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Rockstar Employees Badly Overworked, Say Wives
juicegg writes "Wives of Rockstar Games employees in San Diego recently published an open letter on their Gamasutra blog. The authors say that Rockstar employees are seriously strained by unending crunch periods of 12-hour work days and 6-day weeks. High levels of stress are leading to serious psychological and physical problems for some of the employees. They charge that studio management uses arbitrary, deceptive and manipulative practices to get employees to work more unpaid overtime hours at greater intensity — despite over $1 billion in Grand Theft Auto revenue. Among the blog comments, some current and past Rockstar employees are confirming problems with the studio. 'Ex Rocker' writes: 'What makes R* crunch periods different then any other studio is that they tell you the game has to be finished in 6 months, so let's start our final push to get this awesome game out there! 6 months turns into 1 year, 1 year turns into 2.' Other comments reveal worker hopelessness and general mismanagement at the San Diego studio. This turmoil is affecting development on upcoming games as well."
Read on for responses from Rockstar itself and other members of the industry.
An anonymous reader adds, "Everyone is talking about the fact Rockstar Games has addressed the accusations that it has forced developers at Rockstar San Diego into unpaid overtime to finish imminent titles. But I've noticed that a former GTA3/Manhunt designer (Chris Kruger) has a comment in this piece published Thursday about crunch in studios, suggesting the problem goes beyond Rockstar San Diego and is company-wide.
He says in Develop's Jury-style debate that the damage caused by excessive overtime can upend the out-of-work relationships developers have: 'Crunch is totally damaging, but much more so to the individuals involved. An almost failed marriage in my case. To the company the cost of crunch is very hard to define but any benefit at all is easy to measure. That's why it's such an easy decision to make for most companies. Unless there is a push back and the cost is made clear, it won't change. In my view self regulation doesn't work, and the only real solution is external regulation or utter agreement from the vast majority of staff on how to approach the matter.'
There's no easy way around the topic, but crunch is clearly damaging. When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?"
He says in Develop's Jury-style debate that the damage caused by excessive overtime can upend the out-of-work relationships developers have: 'Crunch is totally damaging, but much more so to the individuals involved. An almost failed marriage in my case. To the company the cost of crunch is very hard to define but any benefit at all is easy to measure. That's why it's such an easy decision to make for most companies. Unless there is a push back and the cost is made clear, it won't change. In my view self regulation doesn't work, and the only real solution is external regulation or utter agreement from the vast majority of staff on how to approach the matter.'
There's no easy way around the topic, but crunch is clearly damaging. When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?"
That's the way it is - it's profitable for the company with no downside.
The only option is for employees to show that it will cost them in the long run through turnover and training new employees.
Alternately, unionization or government regulation are the only other options.
> When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?
The day that programmers stop being yes-men and saying to their managers they can do it. I've been with EA 5 years. I know the drill. Once your team wises up and only signs up for what it can deliver, the crunch goes away.
Step 1: Be upfront and straightforward. Don't promise what you can't deliver.
Step 2: Dont' work more than 40 hours. Just leave after that.
Step 3: Profit.
There's a reason EA and Rockstar take young 20 year olds just out of school, and expect them to be gone by 30. Kids buy into the myth of 'work hard, play hard', don't know what quality of life is, and haven't yet had a shitty work experience to stand up for themselves.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Having worked 28 some years in the semiconductor industry grinding out chips for PC's the story sounds SOOOooooo familiar.
"It's just this time...honest....just give up your entire personal life.... your wife and kids will love you for it cause we are just going to rain cash and kudo's on you"
Fast forward 2 years later...
"Ok, so my wife left me, my kids hate me and now your telling me my bonus went to the CEO and his butt buddies on the board because they needed something to light their cigars with and now your laying me off because we missed the market because you couldn't make up your friggin mind what you wanted and we all killed ourselves for you for nothing? Do I understand this right?"
Sux don't it?
I feel fortunate to have stashed just enough away to moon them all Ace Ventura style and walk away. Those in this kind of mess really have to ask themselves what is REALLY important. Those that run places like this which is 90% of corporate business these days don't give a rat's ass about you. Employees are an expense to be reduced not an asset to be valued. Think you are not replaceable. Put you hand into a bucket of water and pull it out and see how fast that hole fills up. That is the reality. If you really like that work more than life itself, then that is what you should do but if not..... you might just want to look around.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Unfortunately, most developers are too brainwashed | chickenshit | dysfunctional to unionize. "Oh, but our job is different." "We're not blue-collar workers!" "We'd lose our independence!"
There, fixed it for you.
There's nothing stopping workers from unionizing except themselves.
Why don't they just quit? In this economic climate I think many people are thankful they *have* a job. Thinking about quitting is the last thing on their minds.
But that's not necessarily just it. It's actually the same reason the don't become application developers as you mentioned: they love games. Absolutely LOVE them. They live by them, they breathe by them. Game developers are a special breed... game development is complicated in and of itself, when compared to just regular application development. It takes dedicated, hard-working people under an enormous amount of stress to bring a title to fruition.
And many developers, regardless of workforce pressures, will continue to work for a studio because that's how much they love games.
There are a few articles on this written by some ex game devs who lost/came close to losing their marriages/home life/etc because of stuff that EA was doing. I can't find a link to them so if someone can it may help to understand the point-of-view of many game devs.
The problem is managers that use simple metrics like lines of code written per day to determine a developer's value.
Hear hear! For all the "Management Science" out there, what actually does work? The Waterfall method is hugely limited in software development, and upper management without a clear view is crippling. I was once part of a project where six teams had each developed their own printer drivers for their modules because management neither thought of it or noticed the duplication. Team isolation prevented sharing as well, so six freshly re-invented wheels.
What is it they are crunching on anyway? Did somebody's new skin break the display engine? Did fixing a wall error crump edge detection or LOS calculations? Did a weapons tweak make the ballistics engine puke? Was there a pent-up demand for crawling ants lighting on a display instead of just a glow? Where are the edges of accountability for these things, and which manager is (not) paying for their miscues?
Granted, starting with a well behaved engine or other project module is always going to be risky when you push it to do new or different things. The upper echelons should be aware of this in their design plans. But flogging the oarsmen when you're completely off course is the wrong way to go -- fix the navigator!
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Uh, are you an idiot? Hourly paid employees do have rights. The DOJ cares about them. Do you work at Walmart?
"Exempt" employees are deemed "management" and therefore have to "do what it takes" to get the job done. This is typical for software developers, but most office workers too. If the exempt employee doesn't like the conditions, it is up the him/her to solve the problem - talk to your boss, figure out comp time (usually illegal), work out a bonus structure that doubles your salary on completion, or quit.
It really is that simple. The DOJ doesn't care.
When I left "employee" and became a contractor, my client implied that I should work more hours than I billed. I raised my rates and still billed every hour. I was hoping they would fire me, but they didn't. When that contract was up, I raised my rates for the new contract, they paid it, so I guess I was worth it. I hardly ever worked/billed more than 45 hours a week. For a few weeks, during "crunch time", I would work and bill 60 hours, but never more than twice a year. After crunch, I took a 2 week vacation.
Finally, after 10 years of raising my rates, they demanded I become an employee or my contract wouldn't be renewed. I left. Thanks for all the "f0ck you money, guys!"
You find another job? You make it sound so easy!
The auto-workers can do the same thing. They can just "find another job", and it's so easy anyone can do it!
Unions have a place, but they too can become a monopoly. Would you be OK with joining a union as long as there were multiple programming unions, competing in how they represented employees and negotiated contracts? IMO, Unions should be subject to the same anti-trust laws that corporations are. There's too little competition.
Required reading for the Period It All Changed is Steven Levy's book "Hackers". He focused on Sierra On-Line, which started off programming Apple ][ games in assembler, with founder Ken Williams as programmer/guru to houseloads of teenage programmers that were making up to a quarter-mill a year (in 1983 dollars) for inventing Frogger and the like, because Williams gave percentages of what the game made to the developers.
This changed at remarkable speed to a market where the owners of capital got everything but "what the traffic will bear" in terms of how little programmers would work for.
And young people doing something that gives them a buzz (and, let's face it, fellow addicts, writing an elegant algorithm, solving a knotty problem, producing a slick-looking result on-screen, especially in a problem area where the output is intensely visual...there's no buzz like it) will work for pretty much nothing.
And, no, my "owners of capital" term isn't the start of some socialist screed. The critics are right: the workers can just walk away any time they come to their senses. The profit split may resemble a 19th-century company town by a coal mine, but "Labour" here isn't some hapless bunch of illiterates with no options; they just have to accept that they're being "paid" in buzz, and any time they want to switch over to money, they can go program payroll systems.
There's some buzz there, too, believe it or not, you find elegant algorithms, and user interfaces that match the human intuition and expectations hand-in-glove, in lots of places. And you're home by six, good paycheque warm in your pocket.
There are satisfactions, too, in being part of actually building the Real World, not just amusing people with fantasy ones.
You don't have to unionize to fix this problem. You just have to quit and go somewhere else if the terms are not acceptable to you.
Indeed - and it seems to be particularly a problem in the games industry, rather than development in general.
I guess the problem is that there's a larger supply of people willing to work for crap conditions in the games industry, because of the attraction of it being "fun". Although then again, I remember a recent story in the UK where the games industry were whining about a skills shortage. Of course, they had to cheek to blame the Universities. The reality is that there are plenty of us with the skills to work in the games industry, we just go elsewhere where the pay's better, and we're not treated like shit.
If you're going to effectively refute the charge of being brainwashed, perhaps you should cite some of your actual experience with unions.
My experience with unions doesn't jibe with your description of them. I was a union member in a west coast school system that I developed software for, and the dues were trivial and I never once had a union official telling me what to do. About the only thing you got right was that the union did attempt to influence local politics, but guess what? Most companies do that as well, and they sure as hell don't ask their employees what they think about it.
What I got out of the deal was decent pay, decent hours, and full health care coverage and a really nice pension plan.
This is not to say that unions don't have drawbacks as well, but everything involves a tradeoff. For a good picture of what life was like without unions, see the 19th century. Or, apparently, Rockstar.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Most of the larger companies are trying to get away from this practice, though not always with much success. I do know that even within a single company, things can vary greatly from one team to the next, so I wonder if this is due to the management at a particular studio, or if it is a problem that affects all of Rockstar. The article mentions 'despite over $1 billion in Grand Theft Auto revenue', which is deeply misleading. That was made at Rockstar North, in Scotland. There is no reason to assume that just because one studio is printing its own money that the revenues will be distributed evenly across all partner studios.
I have worked for two of the largest companies in this industry, Ubisoft and EA. At those companies, I can tell you that as far as the CEO / corporate level management are concerned, they just want to see a game get done on time and on budget, and for it to hit the sales estimates. This is because those things will have a direct affect on the quarterly and annual statements. For a game to be a hit depends on many factors that cannot be directly influenced; ie: the design, gameplay, story (if applicable), the license and the marketing campaign all have to hit the right notes to result in a hit. Most pressure that a typical developer sees, especially if there are not any direct design responsibilities, is to get stuff done On Time and On / Under budget. The incentive used is a bonus. And this is where good intentions start to break down.
The producers on a project are typically given a bonus that depends mostly on the game being done on time and on budget. They are given a budget, and after that, the rest of the company does not look at anything beyond various demo's done for the editorial boards. The CEO types would like for the employees to be happy (no one wants bad press), but they leave that up to the studio HR and project leads / producers. What most people do not realize is that even within the same company, the work experience can vary greatly from one team to the next. One team might be using wise development practices, be carefully deciding which employees work on the title, and doing what they can to keep the scope of the game manageable given their time constraints. Other teams might simply pour on the crunch hours and death march the employees to meet the goal. But if the game is done on time and on budget, the producers always get their bonus.
What I see as being a big part of the problem is that there is no incentive at any point for those who run the projects to keep their employees happy. At a company like Ubisoft, you can finish your project, and have 70% of the staff quit, burn out, or just refuse to work on the sequel. But if you got it done on time and on budget, you get the same bonus.
Getting back to the article at hand, it is entirely possible that the people running Rockstar North have great development practices and have happy employees, but for the Rockstar San Diego studio to be helmed by Captain Bligh.
END COMMUNICATION
Actually that attitude was exactly the reason why I never even considered going into games development.
I refuse to work in an industry which has a history of abusing its own employees up to levels where it becomes dangerous for your live.
Um, exactly how much artwork work is required in a console port of a PC franchise with 'at-the-time' outdated graphics and an existing engine require?
You are also conflating last gen with current gen's artwork requirements. HD gaming has raised the bar exponentially for the number of man hours required to make state of the art graphics. Sure, a small indie game does not require 70 artists, but a game that pushes the boundaries, or at least can hang with the AAA big dogs most certainly does.
On Braid, that game may have been developed by a skeleton crew, but it still required several years of development time and a budget of around $500,000. You can say that anybody can drop what they're doing and start coding a game, but how many have the tenacity and resources to devote that much, particularly when balanced against the risk of never breaking even or losing money in the end?
Financially, indie game development is a HUGE crapshoot. Alternatively, every one of the horrendously overworked R* employees went home to their failing marriages with paycheck in hand. I'm not defending R*'s labor practices, but from a practical risk/reward analysis, they are much better off than the average indie game dev, who operates with no certainty of every having a payday. It's solving the poverty problem by installing slot machines in low-rent neighborhoods. .
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
The problem really isn't R* or EA (not that they're faultless here), it's the employees. If you LOVE games so much that you're willing to sell you soul to a studio, then who's fault is it? It's like the battered wife that LOVE the man so much that she'll keep going back no matter how badly he beats her. Is the man faultless? Absolutely NOT! But it isn't he who continues to go back for more abuse.
Hey Devs, wake up! Stop putting up with the abuse! No need for a union, just stop taking it.
Oh yeah, and if it's true that studios hire 20-somethings and expect them gone by 30, let me tell you something... your 20-something. You have you're whole life in front of you. Quit. Move. Stand up and say, "NO!" Whatever you want, you're 20-something. The night is still young!! Once you get to be 40-something, you'll understand what I'm saying here.
For some reason engineers and software developers got the idea years ago that they were "professionals" and thus should have pride in finishing no matter the cost.
Of course, the jobs that are really considered "professional" by most people (lawyers, doctors, etc) don't operate this way.
My mom is in a teacher's union in Ohio. She freely admits that the union keeps incompetent people from being let go in favor of those who are better teachers. They also remove your ability to bargain for your own wages - they bargain for you, and sometimes that means you get something better, and sometimes it means they ignore what areas of compensation you care about in favor of others (see increasing pensions to the point where the state will go bankrupt if they ever have to pay them, instead of money you are sure you'll actually get). They will fight for you if management tries to get rid of you... of course, they'll also fight for people who have no business being teachers, increasing the antagonism between you and administration. She firmly believes that no useful reform is going to come to the education system until you make a system that sidesteps the union and existing organizational structure. She also doesn't really want this to happen, because it will likely cost her a large portion of the benefits she has in her contract in lieu of decent pay.
There are a lot of people who, given the option, would take higher pay over a higher pension. However, if you've been working twenty years for that pension, it's not like you're going to be in favor of changing the system now. Unions pretty much remove your ability to have a choice there if you're going into a union-dominated field - you don't really have an option as a public school teacher - either you're in the union, or you pay the union dues anyway and don't get a say in what they negotiate for your salary.
Game developers get away with bad business practice because probably 3/4 of people going into computer science started out wanting to make video games. They are one of the few areas in CS where people just love the work they're doing enough to put up with poor management and horrible hours. Even if people try to unionize, there are so many scabs ready and willing to do the work instead, that I doubt there would be much success to it.
Not just the game industry. I'm betting everybody who's reading this who has a job is working longer hours under worsening conditions.
There's been an all-out attack on workers since 1980. Little by little, every bit of progress that was fought for by organized labor in the first 3/4 of the 20th century is being destroyed.
The years when organized labor was strongest in the US were also our years of greatest economic growth. It's not accidental that Germany, which is one of the countries where organized labor and labor protection laws are the strongest, is also the number one exporting/manufacturing country, with exports valued at about 300% of China's.
It's also interesting that the years when we had upper-bracket tax rates over 75% were also the years that we had the greatest increase in GDP and the greatest growth in the middle-class.
Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you that labor unions and taxes on the rich are bad for the economy and jobs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you regularly work more than 45 hours a week, you are doing it wrong. There are exceptions, but they should be rare. Get your priorities straight!
If your job sucks, you are doing it wrong. Fix it or get out!
If your wife talks to your boss for you, you are doing it wrong. Grow a pair for christ's sake!
Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you that labor unions and taxes on the rich are bad for the economy and jobs.
Taxes on the rich are good; let's make capital gains count with all income, and there will be plenty in the general fund. Never happen though, because the rich buy the legislation. Labor unions were good, but now are a drain because they are almost all almost entirely corrupt. How many unions in the USA are run by the Mafia? I know of at least one for sure. I personally know of at least three incompetents working for one junior college who should have been canned long ago so that someone competent could take the work and serve the students by serving the faculty, but it's virtually impossible to be rid of them because they're union employees. And, I might add, I'd have had one of those jobs if they could be fired, and I discussed this situation with their manager.
Unions are the employment equivalent of feminism; it was a good thing until women got rights. Now it's just sexism. We need humanism rather than feminism, and we need labor laws for all people rather than Union protection for a few.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem is that the corporations aren't going to give you those rights out of the goodness of their hearts.
We got the five-day work week, and sick days, and safe workplaces, and fair pay because people fought for it and bled for it. A lot of working people trying to organize got their heads broken by off-duty cops working for the corporations.
I'm not saying that there aren't people who are doing bad jobs and not getting fired. Some are protected by unions. Some are protected by being the boss' nephew. Some are protected by having even more incompetent managers.
But every, single American worker has benefited directly from the labor movement. There's not one improvement to wages or working conditions that would have happened without unions. Even in "right to work" (sic) states, it's the union contracts that serve as the model for employment standards.
And most important, organized labor is good for business. As I said above, Germany is one of the most labor friendly countries in the world, and they've had tremendous success in the world economy, exporting more goods than even China, which has no protection for workers.
Men didn't just decide one day to give women the right to vote. The US government didn't just decide one day to be fair and end slavery. And corporations aren't going to give you fair wages or decent working conditions out of the goodness of their hearts. Somebody had to go out and fight, and bleed and get their head beaten in to get them for you.
Finally, you shouldn't expect the government to pass any "labor laws for all people", especially now that corporations will have unfettered ability to use their profits to influence elections.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So the labour unions are somehow responsible for GM and Chrysler making cars that suck? Most workers at VW are unionised, but somehow VW still manages to become the largest automaker.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap