Slashdot Mirror
Stress Is Driving Developers From the Video Game Industry
Nerval's Lobster writes: For video game developers, life can be tough. The working hours are long, with vicious bursts of so-called "crunch time," in which developers may pull consecutive all-nighters in order to finish a project—all without overtime pay. According to the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Developer Satisfaction Survey (PDF), many developers aren't enduring those work conditions for the money: Nearly 50 percent of respondents earned less than $50,000 annually. Faced with what many perceive as draconian working conditions, many developers are taking their skills and leaving video games for another technology sector. The hard and soft skills that go into producing video games—from knowledge of programming languages to aptitude for handling irate managers—will work just as well in many aspects of conventional software-building. Fortunately, leaving the video-game industry doesn't have to be a permanent exile; many developers find themselves pulled back in at some point, out of simple passion for the craft.
Women and minority developers are also being driven out of this industry because it is an inherently racist, sexist, misogynist boy's club.
I wouldn't do "Crunch Time" for $50K/yr unless I was building my chops.
--fatboy
Parallels with professional musicians and actors, who usually get little sympathy on this board. Supply and demand, etc.
We'll see whether the game devs do any better.
Sure you can go back to it... but (allegedly) your skills are in high demand in general, and the pay and work/life balance seem terrible.
Your best bet is to abandon the industry, and force them to be competitive in the labor market.
It used to be that it was "glory" of working on a great project. Now with the number of people working on a project, there is no "rock star" status available. The need to perform all the extra OT that is now almost "required", makes the job no longer "fun".
The industry collapse will come when nobody is willing to work for the breadcrumbs being offered for work that is unfulfilling. The companies that adapt will survive.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
this is from last year
There's no STEM shortage, just a shortage of people willing to work 80 hours per week for under $50k per year.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Once people find out they can take advantage of you they will continue to do so for as long as you let them. They perpetuate their own problems by staying.
... If it wasn't for the horrific architecture and code produced by the steady stream of noobs hired to replace the burn outs.
Stress is a reason to leave a lot of jobs/careers. If game companies can't get a supply of new suckers, they'll have to either do something to reduce the stress, or actually pay more. If they can get a supply of new suckers, I guess things stay the same and I recommend staying out of the industry. Either way, no real story.
When I was a kid I always thought I wanted to be a game programmer. Turns out, I fucking love writing boring enterprise software. I write lots of code, solve lots of problems, make lots of money.
The average game developer makes crap money writing spongebob or dora the explorer or some other licensed character crapware 16 hours a day for years in hopes they will be on one of the teams that gets to write the one good game their studio puts out each year/decade.
The average enterprise software developer spends years working 8 hours a day fattening his 401k and, since you get to go home at 5pm, could spend the other 8 hours a day he would be working at the game company writing his own games... or more likely just playing games or having a family.
I love games. I wish making games for a job wasn't the programming equivalent to grinding it out as an extra in Hollywood for years trying to be an actor, but that is exactly what it is.
... I'm sorry to say but I have no sympathy for anyone in the videogame industry, you will find some of the most spineless, shady and cowardly simps in the game industry.
The game industry over the last 10 years has turned totally criminal with the rise of always online/drm f2p/mmo nonsense.
I write drivers for consumer electronics (tablets, STBs, some phones). I am paid significantly more than $50k/yr and I have a fairly predictable schedule. We have occasional long hours to fix the last few bugs at release. But everything is code complete when it is supposed to be, and we aren't designing new things near the end only cleaning up and making adjustments.
So game devs, get out while you still can. There are other ways to apply your code-fu and still go home every night.
If it's such a dismal industry, why is it fortunate that developers can return to it? That's an abusive relationship, not a perk.
Aside from the Almighty corporate greed, freeware paid for by marketing (ex. Facebook games, everything Google makes, etc) and Open Source (which almost always implies free as in free beer more than the development process and idea sharing) are reducing the size of the pie for the rest of the software developers.
In my opinion, we are the end of the Golden Age of software development, for the developers.
If you pay staff for what they do, they are happier. Expecting them to work 12 hours a day, and having to come in at weekends because your marketing department pulled a date from their arse is what pissed people off. "Free" food and drinks is no substitute for lost time with family and friends. Only those starting out are dumb enough to put up with it. Why? Because they've yet to start a family and work is all they have.
I am a software engineer and it's never made sense to me why people would be willing to put up with these types of conditions. Sure it's fun and way cooler that most other programming jobs but I wouldn't want to give up weekends and put up with asshole managers which inevitably make the job NOT fun.
The employers like EA, Trion, and countless more are exploiting the people's willingness to get treated like slaves in exchange for working in the gaming industry. Engineers need to stop undermining each other by taking these shitty positions and it sounds like this might finally be starting to happen. And they shouldn't fear that the video game industry will go away because it won't. Execs will simply need to reset their profit expectations in light of paying the engineers more.
I know a bunch of mobile game developers. They do seem to work harder than the corporate drone programmers I also know, but this seems to be the flip side of getting products out the door, as opposed to working on yet another CRM system plug-in that drags on for years with nobody being able to agree on what they want. In the end I think it just comes down to what you value. If you're on $50k at a startup that gets a hit game out, you could literally make millions from share options, or at the least become a key member of the team pulling in a big salary. On the other hand you could end up with nothing if the product flops. If you don't want to take that risk you can go get a corporate drone job, be reasonably bored, but bring home a decent amount of money and work yourself into a job for life maintaining some mission critical COBOL library that only you and an old guy who comes in a couple days a week have any idea how to manage.
I actually think it is pretty cool that developers can choose where they want to be in that spectrum.
Of course if you are a really talented developers you can get great money and conditions anywhere, and I think this annoys a lot of people. But the reality is that is true of most professions and is not exactly the fault of the talented developers.
The biggest of which is "will I still have a job tomorrow?"
Even IT contractors have more job security than a game developer. I'm glad I ditched the industry to go work on spacecraft. New Horizons, coming to a Pluto near you!
EA SPOUSE
(OK, it was one word and an acronym.)
From what I've seen of the Video Game industry and software development in general, profit margins are huge. This just another case of management and owners taking all the profit and stiffing the working class? Its not like there is a narrow profit margin where increased staffing costs would destroy profitability. There is the carrot of "getting to make video games" but it sounds like that losses its teeth over time so you end up with a revolving door of under skilled workers.
Maybe this industry need a little right-setting?!?!
-- Disclaimer: I can't really back up anything I post on
Just don't expect to be respected for pointing that out. I worked for Ubisoft a few years back on an utterly pathetic salary. When the crunch came along, I worked out the extra hours I was "requested" to work (unpaid, of course) would've effectively pushed my hourly salary below the national minimum wage (i.e. it was illegal) so I refused.
Of course, my appraisal rolls round and I get an abysmal score - despite the fact that my output exceeded that of my colleagues slaving away into the late evening. One of the idiots who did my appraisal said that the studio producer had basically asked why they didn't just fire me for having such a low score, and that he'd "rescued" me by saying the work I was doing was invaluable... despite being responsible for the low score in the first place.
Resigned shortly after and switched to web dev. Never looked back.
Video game industry is the canary in the pixel mine. This what ALL tech work will look like if suits succeed with over-saturating the market. So with each H1B, the rest of us getting closer to this hell. Make sure to write your congressman.
I've shipped numerous games on consoles and PC. I exited the direct industry a few years back; I now make significantly more, have way less stress, and work stays at work. I also get to work on my indie game the first thing I wake up for a few hours and then start my normal day job which involves WebGL and Javascript.
There are 4 major problems with games industry:
* This industry was started by _hobbyists_ before the "suits" came in and tried to run it like a business. AAA games have become linear, repetitive, and formulaic narrative. This FPS map design 1993 vs 2010 sums its up.
* I slept under my cubicle in 1995 when I worked for EA because of "crunch time." The fact that crunch time *still* exists is a symptom of managers _failing_ to take responsibility. Why do they treat game devs as a resource to be consumed. Why did it take a lawsuit "EA Spouse" to make a dent in this problem??
* Mobile has zero respect for gamer's time. They call people who spend the most on freemium "Whales." What's the problem with freemum? You keep using this word free, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. This image succinctly summarizes how they have hijacked the word free to mean Hurry-up-and-Wait.
* The cost of content creation is spiraling out of control. Each year the budget and man-hours keep increasing. Something has to give.
Indies have their own share of problems but what they bring to the table is innovation. Vote with your wallet and support indie games such as:
* Limbo
* Minecraft
* Path of Exile
* The Stanley Parable
* Trine
* The Vanshing of Ethan Carter
* World of Goo
If you continue to play grind fests that have zero respect for your time such as Defiance, Destiny, Warframe, World of Warcraft, then all you are is part of the problem.
People have been fleeing game development for years.
Best Slashdot Co
Crunch time comes with most (pretty much all to some degree) companies I've worked for with all new products. As a design engineer, I've seen it since the late 90s. Now days they are applying it to everything, by using unreasonable, arbitrary deadlines on all projects (cost-outs, sustaining, etc..). Exempt employee = lots of unpaid OT.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
That's one reason why there is so little institutional knowledge in game companies and they end up making the same mistakes over and over again. Radyo Dinle Arabesk Damar http://www.dermangibiradyo.com...
http://www.dermangibiradyo.com
"Passion for the craft" is why they get paid less and have crappy working conditions. Because they're committed to being a video game developer. There's a certain cool factor that motivates some devs to continue to work in that industry despite sub-standard pay and/or working conditions. In other words, part of the compensation package is "the fact that you get to develop video games". And, apparently, for some folks that's worth a non-insignificant amount of cash.
but with a $10,000 annual paycheck, welcome to the third world.
we need unions / better labor laws in EU if they pull this work 60-80+ a week with no OT pay and you say no they can't fire you / if they do then you can sue them a win.
In the USA they work you so long that you make under min wage and it's harder to sue them for it.
On the one hand, the folks in charge seem to be a collegium of folks who believe death marches are the proper manner to develop software.
On the other, the big companies wrote the rules (check out the US Labor Dept), so that all computer people, pretty much, are "in management", and so can't join, say, unions. And the companies don't need to pay overtime, because they're "salaried" (really? that used to mean that if you had a light week, and worked fewer hours, no biggie, since you were around enough to more than make it up during crunches.*; now... raise your hands - who here *must* have a client charge number, and if not, THERE IS NO "OVERHEAD" NUMBER, you get to take it with or without pay? Who here, under the cover of "plausible deniability", has not charged the actual number of hours they worked?)
But we don't need unions. Thanks for keeping me from ever getting into one, you stupid suckers.
mark "there are two kinds of Republicans: millionaires and sucker"
* And if you don't believe that this is what "salaried* used to mean, and still means in some areas, let me introduce you to my wife, the salaried lawyer.
So don't worry! Start an office overseas and hire tons of L1 visa holders - which have no limit.
Microsoft does this.
Vancouver office, using Canada's liberal immigration laws to their benefit, gets tons of Chinese and Indian developers. Oh look, we have to transfer you across the border to Redmond where we work you 80 hours a week +. Don't worry, the US Citizens will train you before we lay them off.
Sure the pay might suck, and the hours can be grueling... but at the end of the day, who gets the millions of crazed cult-like fans willing to personally fund your work for the rest of your life? Miamoto or Kotick? Devs with the right talent and ambition can literally turn into world wide rock stars, not just industry ones. That's why they do it for the craft, for the fans, and ultimately for themselves.
The summary is basically why I left. Project management in the industry is really, really bad. You work really long hours because you're passionate about things, but you start to wonder why you're working so hard to pad someone else's pockets after a few development cycles. Your health suffers, your social life suffers, your family suffers. If you have any reason to work less than 80 hours a week (family, school, whatever), you're not endearing yourself to your more "committed" colleagues. This is true even if you're ultimately more productive than the rest of them.
When you get a job outside of the industry, you realize just how underpaid game developers are. I'm making 40% more today than when I was in the industry (which wasn't too long ago). I do incredibly boring work in comparison, but I'll take 40 hours of boring each week and a comfortable retirement over the bozo management in the game development industry. I can always develop games on the side and the time has never been better for small independent developers.
it's both (& likely more)...
I took a job at a studio w/a popular current game, my 1st time in the industry after 20+ yrs at more conventional companies. w/few exceptions they paid squat (I was shocked at what some of them were making) b/c they did have (disproportionately male) kids lined up around the block to work for them _AND_ they tolerated sexual stuff (tbf didn't see racial stuff) that would get a company in another industry sued out of existence. I got out quickly - it sounded like fun & the technical challenges of gaming sounded interesting but the answer is definitely "D - all of the above". while I envy the passion to be willing to sacrifice so much for so little that is the nature of the beast...
...there were an extensive body of law to protect workers from this type of exploitation? Oh, there is? And employees are too terrified to assert themselves? These workers need to get themselves a union, stat.
How many times are you going to post the same stupid comment in this thread? They're not "terrified", and they are asserting themselves. Developers leaving game development for better jobs elsewhere is exactly what should happen when the job they have sucks.
Any dev with a brain is going indie these days.
There's an abundance of dirt cheap/free (beer) softwaretools.
Hardware prices are negilible.
Networking makes it possible to find co-devs all around the planet.
Steam, Google Playstore and Apple Appstore are taking out the middle-men.
All the big publishers can do these days is kill off good studios and churn out the bazillionth CoD clone. They've abandoned innovation.
All major space games today come from teams of less than ten, such as No Mans Sky.
Limit Theory, one of the most interesting prospects, is from a single guy!.
Robertson is doing Star Citizen as a crowdfunded indie project - a big one, mind you.
Koji Igarashi left Konami and started a Castlevania follow-up/Rip on Kickstarter. The fans are drowning him in money and he has more creative freedom than ever.
Bottom line:
Indie is where the partys at nowadays. No one wants to work for EA and the likes.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Don't let sales people drive things.
All the best companies are run by engineers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Elon Musk, etc. etc.
Well perhaps the IGDA will put their money where their mouth is and advocate for some form of unionization for these exploited workers?
I worked for New World Computing/3do (Worked on Might and Magic 3 through 8) and I must say their are upsides to the video game industry as well
There is the opposite of Crunch time, and that is slack time. Between projects or at the beginning of a project their was plenty of time to slack. We played lots of video games (obviously) and had lots of time off to make up for the intense periods of crunch time (sometimes 24-48 hours straight when working to meet a ship date).
I didn't have much of a life back then but it was probably the best job I have ever had. I enjoyed being at work and had great bosses and co-workers.
I would still be working in the industry if I could, unfortunately I moved to a place where their is no video game industry at all (Hawaii) but I make MUCH more money now than I ever did in Video games, so I guess its a trade off.
I have a great job now, but I don't enjoy it like I did with designing video games.
So Basically, the money isn't that good and the hours can be horrible, but the atmosphere of working in that field is wonderful. I have been playing video games for most of my life (30 out of my 40 years) and I don't see myself ever losing interest in video games.
The good ones can be orders more productive than the bad. Many of the bad have negative productivity. The good ones also do not earn $50k/year
Star Citizen, while crowd funded, is not indie developed. Unless you consider major studios being paid by someone as indie, which they do. For instance, Kuju considers itself "indie" because it is not a publisher or affiliated with one, but they have a few big studios with 100+ per studio, in multiple countries.
Indie in the game industry does not mean "one or two guys in an apartment"
That's nothing for a job where they'll expect you to have a degree. But I'm nor surprised, there are plenty of jobs around here that even without the degree debt just wouldn't allow you to live in this area. Even some big names in science who you'd think would want top people to get shit done right pay what I consider peanuts and often only offer fixed terms. So it's pay too low to buy a home, no job security to help secure a mortgage and enough of a wage to guarantee you'll need to pay your uni debt. It's no wonder so many good devs go down to London to fight over jobs in finance.
I've done it for 25 years; I started to work on the 8 bits and it was my passion. But once the industry became big, parasites came with it as well and then everything changed.
I worked on a few of the biggest franchises, I have been a programmer, a manager, an owner, etc.
And about 6-7 months ago I got fed up...
I love games, I dislike the industry, I just moved on and I really feel happier.
Programmers demand higher pay from video game industry.
Video game Industry outsource jobs to other countries for cheap labor. ( with a lot of comments attacking outsourcing and H-1B)
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
In talking to managers trying to hire good producers they all compline they have to kiss to many frogs and have to keep the one that misrepresent themselves and turn out to be second rate workers. Women aren't part of picture because none applied.