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Game Development Conditions Could Drive Devs East
Kotaku has up a feature piece looking at the opening of a new studio in mainland China. Staffed by expatriate Western game developers, it represents something that founders Chris Pfeiffer and Max Garber see as a future trend: developing games in the west is soul-crushing. The two participated in the grind to get Resistance: Fall of Man out in time for the PlayStation 3 launch, and have now opened a studio with the goal of 'making great games while living a good life.' Lower costs in China allow for a higher standard of living, while labour laws will force game studios to stick to rational work-weeks. Pfeiffer also suggests that the overwhelming costs involved in making games will force U.S. studios to outsource development work to Asian nations. When that happens, Pfeiffer's studio and compatriots will be ready.
It seems to be just saying gaming companies work people too much, so if you work less it must be better! While I understand overworking hurts productivity, at some point addition by subtraction has to fail. If it's really such a great idea for programmer to work 8 or 6 or 4 hours a day while stll making a great game, someone would've done that by now. The fact that there hasn't been much success from not working much on the gaming industry seems to suggest that working really hard at least works. And if working less really is better, what's stopping someone from doing it here?
I'm not even sure how the standard of living is relevant. It applies to every job equally. You gain due to the lower standard of living, yes, but you also lose some things, like living in a foreign country you're not familiar with. It's not like outsourcing is some always benficial action to do. You win some but you also lose some. If not, all companies can just pack up and resume operations in China!
That's the problem at had when I worked at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari for six years. One of my mentor told every new hire that they must prepare to sacrifice their personal life to the video game gods, get rid of the girlfriend/wife (prositutes are OK), and forgot about the kids. My current job is being a help desk specialist where I work only 40 hours a week but I make the same kind of money when I worked 80 hours a week in the video game industry. Now I have time to enjoy a personal life.
Why not India? Its a democracy(albeit poor one)
but you can live there as well as in China for the money.
If they consider to stay there long-term it might be a factor.
When you hear about the huge budgets of modern video games, you rarely hear what percentage goes to actually paying developers. If more of the money went to the people actually doing the work, they could hire the developers they need to get the job done without working their developers to death. As it stands right now, no self respecting developer with a family can afford to take a job in games because the hours are crazy, and because if they're any good the pay in non-games work is as much as three times what a programmer can make in the games industry. No wonder they end up understaffed with inexperienced people, struggle to hit deadlines, and we're always hearing about how this or that experienced developer gets fed up and leaves the industry. Meanwhile, the publishers and marketers are living fat off these people's labor.
One of two things will break this trend. Either publishers will become less relevant as self funded studios become common (who knows how this will turn out as Vista pushes game development off of open platforms into a console and portable only world), or the rest of the venture backed software industry will start to treat their employees poorly enough that game development doesn't look so bad anymore. Either way, it's likely to get worse before it gets any better.
Regardless, it's hard to see how China has anything to do with this story other than to stir up the outrage of outsourcing and send hits to the website. So they opened an independent studio, and they did it in China because they have some delusion that their happiness there was due to geography and not the fact that they actually took a vacation... I wish them luck, really, but the geography of this story shouldn't be the focus. It's a red herring.
The article seems to be suggesting that labour laws in China prevent the kind of unpaid mega-crunch 60+ hour week hell that western developers demand... since when were we behind China in labour laws?!
Saying that, the UK is behind a lot of Europe, and the US behind us...
As for Japan, I'd gladly put with with the crunch there I think. It's hard for a while but the rewards are genuine.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Believe it or not, I believe the game industry is actually growing up. Losing your life to the almighty schedule was the accepted norm a few years ago, but not so much today. I actually know of publishers routinely scheduling six-day workweeks for the latter half of the project, and seven-day workweeks for the final month or two.
This is an issue I actually talked with my current employer about during the hiring process. I've now worked at a pretty well-known studio for the couple of years, and have shipped two successful games. So far, I'm still working normal 40-hour work weeks, except for the few weeks before and after the ship data (after because it's online). And so far, I have yet to come in on a weekend.
The company was founded by guys who were tired of the burn at other companies and wanted to make sure theirs was not like that. Lots of our devs have families and young kids, and it's a great working atmosphere. And, we're *still* very productive. Many companies are starting to understand it's just not worth burning out your talent and losing them for the sake of a single title.
For anyone looking for a job in the industry... don't let anyone tell you that everyone in the industry goes through insane crunches. Crunches, yes, but the days of mandatory death-marches are fast disappearing. Many developers love to brag about how many hours they worked during the end days of a project (guess it's the game developer equivalent of a war story), but I'm no longer impressed. Putting up with that kind of a nightmare is just foolish at best, and destructive at worst.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.