
Why Game Developers Keep Getting Laid Off - footpath
http://kotaku.com/why-game-developers-keep-getting-laid-off-1583192249
======
dsirijus
This relates only to a particular type of games - the ones that are shipped
and forgot, or the ones that need minimum upkeep costs. So, perfectly
understandable, and this is (almost) analogous to complaining why some hotel
staffs 30 during winter instead of 100 people during the summer season.

As a game company owner myself, I've found a way to do efficient damage
control (with regards to morale) on this - announce the "cuts" as early as
project pitch! It's not incomprehensible that you know how many people you'll
need for the game's upkeep and how many for development stage. Throw an "if
game is successful" and "if game is !successful" clause in there, and that way
everyone knows what's the playing ground for your game.

I've noticed that these policies of mine have attracted fast-moving employees,
the ones that will find it perfectly understandable if I, right now, scrapped
every project and said goodbye to everyone. Which, in game industry, is a
frequent occurence.

~~~
Sniffnoy
Isn't this more or less how movies get made in Hollywood? You're always hired
just for a particular project? (Going by memory here, may be way off.)

~~~
watwut
The difference is that Hollywood is up front about it and you sign temporary
contract etc. Game companies tend to sign normal employment contracts, promiss
long term employment and heaven, exploit you during development and fire you
later on (occasionally just before you would collect benefits).

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that game developers did not used to be hired for
one project in the past. It is a thing of last years. They used to be hired by
company and worked on multiple games there. Bad development practices used to
be norm all the time through.

Which does not apply to parent who is up front about the whole thing.

~~~
dsirijus
Exactly. It's about non-delusional financial projections and transparency of
business leadership. So, management.

------
seanewest
I've worked in the AAA game industry and there are many factors. When you
break down the interests of companies this seems like just a product of
economic self-interest, financial risk, volatility, and publisher/studio
relationships.

But the truth is that the practices of industries are often based on what the
employees are willing to take. Employees in the game industry will come back
after being fired ... and fired again. They won't quit their job even though
they work 80+ hours a week for months on end. In other industries, this would
never fly, and practices that assume you can do this to employees would have
never caught on, because the employees in (many) other industries won't as
consistently take that abuse.

The practices of the gaming industry have, over the years, formed around this
fact of nature about the employees. None of it would be this way if employees
weren't willing to take the abuse in the first place.

~~~
sportanova
But I'm guessing that a lot of these devs are really interested in x genre,
but they're working in y genre, so why do they take the abuse? Is there just a
huge over supply of game devs?

~~~
yen223
> Is there just a huge over supply of game devs?

Bingo. Too many people think being good at playing games means they are good
at making games.

~~~
sportanova
Do the ones who are __actually __good at making games get treated better? Is
this just at the lower / junior levels?

~~~
seanewest
Nope.

Edit: Although QA probably gets treated the worst, and many
programmers/designers use QA as a way to get their foot in the door.

------
x0054
Wouldn't one solution to this problem be telecommuting combined with contract
based model. You put a team together for a project, work the project, and let
every one know up front that this is a temporary gig, not a permanent job.
Like in the movie industry. But the twist is, you embrace a telecommuting
model, allowing developers to move from project to project without having to
move from house to house.

This would also make it much easier to rehire people who worked for you
before, providing continuity to the games, and increasing level of code reuse.
I know it's not a steady job, but perhaps it's a fair compromise. Also, this
would allow the video game industry to keep older talent, as developers would
be able to have a more flexible schedule and live in more family friendly
suburban neighborhoods.

Just an idea....

~~~
kevingadd
Remote contractors are heavily leveraged in the game industry. It's not a
solution; it usually makes things worse.

~~~
yen223
I can't see how game devs can work remotely in any practical sense. It can't
be easy pushing gigabytes of assets down the Internet.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Keep the data on the internet instead of working locally, using tools such as
[http://clara.io](http://clara.io).

------
neves
Layoffs aren't a problem. There will be a new generation of young freshman
whom greatest desire is to be a video game developer. The non unionized guys
will work 140 hours a week. Have a great salary for someone so young. And get
their layoff when they get older and can't stand more this.

~~~
bittermang
Spoken like a person who has never so much as sniffed what the world is like
in "AAA Game Development".

Imagine what a product like Facebook or Mac OS would look like, if after every
major release, 2/3rds or the entire team were laid off, and a fresh batch of
bright eager young talent was put in the chairs at a cheaper wage than the
last crop, unaware of the doom riding on the horizon.

Do you know why every EA franchise seems to tank over time, until it's
eventually killed? Because the people who made it originally are gone,
replaced by a bunch of guys who are told "Make it work like the last one, but
the market says it needs to be more action-y, so do that too." The people on
the new team weren't there the first time around, and so they wind up making a
faded copy of a game trying to imitate the predecessor. Eventually the game
loses all of the heart, passion, and competency that made it a great game in
the first place.

In the software world, we know the benefit of building a strong team. People
learn to work with each other, and people learn to work with the product,
knowing it inside and out. They're able to make the product the best it can
be. That doesn't seem to matter in the world of games to publishers. They see
the people who build the games as disposable fodder, because as you say there
will always be a new generation whose greatest desire is to be a game
developer.

Sure. Publishers don't see layoffs as a problem. It's become part of their
business model by now. But from where I sit, you can only disenfranchise so
many people, until you've killed your golden goose who makes building the
product for you possible in the first place.

And this is directly why we've seen the rise of indie games. Every time they
piss one of us off, we slowly start to realize we don't need them anymore.

\-- A laid of game developer, with a foreclosed home.

~~~
chc
I think you might have misunderstood neves' post. You seem to largely agree
with it.

~~~
bittermang
"Layoffs aren't a problem."

They are _the_ problem. See Dead Space's decline until it was given the ax.
See the constant eb and tide of Need for Speed, as they play developer hot
potato with the title. See the rambling incoherent mess that are Medal of
Honor and Battlefield, the original marquee warfare titles, that don't even
know what kind of game they want to try to imitate anymore because they forgot
what they were.

In my mind and experience, these can all be directly attributed to EA's policy
of killing everyone at the end of the dev cycle. It's like every sequel is
started from scratch, when you have to spin the new team up every time.

But that's ok, because "when they get older and can't stand more this" they'll
move on, right? You mean six to twenty-four months older, depending on when
they joined the project. If they're lucky, they can parlay that experience in
to signing on with another developer. But the constant layoffs mean that not
only is your pool of competition for the job full of young bucks fresh out of
Guildhall and Full Sail, but also full of desperate people just like you.
People who felt safe enough in their so called tenure to dare to do things
like try to start families or own homes, to live a life to accompany that
dream.

Lay offs and the ideal of living the dream of games are creating an over-
saturation in the market that is going to have some dire consequences down the
road. We already see this today in real time, as the money continues to
consolidate at the top, and developers are left dead in the ditch. Terminal
Reality. Lucas Arts. Vigil. Time Gate. Studios with long rich histories, full
of talented people who made a lot of great games, many of whom I knew... gone.

Stand here and tell me lay offs are not a problem, when I've had to listen to
their pleas of what they're going to do now with no job, and a baby on the
way. When another great game is taken from the world, because the focus groups
didn't respond the right way, so you all can line up at the unemployment line.
Stories and worlds we'll never be able to enjoy, because someone decided that
they had enough of trying to live this way, and the dream died with their
career.

Explain to me how that is not going to have a long and damaging impact on this
industry, when the people who make fun aren't having fun anymore.

~~~
watwut
"Being Indie is even harder, and only a very small fraction of indie devs
actually make money."

Only a fraction of big games makes money. Big game studios are falling right
and left. The thing is, if you can develop games, you can develop other things
too - and those jobs invariably offer much better conditions and pay.

~~~
ekianjo
> The thing is, if you can develop games, you can develop other things too -
> and those jobs invariably offer much better conditions and pay.

Yeah, but I guess you miss something important: people make games because they
enjoy doing that instead of social apps or server-side applications. And the
fun factor also has value that is not always related to how much you make.

I've seen the same thing in other industries: people with high tech skills
quitting and going to a complete different occupation where they actually make
less money, just because they see it as a more worthwhile pursuit.

------
mynameishere
_It 's weirdly common to hear about people getting laid off from the same
company more than once—i.e., they get laid off, rehired, and laid off again in
a span of two or three years_

It's not too weird. This was how factories used to work on a regular basis.
Guys would work for 8 months, get laid off, get unemployment for 2 months and
lay around the house bugging their wives, then get called back again. Repeat
until retirement. The supply chain techniques have improved so that doesn't
happen very much now.

~~~
pjc50
Which country/time period? Across much of Europe for much of the 20th century,
trying to do that would bring your entire workforce out on strike.

~~~
yen223
That strongly resembles life of an oil-rigger. 6 months hard labour, 6 months
vacation, rinse, repeat.

~~~
Anderkent
The key here is that it's vacation, not being laid off.

------
Iftheshoefits
Game developers keep getting laid off for the same reason game developers
generally earn lower salaries and have worse working conditions than other
people in this industry: a robust oversupply of potential labor.

These companies can replace their entire development staff regularly. That is,
of course, the successful ones can. Developers at smaller places are laid off
when their studios are bought by the sharks or fail to achieve any success in
the market.

~~~
mattm
Yeah, I had a friend a few years younger than me say he wanted to get into
game development. I told him the horror stories that many devs work all the
time, get paid little and don't even have time to play games.

His response?

"I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."

~~~
tsotha
This is the key. You wouldn't want to be a game dev for the same reason you
wouldn't open a surfboard shop or depend on your band to pay the bills. To
much in the way of virtually unpaid competition.

------
nnq
This sounds like like _one of the few_ problems that can really be solved by
unionizing workers and moving to long term work contracts... but good luck
selling this "socialist" mentality to game developers :)

~~~
forrestthewoods
lol. Game studios shut down left and right. Almost every game studio in
existence lives project to project. Most live paycheck to paycheck. You can
unionize all you want but when there's no money there's no money.

This isn't a tale of fat cats getting rich at the expense of the little man.
It's a brutal industry where most games don't ship and most games that do ship
still lose money. All of us who work in the industry are mildly insane to do
so.

~~~
nnq
so then the problem is more in a pathological game-dev-studio to publisher
relationships? or are most studios too small to have a bunch of running
projects at the same time?

...because the industry as a whole, on average, surely makes enough money to
actually keep people employed even for the short periods when they aren't
needed. What the OP describes is simply exploitation.

The only alternative conclusion to draw would be that _the game dev industry
attracts more talented programmers than it can support,_ but this sounds like
a dubious claim. _I doubt talented programmers are so attracted to game dev_
to actually saturate the sector with cheap and high quality labor...

------
gambiting
>>The average yearly salary for game developers, according to a Gamasutra
study, was $84,000 in 2013.

I just got hired as a junior programmer at a large studio(one of the largest
in the world in fact) and I make ~$30k a year - wonder where they get their
numbers from, or if maybe the market in the US is better(I am in the UK).

~~~
hackerboos
That's low for any programming job. My first job out of university was $42k.

Where about are you based?

~~~
gambiting
I know it's low - and everyone is telling me that "that's how games industry
is like". Both me and my girlfriend finished the exact same course at uni, and
I got my dream job in games industry, making £18k a year, and she got a job in
BT, making £30k a year. It's in the North East of England.

~~~
hackerboos
I know the North East doesn't demand London salaries but even here in the
North West you can get more than £20k as a junior.

I guess it depends on your priorities. Are you learning a lot? Do you enjoy
it? etc.

~~~
gambiting
I do enjoy it, I get to work on a game that sells millions of copies per year,
and I currently have every single devkit(Xbox 360,Xbox One, PS4, Wii, Wii U)
right on my desk and I get to work with them,which I always found exciting. So
yeah, I am working at my dream job, because I always wanted to get into the
games industry. I am just saying that in any other industry, I could literally
be making £10k more/year, which means that in a way, I am paying almost a
£1000 a month just to have the privilege of working in the games industry.

~~~
ido
£18k (€22.2k, or 1850 €/month) for a programmer is significantly less than
what you'd get in Germany or Austria for the same position. My very first job
in the game industry paid almost 50% more than that & that was some years ago.

I believe in Austria the legal minimum (from the Kollektivvertrag) you can get
paid as a programmer is 2.1k €/month, 14 times a year (so €29.4k/year) and
most people start above that minimum.

~~~
hackerboos
Can English only speakers find jobs in Germany/Austria?

~~~
atesti
Yes! (in Germany)

~~~
ido
Also in Austria, or most anywhere in western europe for this matter (might be
different in a couple of renownedly monolingual countries like Italy or France
but definitelly anywhere in the map [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic-
speaking_Europe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic-speaking_Europe)).

------
Furzel
Couldn't this problem be solved by a shift to a video game consulting industry
?

In tech companies it's quite common to have a period of 'inter contract'
between two missions where you can do trainings or even self training. Is the
video game market hostile to this kind of organisation or has it just not been
tested yet ?

~~~
Cthulhu_
I considered that option too - consultants or freelancers or the like with
less rigid contracts - however, the cost for those would be exponentially that
of the young easy to hire developers; hourly rates at least twice as high,
which doubles if you make them work double hours during crunch hours.

In-house developers work for a flat annual salary, and IIRC most game
development companies don't pay overtime whilst demanding devs work overtime
during crunch time.

But game dev extortion is a known problem, and the other problem is that
people take it. Working in the video game industry is a dream for a lot of
people, and they're willing to take a lot of shit for the perceived privilege
to work on the things they love.

And the weirdest part? The actual development of a video game is often only a
small part of the total cost package; iirc, games like the Call of Duty series
cost more in marketing than the actual development.

------
angelortega
It's a strange language when "getting laid" and "getting laid off" mean such
different things.

~~~
aikah
Yeah,as a foreigner ,it's hard, never know what to put after a verb to get the
right meaning,let's take "to go".

to go on,go back,go off,go around,go by

have a different meaning...that's the most difficult part of the english
language imho,now you can use a different verb for each expression,but it
wouldnt feel idiomatic.

At the same time,it makes english composable and easy to extend,it cannot work
with my language.I wonder if other languages work like that too.

~~~
sammyd56
Most Germanic languages have constructs similar to English´s phrasal verbs.
Learning them, for a foreigner, is really difficult (I know, because I spend
most of my time teaching English to Spanish students). I actually just
released the Android app I´ve been building to help with this. I didn´t think
it was worthy of a Show HN post, but now seems a good time to mention it:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phrasalver...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phrasalverbworld)

------
drpgq
The Curt Schilling story has always fascinated me (the video game part, not
the baseball one).

I live in Ontario and like a lot of other place, Ontario gives pretty large
tax incentives to video game companies. I've interacted a bit with some small
video game companies here who basically seem to only exist because of the
various tax incentives (both federal and provincial). I've pretty much decided
these aren't a good idea, but politicians think video games are cool.

~~~
shard972
I remember when I first herd about him and his company. As an Australian I
didn't know who Curt Schilling was so in my mind it was a guy who got a lot of
tax benefits and money to build an MMO.

------
was_hellbanned
A good friend of mine has worked in the games industry for over a decade now.
He worked on the Spore project at EA. It was insane how many hours he put in
while on-project. He'd have to answer his phone at _any_ time, and sometimes
drop whatever he was doing to trudge back into work. At the end of a three
month crunch, he said he'd spend about two weeks just dicking around at work,
sort of an informal comp-time system. I remember the "EA spouse" incident, and
by the sound of it, my friend was on one of the 'good' teams.

I once asked him why game developers don't get any royalties, since there was
a time when that was at least not unheard of. He insisted that it would just
cause people to game the system, with lazy people trying to get on the money-
making teams. Personally, I fail to see how that's not always the case,
everywhere, anyway. I think he's simply drunk the Kool-Aid and bought the line
that upper management fed him in order to maximize their profits.

------
tsotha
>Several of the developers who contacted me for this story said they were fed
up with layoff cycles and had left the video game industry entirely. Some told
tales of endless relocations and unreasonable hours, and bragged that in their
new fields, they were paid more to work less.

Yeah... this isn't exactly news. You work in the gaming industry because you
love video games. It's not a career. It's a job you do when you have youth and
health and minimum entanglements. When you get married or get older or get
just plain sick of working around the clock for not much money then it's time
to look around for something more stable and remunerative.

It's ridiculous to compare video game industry jobs with Big Grey Financial
Company. If you want comparisons, look at the movie industry, where people get
together to work on a project and then all get laid off when it's done.

~~~
bowlofpetunias
The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining
skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry?

The tools people use in the movie industry are commodities with relatively
slow innovation. People can get by on more or less the same skill set they had
15 years ago, and once the movie has been shot, virtually nobody has gained
any new knowledge.

The game industry has to considerably up their game (no pun intended) with
every new release. The only way they can keep up the movie-style cycle if a
company producing a new game can pick up developers just laid off by someone
else.

I doubt if that is sustainable in the long run. At some point hiring new devs
with very recent experience will become more expensive than retaining
knowledge.

The game industry will always have more dramatic cycles because any company is
as successful as their last game, but the current state of affairs just reeks
of immaturity.

~~~
ekianjo
> The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining
> skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry?

Well at the same time the technologies you used to make the game you worked on
2 years ago are probably going to be obsolete in the new game you'd be hired
to work on. There's only a few jobs in the game industry where highly
specialized, technical people are valued and retained. And there's a ton of
talent pool to pick up fresh people from out there who are decent at what they
do - probably more than there are jobs for them.

Look at Mercury Steam, they had no experience doing a AAA game (unless you
consider Jericho one of them, but I'd say it was rather average in scope), and
yet they managed to convince Konami they could do a reboot of Castlevania and
they did it pretty well without much prior experience in the similar genre or
scope.

------
lazyjones
Isn't the bigger issue here that game developers have been underpaid for many
years? They are usually exceptional programmers who would be getting much
higher salaries (and much better working conditions) elsewhere, so getting
laid off would not be such a dramatic experience due to savings etc..

------
shmerl
_> But inertia is hard to fight. How do you convince a multi-billion-dollar
industry to change practices that prioritize short-term profit over long-term
morale_

How does it compare to smaller studios, for example those which use
crowdfunding (inXile, Larian etc.), or even bigger ones but self sustained,
not relying on external publishers such as CD Projekt Red for example? Are
their practices better than those of the big and nasty companies like EA and
Co.?

~~~
Paul_S
Obviously, I don't know all of them but CD Projekt is not any different than
any other publisher funded (owned or funded on a per project basis) developer
I worked for in the decade I spent in gamedev.

There's little incentive in keeping your staff - there is never a shortage of
younger people who will work for next to nothing and stay at the office till
midnight, doing 80 hour weeks. You'd think that the owners would realise that
more senior devs doing 40 hours would be a better ROI but we are talking about
people who plan for crunch - it's not done in an emergency, it's planned for,
literally, like in a spreadsheet.

~~~
shmerl
Are you familiar with CD Projekt Red or you just assume it? From what I've
heard about the company they value their developers and in general they are
quite different from your typical EA and Co. type of company and have more
common sense. For instance they are strongly against any DRM.

~~~
Paul_S
My friends work there. The games industry is tiny. After 10 years I probably
know at least one person in every company in the UK simply because of how
often people change companies - including going to a different country they
don't even speak the language of. So OK, kudos to CD Projekt for hiring from
an international talent pool (and treating them well, helping with the move
and all that which is rare in gamedev companies who seldom have rich
compensation packages beyond the salary) but they are not some hippie commune
and will scale the workforce to whatever they need at the moment.

~~~
shmerl
What I meant is, do you know if CDPR are often firing developers to hire new
ones just in order to rotate them? Or they value their input and invest in
those who work for them?

They had financial difficulties in the past. They wrote how they almost went
bust a while ago, while developing the Witcher 2. I don't think that's the
subject of this thread.

------
frik
If they drive off the hardcore gaming community by adding more and more casual
elements like _pay for win_ , double-DRM and dumped down gameplay, the
franchise will go downhill.

For example open world games usually center around vehicles to move around
vast amount of map-terrain. You can make the driving physics (the central
gameplay element) arcady and fun (like GTA San Andreas) or realistic and still
fun (like GTA 4 or Mafia 1+2). Or you don't care and get the driving mechanics
mediocre like most such games (GTA V, Watch Dogs, Sleeping Dogs, Need for
Speed, etc.)

~~~
chris_wot
I can't understand why this comment has been downvoted. It seems like a
controversial but valid opinion. What are the specific objections?

~~~
agersant
It's off-topic.

------
notastartup
I think developers/designers or any type of creative work that involves using
the computer need a union of some sort. Artists have it, Writers have it, why
not the tech crowd?

~~~
chris_wot
I see you have been downvoted, but I've increasingly been of that opinion. I
see developers being screwed over all the time by big corporations - as an
example, Apple and Google with illegal agreements not to poach each other's
workers. A union, IMO, would have helped.

------
herperderp
employment is a scam

