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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.
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.
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
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.
[citation needed]
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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.
Isn't that how game companies work? They hire fresh faced grads, work them like dogs for a few years and then let them go once they get the skills to demand good pay and reasonable working conditions. Or they just burn out entirely and change professions. 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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Women and minority developers are also being driven out of this industry because it is an inherently racist, sexist, misogynist boy's club.
Baloney. Women are repelled by the long hours and low pay. The game industry has plenty of minorities, unless you are using "minority" as a code word for "black". I have friends in the video game industry, and it has always amazed me how they can get so many talented people for such low pay and horrible conditions. But many guys (and very few gals) dream of being a game programmer, so they have them lining up at the door. My 12 year old son spent the entire weekend writing Mindcraft mods in Python, and wants to be a professional game programmer when he grows up.
[citation needed]
No it's not... At least for the people who wish to fan the flames of social discord.... Or for those being sarcastic..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Not really, the companies that develop the popular games will survive. That means marketing is at least as important as development, that having good art work and a good story are as important as having a good development staff, that getting onto the right platforms and released at the right time is as important as developers...
Catching what I'm saying yet.... Development staff is literally NOT as important as it seems up front. Successful game releases require a lot more than just development...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Men - especially young men - lack scope. They're thrilled by the thought of doing their "dream job", playing with cool toys and whatever, and forgetting a job is just a means to an end. By the time they find out it's too late, they're burned out, about to be replaced and with no safety net whatsoever. Computers are for chumps. There may be some smart and lucky ones but the rest is in for a miserable ride.
> I have friends in the video game industry
Yeah well, I work in it, so I'll thank you for not speaking for us. It is inherently a pretty tough environment for a lot of women, and I've worked outside of the game industry with similar male to female ratios. The work environment and what's considered professional to talk about and what's permissible in the work environment is not the same.
Guys that work in games are also incredibly defensive about this - they seem to take it as an attack on their character, in addition to somehow thinking this is the correct way to progress towards more women not wanting to work in these environments, so pardon me if I call bullshit on your anecdotal evidence. I assume your son won't mind managers drawing penises on whiteboards for fun or plastering each others wallpapers with porn - could you say the same thing if you had a daughter who wanted to work at a typical studio? Game studios let a ton of shit slide that wouldn't be tolerated in other industries.
And hey, I'm not personally offended by that kinda shit - I'm a guy. But the upside of that workplace freedom does cost us a certain amount of access to qualified female engineers.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Men aren't supposed to be repelled.
It's the workaholic ethic many men grow up with.
You might think sexism is only discrimination against women. Men are the victims of sexism just as much, on the basis that they're supposed to be strong, macho, invincible in the face of adversity.
"Long hours? You don't like long hours? What kind of a pussy are you? You're not a team player. Your last paycheck will be Friday."
or...
(I heard this from one of my supervisors. It's something straight out of Dilbert:) "Taking unpaid personal time is stealing from the company."
These attitudes are rampant not only in game publishers but in manufacturing and everything else.
And we're supposed to just put up with it. Because we're not pussies.
--
BMO
And I'll call bullshit on the sexist (and heteronormative) notion that women can't handle the idea of porn. That we're all so scared of guys liking porn and sharing porn that it's scaring us out of male-dominated fields.
Aside from that, if porn is the thing that alters your life plan, then your life plan wasn't that good to begin with.
You may need to find a new job, but there is a substantial difference between saying the industry is sexist versus a single studio being sexist.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
This attitude also comes into play when you start a family. It is thought of as natural for women to want to take some time off after the baby is born. (Though, maternity leave isn't guaranteed in the US. Some companies still expect you to push out the baby and get back to work.) However, if a man wants to take some time off to help out his wife (exhausted from the birth) and new baby, many people will think of him as neglecting his "duties" to waste time with his family.
Example: The case of ballplayer Daniel Murphy who missed opening day when his son was born. Some radio hosts said that he should have been at opening day and not with his family. The hosts even went to far as to claim that his wife should have scheduled a C-Section before the season began so that he wouldn't miss any games. Yup, let's put his wife through an invasive, likely-unnecessary surgical procedure just so he doesn't stop hitting a ball with a stick. Where are some people's priorities?
I was lucky that my company let me take time off, though it was pulling time from my vacation/sick days. My company could just as easily have said "No time off for you. Get back to work now!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Should mod parent up and GP down. I'm with Lauren. Regarding GP, when he says "And hey, I'm not personally offended by that kinda shit - I'm a guy." I'm offended by this. I'm a guy and I'm not just offended by that behavior ("that kinda shit") but especially by that sexist comment. "I'm a guy" supposedly means that you shouldn't be offended by it? That's exactly the behavior the OP is talking about, albeit it's a generally pervasive problem and nothing to do with gaming industry. Guy or not, you may or may not be offended by it. By virtue of you thinking that "I'm a guy" shouldn't be offended by it--that's the problem.
1. Promise AAA game in 10 months.
2. Scope out 16 months worth of work with the resources available.
3. Work a bunch of young, eager (i.e. cheap) developers to the bone.
4. Profit.
You say bad project management, but it sounds pretty lucrative for the folks who are actually in management.
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
Many humans can handle porn. But for some reason, they seem to prefer seeing the kind of porn they want to see, and generally in a private environment, not plastered on computer screens at work. I apologize if that came off as hetronormative - I just mean that the *multiple studios I've work at* have had work environments that are exactly that: full of guys who think that the word hetronormative is imaginary PC bullshit. What you think should be tolerated (ie: all porn, of all kinds, I presume?) is exactly what professionalism seeks to address and what lacks in these work environments. But in the ways that these environments are unprofessional, it is exclusively geared towards male hetro guys who seem to freakout at the very concept of hetronomativity. (Presumably you would be fine with most of your co-workers laughing at you and calling you an SJW .. it's a very off-putting element of many of my colleagues in this industry to me. I'm not saying it's all bad. Plenty of good inclusive environments in gaming exist - I'm only saying that they're still the exception.)
I'm sure that the solution is just to hope that everyone gets all mature and never gets offended or bothered by the lack of professionalism and sometimes downright hostile environment in some studios.
And I don't need to find a new job. I've worked in this industry for years and year, and I enjoy it. What's next - I don't like a law, and your suggestion is that I move somewhere else?
"Old man yells at systemd"
A job is NOT "just a means to an end."
It's something you're going to be doing for the majority of your waking life. It really pays to find something that you like doing.
Going for your dream job is a fantastic move. Passion for your job is a positive. However, you can't let passion blind you either -- when considering that your 'dream job' pays little for terrible working conditions, it might pay to be pragmatic and avoid the industry. They can only get away with such conditions because so many are willing to put up with it.
And then your studio shits out something like Assassin's Creed: Unity.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The point I was replying to was not that porn should be in the workplace, but whether or not women are affected differently by it. Are women going to need a fainting couch put in because work isn't a "safe space", because the "guys" have had a long day and have dropped the appearance of propriety, or are they going to grow up and deal with it like an adult?
Moreover, it's a tried-and-true business practice to not linger where you're not appreciated. If you're never going to get promoted, or get a raise, or internal office politics are going to kill morale, what do you do? Do you bitch and moan? Do you start trouble? Or do you find someplace else where things are more stable?
I've found that the best option tends to be the last one in virtually all cases. Don't burn bridges, just say "sorry it didn't work out" and move on.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.