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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?'"
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.