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The Dark Side of Making L.A. Noire
JameskPratt writes "Long-time readers have no illusions of how awful the video game industry can treat its workers. Eleven ex-employee of Team Bondi, who made LA Noire, have now cited 60- to 110-hour work weeks, unusual compensation rules, and the 7-year development cycle as reasons for frustration and discontent. They claim their boss, Brendan McNamara, crushed office morale with verbal abuse and unreasonable goals. As the saying goes, the two things you don't want to see being made are law and video games."
The International Game Developers Association will be investigating the matter.
Asshole bosses and ridiculous work hours? In the software industry? Say it ain't so!
the three hours I spent on duke nukem are lost forever.
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
Just to sum it up, stories like these kept me away from the games industrie even when I was younger.
Your life and health and family is not worth it to work on the next cool game. Sorry, but the game will be forgotten
within half a year, a burnout a divorce or even worse damage wont be forgotten in a 10 years timeframe if ever.
All I can say is stay out of hellhole companies wo seem to have a history of burning through
their employees.
... at least, this matches my experience at an Australian game development company. At least we didn't have to suffer this for seven years before shipping, though.
Sure enough, after shipping, the company lost 70% of their coders and they were reduced to producing shallow clones of their original (good) game.
The game industry is, basically, sick.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it Fred.
These days is anyone surprised that working for a games company is something that's best done by the young and unattached? And asshole bosses exist everywhere. Learn from the experience and move on. From all accounts I've seen, you guys produced a pretty darn awesome game.
G.
The problem is that it's destructive to society. There is a halo to the Film and Game Industries. They seem like they're super exciting and people invest a lot of time and money on training to be able to get a job doing it--and then a year in discover that the reality of 10 100 hour weeks back to back is very different than the idea of it.
So yes, they do eventually quit. And a whole new batch of young and naive fools fall into the meat grinder. The normal market forces where you run out of talent just don't exist.
Another problem is expectation. As it said in TFA most of these people were told it was a 12 month job and that they would get bonuses/overtime if they stuck around to the finish. You get into the Gambler's fallacy pretty quick. "I've already put in 6 months. I can tough out another 6 for a huge fat bonus." And then 12 months promised turns into 5 years so they quit having put in longer than they had hoped but gotten less than promised.
The real tragedy is that it doesn't need to be that way. As was pointed out in multiple interviews with ex-staff you have huge waste. You don't have to run a 24/7 crunch for 8 years. That's just poor management excusing their incompetence. I've seen it before many times. The leadership treats the people as dispensable. The people quit. They fall behind. They treat the next people like shit. They quit. They fall further behind. If they had paced themselves at the beginning and been honest that they couldn't match their deadlines then ultimately they would be more productive and finish sooner. But they also have the publisher breathing down their neck and they know that admitting to needing a 100% larger budget will end the project. Asking for 10 10% extensions to not "let the work done so far go to waste so far" keeps their death spiral alive.
Eventually the game gets released. Eventually if it's halfway decent it'll probably make its money back. The whole fucking fiasco looks like it was the right decision and they do it all over again.
The first time somebody pulled something like that I would find them alone and tell them point blank that I'm not going to take that. Ever.
The second time I would pull my prepared letter of resignation out of my desk, sign and date it, and hand it to him right in front of everybody.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blah blah want to get in the industry blah blah need a job blah blah. If he was hired at a gaming company he's got the resume to get a job doing something different.
Being treated reasonably is not something I'm willing to give up. You know that "Animal House" initiation scene? "Thank you sir, may I have another!" Well, if they keep doing that to you after pledge week it's time to quit the fraternity.
Every time I hear a sob story like this, I can't help but wonder why employees tolerate this kind of abuse. If the job is going to shit, LEAVE! If you have any saleable skills, you can take them elsewhere. I'm not saying they need to unionize, but almost... If game developers stood shoulder-to-shoulder and said no to hostile work environments, the industry would be forced to adapt. It sounds very much like these people are afraid to say no. You'll say "but what about the house" ? Fuck the house! What good is a house when you spend every waking moment at work, eating advil by the handful ? Fuck the house, and fuck the job. You have better things to do in life than pad some greedy sociopath's stock options.
Conversely, if Rockstar needs 110 man-hours a week for every coder, they should hire 2 extra coders to meet the demand. If that breaks the budget, fuck the project, it's an unprofitable project. If it can't be profitable while adhering to reasonable work conditions and timelines, then it should not be undertaken in the first place. If a guy called me tomorrow and said he wanted a Facebook killer for $50, I'd cheerfully invite him to die in a fucking fire. No, scratch that, I'd go to his house and beat him to death with a Chia Pet for even proposing such a ridiculous venture. Game devs need to learn to do the same thing. Democracy only works if you have the brass balls to stick to your guns.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Apparently it didn't work. Wisdom says treat your employees badly, and they'll do shoddy work. What happened after several years of poor product management, treating employees like dirt, Rockstar had to seriously cleanup a lot of the code, which is why the game was delayed. Rough stuff.
As a programmer that makes me feel happy. I like to hear that their is an advantage to treating employees well.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Making games has to be one of the most barbaric, ass-backwards forms of software development. The worst crunch times, the longest hours, the greediest publishers, and the most amateur media covering it all. Other entertainment mediums such filmmaking or writing have veterans who keep creating for decades, but the game industry burns out its stars and drives them away; e.g., Will Wright.
Based on just the stuff in the linked articles I do have to wonder why the employees didn't seek legal advice and pursue constructive dismissal action. I fucking would have.
You cant move coding offshore for game development. You can do it for generic software/website/enterprise system which is brain dead boiler plate coding for some huge bank that they can milk for maintenance contracts. But making a game requires very rapid prototyping, a huge variety of technical skills, creativity and honestly? a bit of love. Knowing what you are making and being passionate about it will be lost when transferring code oversees where there are no designers and no beta testers to fix it. How can u explain a level or gameplay mechanic through a requierment spec?
India is already a source for artwork for games and film but programming? no way. I know, ive looked for jobs here (a lot of art studios) and there are very few end to end game studios.
What if you actually want to have that game on your resume, because it might help your career in the long term? How much would an employee tolerate for that?
They're young, naive, and afraid of rocking the boat.
I think the main complaint about "unusual compensation" was that they were expected to work huge amounts of overtime, but weren't paid for it unless they stuck with the project until 3 months after it's release date ; this pretty much encourages management to treat people like shit so they will leave and forfeit their (huge) overtime bill.
I hardly think it's "prima donna" to expect to work the time you are contracted for, get paid for your overtime, and have the truth told to you by management (unlike one guy who worked 3 x 100 hour weeks back to back to meet a deadline for a press demo release that never occurred, and was probably just a fabrication to get shitloads of work out of him). Most of these guys are not coders either - the majority of work effort on a game like this is content production.
And as for the Ferraris? To date, LA Noire has sold 1.94 million copies on combined PS3 and Xbox360 sales, on the back of 5 weeks of sales. With a used Ferrari running to about $300,000 I think they could afford a few.
and those that arent, know the someone else whos young and naive will take their place. Or you want the credit. Or you want to make teh game, and are so emotionally invested in it taht you just... have to do it.
After being in a couple of startups on both ends of the org chart, I am constantly surprised by one simple thing - bosses don't appear to understand that the incentives of their employees are not the same as their own. Here we have McNamara talking about his employees only worked the same work week as he did, but why should they do even that? He presumably owns this game studio and stands to make a lot of money from a successful product. He is completely invested in this product, so its hardly surprising that it trumps almost any other priority in his life - health, family, entertainment, none of that matters to him as much as this product succeeding and making money.
His employees, though? They make fixed income, they are unlikely to have stocks in the studio, and at worst the product will fail and they will have to get a new job. So why should they neglect their lives for a product in which they have so little personal stake? Either give them some financial incentive, or accept that any of them who do share your passion for your product are loyal above the call of duty and treat them appropriately well.
If only there was some sort of way the employees could group together to increase their bargaining power with employers to avoid these situations.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
If workers want to have a say in their conditions and want to retain the value of what they produce without bosses and investors taking most of it away in profits, than we need to organize a union. The time is long overdue for an IT industry union.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
And why *shouldn't* you unionize? It's not like a programmer is a top of the line job nowadays. It doesn't pay that badly, but I would not advise anybody to take on the job if they have the skills to be a lawyer, banker etc. I've been treated pretty badly by my current company (try working with a 30 year old airco if you are allergic), and I'm now joining the union because of it.
I'm a developer, but I'm trying to move on while staying somewhat on the technical side of things.
If only there was some sort of way the employees could group together to increase their bargaining power with employers to avoid these situations.
If you consistently work over 40 hours a week your employer must compensate you for it even if you're salaried.
The problem isn't that they aren't unionized, the problem is they're too chickenshit to stand up to their boss, or to take the time and effort to report labor violations to the Wage and Labor commission. If the employees demanded the compensation they are already legally entitled to, and go to the proper authorities if it isn't provided, then the problem would solve itself rapidly when the boss realizes he's paying more in OT than he'd pay for doubling his staff size.
Conversely, if Rockstar needs 110 man-hours a week for every coder, they should hire 2 extra coders to meet the demand. If that breaks the budget, fuck the project, it's an unprofitable project. If it can't be profitable while adhering to reasonable work conditions and timelines, then it should not be undertaken in the first place.
Shorter work weeks or hiring more coders to do the work will likely make the project more profitable, not less. I can't believe for a moment that prolonged 60-110 hour work weeks are really more productive than a 40 hour work week. Of course, the first week of crunch you get a bit more work out of your people, but it comes at a cost. Soon, productivity will drop despite the extra hours. Demanding more hours will just tire them even more. A healthy, well-rested work force is far more productive.
One or two weeks of crunch before a real actual deadline can work, but after that, you'd better give them a week off to rest. If you can't afford to give them a week off, it's not worth it to demand that amount of overtime.
Considering these stories, it doesn't surprise me at all that LA Noire took 7 years. I bet a competent development house could do it for half the cost in less than half the time.
I know a few people that work in the industry in the UK and their stories horrify me. Not so much the hours - they do work reasonable hours but that probably Euro law kicking in - more the stupid shenannigans the publishers pull. So many games have been coming along nicely then the publisher's marketing people start demanding wholesale changes, killling the game's playability.
They also pull stunts like demanding a rewrite on an impossible deadline then use the failure to deliver it on time as a reason to cancel the contract.
There also seems to be a trend to make dev teams redundant just before Christmas as the development houses finish the game for Christmas but can't keep ticking over waiting for the revenue so end up folding. He's lost his job 6 times as 5 were in November. Happy Christmas.
All jobs have good and bad but the games industry seems particularly badly run on the suits side by people that just don't get the end product and just know SKUs.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
You learn very quickly how not to develop software: deluded, unrealistic, underfunded expectations from the get-go; lies, concealment, finger pointing and circling the wagons in every tiny fiefdom; turds eternally rolling downhill; perpetually moving goalposts; two-jobs-for-the-salary-of-one; demanding that each fresh noob immediately picks the job of the burned out vet that they're replacing; and beatings that will continue until morale improves.
But hey, that one Saturday back in 2007, when we only worked 10 hours and then had pizza? Dude, that was awesome.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Now that's a retarded gamble. Why would you possibly want "that game" on your resume before it's made? It could turn out to be an industry laughing stock, and even if you did a great job on your part, it would be a stain on your resume if you included it.
Having something to show is much better than not having anything. And the pros who have a lot of CV material already probably also have the experience to recognize a bad working environment and get out quick.
Also, finishing the current project before switching jobs demonstrates that you have (at least once had) capability of actually completing things. There are enough people in the world who lack that (and they usually blame it on "stuff outside their control").
You can do it for generic software/website/enterprise system which is brain dead boiler plate coding for some huge bank that they can milk for maintenance contracts.
Actually it usually doesn't work at all, except for very, very standardized processes (i.e. credit card processing). I have never seen a successful software implementation, where the software was created by off shoring. It's just impossible to create specs, which are so specific that there's absolutely no ambiguity. In addition: domain knowledge is basically non-existent in offshore coding sweat shops.
Example needed? Our awesome time reporting system. I just know what one line of the spec said:
Must be able to enter hours
That's exactly what you can do. Unfortunately you're not able to enter minutes or even fractions of an hour.
I totally agree with you. I just wanted to point out that it's actually worse.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Simply because, as Duke Nukem Forever is an excellent example of, assets have a short shelf life. Once you have things ready to assemble in to a game, you have to do it fairly expediently, like a year, so that things don't get stale.
Now that doesn't necessarily result in crunch time and sure as hell should be all the time crunch time, but you can see why it is a situation that can favour it for a bit on a project.
However that said there's a real difference between "The game ships in a month, we need you to do what it takes to get the final testing and polishing done in that time," and a perpetual, 80+ hour a week crunch.
So long as you don't want up front pay/benefits. You can't reasonably expect a company to give it to you both ways. If you are willing to be a part of the financial risk of a project, meaning your pay, or lack thereof, depends on how well it does then sure you can have part of the profits. That is basically how it works for all small business owners. How much they get depends on how well they do. However that means you have to accept that you only get paid when it makes money and that if it bombs, you don't get anything.
On the other hand if you want the company to front the risk, to put up all the cash for something, to pay you a regular salary and so on while you work, then you need to accept that they get to reap the rewards if there are some, because they'll also eat the failures. They need the reward from successful projects to cover the costs from unsuccessful ones (if you think ever game makes money, you are dreaming).
You can't have it both ways where they are expected to pay you up front, to bear all financial burden, and then to give you the profits when something succeeds, yet not to dock you when something fails (which they cannot legally do).
Don't know about you, but where I am IT staff fall into the same category as firemen and electricians in that they can work infinite hours with no overtime if paid on salary because they are critical to the operation of the public infrastructure. Which is BS, and the fact that IT is vaguely defined to easily include software developers is also BS, but legally the companies can screw us over in quite a few areas.
Like all the $100+ movies you buy?
I'd give up too many individual freedoms in the workplace. All my experience with unionized workplaces is that you cannot do anything outside a narrowly defined set of roles and responsibilities without drawing the ire of staff with more seniority.
There's also the general tendency to reward seniority higher than merit; there should be some value in having more seasoned employees but merit should also be there; I've seen firsthand people be openly threatened because they work more efficiently than the "acceptable" rate.
In general, unions are no longer the appropriate solution to the problem; the problem is the same age-old one, specifically the way property ownership is granted (the way zoning works is related as well; for instance, in many rental properties the rental contract disallows running a business from that location). Unions address a symptom, not the problem.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
The real tragedy is that it doesn't need to be that way. As was pointed out in multiple interviews with ex-staff you have huge waste. You don't have to run a 24/7 crunch for 8 years. That's just poor management excusing their incompetence. I've seen it before many times. The leadership treats the people as dispensable. The people quit. They fall behind. They treat the next people like shit. They quit. They fall further behind. If they had paced themselves at the beginning and been honest that they couldn't match their deadlines then ultimately they would be more productive and finish sooner. But they also have the publisher breathing down their neck and they know that admitting to needing a 100% larger budget will end the project. Asking for 10 10% extensions to not "let the work done so far go to waste so far" keeps their death spiral alive.
People leaving / burning out is the big problem, you just can't drive people to do any kind of non-mechanical work for those kinds of hours over an extended period of time. When they do leave, they take most of the knowledge they've gained about the project with them (regardless of the documentation procedures you have in place), which puts the development even further behind, driving management to crack out the whip and feed the cycle some more.
The absolute worst thing you can have is staff turnover in software projects, if you had 30% more workforce and your turnover was low, you'd gain more than those wages back in compression of delivery schedule and hence less wage duration (i.e., maybe it wouldn't have taken them 7 years to finish the game). That's without even thinking about if the 80th hour of a programmers work week is as productive as the 40th (it's not).
The problem is that game dev managers; see a willing workforce out there that they can abuse because of the industry, have stupidly optimistic deadlines and budgets set to even get the project approved and a general distain for project management as a task (it's all about getting people to tap keys as long and as quickly as possible).
But first, say no and mean it.
Check out the book Clean Coder. (There's a review of it on here somewhere). The author compares the IT department to the legal department at a company.
The result - people feel like they can ask the IT department to work weekends and "do whatever it takes."
But, on the same task, people feel uncomfortable asking the legal department to work through the weekend.
Why are we allowing them to do this to us?
Because we all know lawyers can get up and leave? These guys just did leave. So why do we think it's acceptable to allow them to ask us to work weekends, to go above and beyond the call of duty?
The only answer is that we must feel we're not working as hard as we could be.
Think about it.
Gotta love working in IT. Work 110 hours, get paid for 40. Abandon your family, and social life, and suffer serious psychological issues. If you make it to the ripe old ago of 35, without having to train your H1B replacement, you will be thrown out in the street soon enough because you are considered too old. At which point you will be considered unhiralbe to many employers. Doesn't really matter, since the entire department is being offshored anyway.
Sounds to me like horrible management is the cause here. That Mcnamara guy sounds like a real pompous ass.
Just because you're willing to sacrifice everything and work 80 hour weeks, it doesn't mean that I should be forced to.
In Quebec, overtime is on a voluntary basis only, so you can politely tell your boss to f*ck off if he's forcing you to stay longer. If you're fired for "not being a team player" or "not performing as per expectations" because you refuse to do 60h+ work weeks, well you can then go to the Work Commission and sue your employer for wrongful termination and win back all of the unpaid overtime plus unpaid wages AND get your job back (I don't see why you would go back though). All you need to do is tabulate hours worked and the over time demands received. Doing this sets a precedent and usually involves an investigation of the employer as well.
FYI, you don't even need a lawyer for this as it's the defendant that has to do the leg work and prove that you were indeed rightfully terminated.
~Syberz
I've had to work with a few Assholes in my time, bosses and collegues. Some of the people in my last contract were particularly obnoxious. I recommend the following books;
The No Asshole Rule A brilliant book that quite clearly sets out how to handle assholes, how to recognise when you are being an asshole and what to do about it
The Bully at Work If you are being bullied at work, get this book now. I can't tell you how much it helped me survive mobbing and abuse from some particularly fucked up people. I took the advice and it really helped.
Coping with Toxic Managers, Subordinates and other difficult people Long term this is a excellent book to help you recognise and identify different types of controlling behavior and what behaviour characteristics you can use to plug into their, fuck political correctness, character flaws to manipulate them to get what you want.
The overall theme in all the books is that bullying, particularly a problem in the U.S because of a lack of bullying laws, can cause long term mental damage. Recently slashdot had a story about how physical pain and emotional pain used the same pathways in the brain. These books mention this and how to start to undo the damage.
For you mental health it's important to burn bridges in a targeted and intelligent way for your own mental health so you can move on. I did this by writing a letter to the board, highlighting the financial damage the bullying caused in terms of staff turnover and training, customer dis-satisfaction and increased contractor rates. That way I wasn't churning over in my head that I shudd, cudda, wudda, done this or that. By using the proper channels professionally (whilst having a new gig lined up) I ensured I could move on and inflict the maximum amount of discomfort on the bullies as possible.
Only one situation is worse than bullying and, unfortunately, I've encountered that to, the Occupational Phsycopath. For this I recommend Working with Monsters. These people are fucked up and *will* scar you, it's what they do. Glib with polymorphic personalities they do so many things they need a whole book to handle them. They cripple workplaces and destroy careers, I was lucky to get away, five years later I'm still dealing with the damage and anger.
Basically these Assholes, and seriously what word describes them better, are so commonplace they are like a disease. I got so sick of them this is what I had to do to build the skills required to handle them. Technology folk who have high levels of empathy, task focused, logical and analytical usually have low levels of Emotional Intelligence and personal interaction skills. What I learned is that this makes us easy target for these fuckers because they can read us like a book.
Good thing about being Intelligent is you can adapt to new scenarios. So as the final whammy I added the Alan Pease book, Body Language so I could turn the tables around. I studied the body language book and then simply went into a public place and observed people. As I practised I got better at recognising the various "assholic" behaviors so I could disarm them (or manipulate them).
I'd also advise you read the books in secret, lest you will make yourself a target for assholes.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The Animation Guild. They represent animators and digital effects artists at almost all the Hollywood-based studios. They have an organizer and are actively trying to sign up the remaining non-union studios. Union animators get overtime. 1.5x pay after 40 hours. Double time after 6 days.
Hollywood accepts that there will be crunches during production, but by long tradition and union rules, management has to pay extra for them. That's why "film scheduling" is an accepted discipline in the film industry.
The Animation Guild makes an interesting point - the union studios stay in business longer than the non-union ones. Because the workers can push back against management idiocy, it tends not to go too far.
Did anyone actually traverse the story back to the original article from IGN (http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/117/1178844p2.html) and read it?
Albeit, a quote from McNamara, but if just this holds true, I don't pity anyone working for the company
There was a bonus scheme for working evenings, and people got a month off for that," he said. "And people who worked weekends got paid for it. We brought in a weekend working scheme for that. But contractually, we don't have to do that. Part of the thing is that we pay over the odds, and it says in their contract that if they need to do extra time. I've done 20 years of not getting paid for doing that kind of stuff.
Call me rash if you like but unless it was made damn clear that weekend work was both required only for a couple of weeks and going to be well reflected when it came to payrise/bonus time, I'd be interviewing somewhere else within a week.
I'd stop short of saying "you can shove your weekends up your arse", but if the interviewing didn't work out I'd be leaving anyway after a month or so. There's more to life than work, much more. I'm glad I've always worked for people that appreciate that.