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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?'"
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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
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.
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.
Balderdash.
Arguments such as these have been made hundreds of times over about every creative profession, and there are enough counterexamples to prove it's utter bunk. Take Cezanne. He did most of his important, really revolutionary work in the last few years of his life. He was only actually discovered by the around the turn of the century, when he was finally honored with an exhibition. Monet himself came up to him and esposed his genius, saying he was, in fact, the greatest genius of them all. He said (T. J. Clark's paraphrase) "Maybe... but back to work!" Can I offer you, perhaps, John Milton, or Robert Frost, or, hell, Neal Stephenson (he's 46, you know)?
Young people generally have the advantage that they're poor, desparate to make their mark on the world, too inexperienced to know what they're doing is stupid. Their brains also have a higher degree of plasticity, but this countered on the other end of the scale by the experience and wisdom that comes with age. What happens to older artists is that they get rich when they're 30 and are too busy with the trappings of fame and fortune to really produce anything good after that. After all, I don't think the decline in the Harry Potter books is because Rowling (not a spring chicken, by the way, she's 40) is now incapable of true innovation, but because she's writing big sloppy books as fast as she can. She knows they'll sell and her dedication to the craft of writing has become lax.
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'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
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.
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.