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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.
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.
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.
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.
But they don't pay you for 40 hours per week. They pay you salary, and as such you are paid the same regardless of whether you work 20 hours or 80 hours.
Thirty four characters live here.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Women and minority developers are also being driven out of this industry because it is an inherently racist, sexist, misogynist boy's club.
Professional videogame programmer here, closing in on two decades in the industry. My thoughts, if anyone cares...
Don't confuse a few unpleasant but vocal gamers with videogame industry professionals. I've never seen any such behavior among my professional peers. Female programmers (and audio specialists, oddly) are somewhat rare, but there are lots of very talented female artists, writers, and designers that I've worked with over the years. I'm closing in on two decades in the industry, and there are more females developers than ever. Some minorities are still underrepresented, but that's slowly changing as well. The industry wants talented and creative individuals. It has absolutely nothing to do with institutionalized racism or sexism, as far as I can tell. I'm sure it probably exists out there, but I've never seen it personally.
The story of people getting exploited, stressed out, and quitting the industry is nothing new. Lots of people quit the videogame industry, because yes, it is stressful. It's got highly complex, multimillion dollar projects with a fixed deadline, and that means things are going to get stressful before the ship date. Of course, when a company forces people to crunch for months at a time (or even years in some horrible death marches), that's crappy management. Nine months of 80 hour weeks? That's abuse, pure and simple. For the love of God, find a new job NOW. I'd quit the industry as well if that was my only alternative. But it's not. Not every company abuses their workers like that, believe it or not. But if you don't think you're going to be putting in some long hours at the end of a three to five year project, that seems a little optimistic.
Also, to clarify, very few developers earn under $50K. A better indication is the annual Game Developer Salary Survey, which states the average salary is a bit over $83K. Keep in mind when you break this down by job, the differences are made clear. Programmers average $93K, for instance. If you've been in the industry for a decade or two, you can earn quite a bit more than that. QA *average* about $53K, so I'm guessing the Dice writers were talking mostly to QA, who unfortunately tend to get the raw end of the industry stick in just about every way, being the least skilled of the labor pool and often hired as short-term temps (but again, this isn't universal either).
Frankly, I absolutely love my job, and can't imagine doing anything else. I'm aware that I could probably earn more money in a different industry, but I still earn a good living and absolutely love what I do. I'd rather not get painted as a victim, because I feel pretty fortunate. There are a lot of guys that work far harder than me digging ditches in the hot sun or freezing rain and earning a hell of a lot less for it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.