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?'"

Comments

Uh... yeah....

[dgatwood]

Most of them have long since lost that creative spark by the time they're thirty anyway. One could reasonably argue that from the perspective of the business, they are merely trying to get as much useful work out of them during the handful of years in which they will actually be productive.

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.