* One of the largest motivators for open source is that a hacker is building something that *he can use*. Yes, peer approval and resume-building and a feeling of helping someone out or fighting against an objectionable closed-source company are all nice, but at the end of the day, there are a *lot* of (and really good) development tools written by open source folks, and few educational games for five-year-olds (yes, I know that there are some projects along those lines). Many, many games can be played through once or twice, and then the replay value fades. As this happens, the hacker can't enjoy using the software that he's writing, and his interest fades.
The open source games that have done well have one very noticable characteristic -- they all have extremely high replay value, much more so than almost any commercial games. People can and have played games like NetHack or ToME for far more hours than just about any commercial games. There are open source card games, and board games. Most open-source games have a randomized element, or are played against other players, so that they continue to be a challenge. I can think of almost zero plot-based open source games that have done well (text-based interactive fiction being a notable exception, and I think that this is more due to the large pool of potential IF authors and the reduced amount of content that must be produced). Plot-based games lose much of their charm after the first time through, so OSS folks can't really enjoy their own game.
* Artists aren't rich. Programmers are, by and large, currently in heavy demand. This means that they can get away with working shorter hours and making plenty of money. They have more potential free time to run out and simply give away on free games.
If you do graphics work, things are, as I understand it, more competitive. One (traditional media) artist that I know of has to work a number of jobs to make ends meet -- I'm sure that if she didn't have to take care of her expenses, she'd love to donate her time.
I've no idea where sound engineering work comes in.
* Game content is less fun than game code. This is a guess on my part, but if I wanted to do some graphics work, I think that I'd rather try out a bunch of my own ideas. It has to be much less fun to, say, draw fifty frames of some character to obtain smooth animation.
Hence, we have plenty of OSS game engines, but less free content.
* Game content is less interchangeable than game code. OSS projects generally have code contributions from many, many people, and are patched together by a maintainer. People lose interest or have increased time demands and stop working on the project, and other people become interested or have a use for the code and start contributing patches. This works well for code. The user doesn't know how many people have worked on the code, because the coders don't have a user-visible style. I don't know whether Joe Hacker has a clever strategy for traversing linked lists when I use software. As long as my softwar
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I think the reason is simple: making games is hard. It's not an easy process. Sure, creating a prototype or an OpenGL graphics demo might be easy, but creating a fully polished game isn't. I think most of the dead sourceforge projects that are out there come from people realising this once they've already started.
I see way too many people getting into games programming where they think games programming is trying to create the next Quake engine, only to give up halfway through with something that's nowhere near as capable as what is out there for free or cheap. There's a big big difference between engine programming and game programming and I think this is something else that's lost to people just getting into it.
The talk of it taking 'millions of dollars' or more and the skyrocketing cost of game development also irks me a little. Sure, if you're trying to create the next big AAA PC title it might be. There are however, tonnes of other avenues out there for the budding game programmer. Mobile phone games is one, where the platforms are at a level much like games systems were in the 90s. Another one (the industry I work in) is games for interactive TV set-top boxes and the like, where a game is worked on by a programmer and an artist, for example. Casual gaming is very huge at the moment and there are alot of good toolsets out there (think Torque et al) that can be had for very cheap.
People just need look beyond their own egos a little and the need to create the next Quake-killer. I'm not saying don't aim high, but at the same time it's wrong to look at the industry and not see the other opportunities out there. There ARE some great companies out there, they're just not necessarily the ones that all the 'cool kids' are talking about.
Oh - there ARE some extremely excellent and relatively popular GPL games. Some great games come to mind: 'Battle For Wesnoth', 'FlightGear', 'Neverball' and (to a lesser polished extent) 'Vegastrike'. Oh and let's not forget Nexuiz.
Add to this the fact that most successful OSS software a) scratches an itch for the developer, b) will be used for years and c) is useful in a pre-finished state. Games, well, 0 for 3. I once got an assignment at work to do some genetic algorithm stuff and, having that as the context, made a Java framework to do the work in and GPLed the framework. But I'll never say "Dang, I really need to play My Dream Game". A project needs continuity in both users and developers or it will end up like the 99.9% of game projects on sourceforge that die before reaching pre-alpha. But its a catch-22, how do you hook in users to play the game (for development periods lasting months or years) before it has any fun gameplay? The most fun games, the ones that are fun enough for people to fork over money to play, typically are used and discarded in a matter of weeks! Then there is the completition feature. Think of Apache, Linux, or Mozilla a couple of years ago. Were they as feature-rich as they were today? No. But Apache gave you a functional web server, Linux was a functional OS, and Mozilla a functional browser. A 20% completed web server will serve web pages. A 20% complete game will *suck* (don't believe me? Spend an hour looking around sourceforge.). It probably won't even show the promise that will sucker folks in to stay the long haul getting it to 100%.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
As an embedded systems software engineer who's worked on the Cell (PS3) processor for 3.5 years as a Toshiba employee, I thought I would have an easy entry into Game business -- and so did a lot of my coworkers. I even got references from a Sony engineer to get my name in front of the hiring managers.
Today, I haven't gone anywhere in game business: I've had several phone interviews and even one on site interview but nothing panned out. Interviewing process for game business is different from embedded systems since I'm able to get jobs (have been for the past 18+ years). I was unemployed for one month (Sep'05) as I tried to focus on a game job but I ended up right back into my area of expertise [where I am getting my pay check]. The biggest jolt I got was when I was told I would have to be hired as a mid-level programmer rather than a senior one. All because I wasn't in the game business before?
I see some of the "we're different here" attitude in embedded systems (like knowing certain communications protocols as a requirement for getting hired -- which to me is just as bad as requiring specific, trademarked development tool experience), but in general basic skills are transferable and specific details can always be (and is) learned on the fly. Granted, I haven't done math recently but with my Math B.A. degree (on top of my B.S. and M.A. degrees in C.S.) I didn't think it was a big deal. They also wanted C++ experience which I was rusty in but I had previous experience before (ironically, with my current job, I had no serious problem porting a C++ program from AT&T Standard Component library to C++ Standard (STL) Library -- it wasn't easy but it wasn't impossible either). Now, I won't even bother to apply to game openings and the only way I'd get involved is if I write my own game or game tool [as if I was working on one in my spare time... yeah, right].
Slightly off track but if you haven't read "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream," I'd highly recommend it. I picked it up while I was unemployed and felt that the author got the right feel of the job hunt process. I don't agree with her proposals on how to fix the system [more government intervention] but she did go into the job hunt process herself far more than I ever had to do [she never did get a white collar job, though].
Danny Kumamoto
If you love doing something, you don't want to do it as a job.
This might sound a little odd, but doing something as a job and doing it for fun are quite different animals.This is particularly applicable to programming: when you're doing it for fun, you set your own schedules, choose your own projects and generally arrange so you're only doing stuff you enjoy. When you're doing it for work, you're doing what someone else wants you to do, when they want you to do it and complete with all of those features you'd leave out of your personal projects because they are tedious to implement.
With all that said, I'm a professional software developer who also does programming as a hobby. I manage to do this without going mad by learning to keep my "fun" projects fun, essentially by avoiding doing anything that's vauguely useful. This might sound silly, but it means I can focus on the fun bits and ignore the tedious bits. Simple puzzle/reflex games are a good example of something that's fun to do for yourself, since you set the rules. It is what you make it and there aren't pesky "features" to implement beyond that.
The licence on Quake 3 is exactly that, though admittedly applied retroactively. I've yet to see any vauguely-complete games built on top of the Q3 engine, because starting from scratch is very hard. I started making some mods to the engine, but code alone doesn't make a game and so I didn't have the enthusiasm to get to the point where others would be enthusiastic enough to help.
This is a problem with open source projects in general and games in particular: much of the early work is generally done by one person, since people are unlikely to contribute unless they use the product, and they can't use the product until it's usable. In the case of a game, unless it's a simple puzzle or reflex game you generally don't play it more than one or twice, and if it doesn't work then you're likely to just throw it away rather than fix it.
You worked 80 hours and when you got home, probably didn't want to see another video game.
Now you're down to a nice normal 40 hours, you've got your life back and probably have a bit of free time - you also have a great big pile of game producing skills in your head. Should you wish to make something interesting as a hobby, you're now in a much better position to do so, then when you were working for Atari (and in a much better position that somebody like myself who doesn't have a clue how to make a game).
I don't know of any open source applications that are "finished", or even try to be
I can name at least 1: Log4J. It's pretty much feature complete, and certainly meets almost everyone's needs for logging in the java dev community. Not only that, it's the preferred logging solution even though Sun ships a logging utility with the JDK now (At least in my experience. I should also note any other logging tool benchmarks against Log4J if they're any good at all).
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Not sure if Lisp is really the tool for the task. Typed-data, untyped-variable languages are intrinsically slow. They have to re-check their assumptions nearly every time they touch storage. Even advanced Lisp compilers don't improve this much.
My own recommendation would be a mix of asm (low-level optimized stuff), Ocaml(engine) and lua (control and configuration).
You're right about one thing though: C++ is a fucking blight. It's used because "it's the standard, it's fast, and you can hire developers". To which the obvious answer is: none of the above matters if you can't use it to deliver the goods! And you can't.
Thanks for mentioning Battle For Wesnoth. As you say, like most, I hadn't heard of it, but I'm downloading it now. I love turn-based strategy, so I'm going to have a blast with this. Looks like it'll have a decent amount of replay value too.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
When you are modifying a commercial game you already have a captive audience awaiting your content and willing to play it. This isn't true if you strike out on your own.
>>this guy is the stupidest person I've seen on Slashdot (and that's a high honor). Just wow.
:)
Sorry to disappoint, but you're not the first to tell me I'm an idiot.
Now, I never claimed to have made great decisions... but my point in telling this story is an attempt to outline my experiences, hoping that somebody else will learn from my mistakes. To defend my insanity, however, I will say that not everything is about the money. This job wasn't, and therein lies the important lesson -- it's how the industry "pulls you in" and uses your own ego against you. It was an opportunity to be at the top of my game even for a short while, and prove to myself that I could do it. Sure, the money was shit considering the effort, but when each week is filled with challenges, inventions and innovations (any one of which would have been a suitable Ph.D thesis subject) and the subject matter is interesting, it is addicting. Add to it the ego-stroking -- how many people get their photo in PC Gamer or see people lining up to buy their software at WalMart or EB, or have an "A List" hollywood director and the head of a major film studio fly out and talk to your team about making a movie? It's not $$, but it's very cool.
You see, it's easy to get caught up in the machine and find yourself evolving to a situation you would have never agreed to if it were that way from the beginning. And there's always the promise from the company that "if we make it big... we'll all be rich." Well, maybe so, but probably not.
Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
a wake up call for all the comp sci students and such. don't go into this sector, let them suffer loss of workers until they treat them right. till then, don't buy, well easy for me, i grew jaded of games long ago. its all the same stuff over and over, and i just stopped caring.