
Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/opinion/work-culture-video-games-crunch.html
======
bsenftner
I've been in an out of the games industry most my career. I was one of the OS
developers for the 3DO, the original PSX, as well as lead or team for 15 years
from 1990 on. Years before "EA Spouse" I tried and failed to get some type of
collective effort against the rampant, illegal employee abuse. The collective
game developer brainwash is thick, and their treatment is 100 times more
abusive than the sexual harassment the larger public is currently outraged
about.

After leaving games, I thought VFX was going to be less abusive. I spent 7
years doing that; artist, programmer & financial analyst. VFX was only better
in the respect that the pay and perks were better. Were. Film VFX is mostly
overseas or Canada now.

I'm in facial recognition now. It is still just exiting the "computer
scientist" stage, not at that "Crappy AI College" level yet.

Until younger people get some type of collective sense of their abuse, it will
continue. Everywhere.

~~~
watwut
This was puzzling about "there are not enough women in games development"
fights. It is not a good job and it is not good for you trying to work in
games. Most people leave the industry in five years - they leave the industry
not just a job.

The question is not why women dont go there and how to get them in. Chances
are, they do a good guess about what it will be like and nope out. The
question is why the hell men put up with all that and accept all the crap
without even trying to negotiate.

~~~
pjmlp
I guess it is the typical macho attitude, trying to prove one can handle
better than the others.

Often they seem to be clever than us. :)

------
eksemplar
I never understood why people went into the gaming industry unless it was in a
position where they did decision making and got credit.

Growing up in the 80/90is I remember thinking a place like Bioware or Black
Isle/Troika would've been cool places to work, but as I reached adulthood and
understood what went into working those places, the dream quickly faded.

Imagine having to work long hours at shit pay, to design/build some loot crate
system. Especially when your skill set is in high-demand and you could've gone
into something like healthcare IT, where you could be improving people's
lives, at 37-45 hours a week at four times the pay.

I really don't mean to be rude, I just can't fathom the motivation you would
have to work some anonymous job in the video gaming industry.

~~~
sidlls
HN cracks me up sometimes. Compare the derision and skepticism hurled at
would-be video game developers to the praise people working countless hours on
pointless "portfolio side projects" on github or whatever get, just for a
minor boost in the grueling interview process or because they're so passionate
about it or whatever.

At least these people (who are certainly being exploited, often in ways that
violate labor laws) are getting some real work experience while they're at it.

~~~
nothrabannosir
_> Compare the derision and skepticism hurled at would-be video game
developers to the praise people working countless hours on pointless
"portfolio side projects" on github or whatever get_

Ok: one is fun, ~100h spread out over any period you want (e.g. a year: 2h per
weekend), completely 100% beholden only to yourself, no strings attached. The
other... well, I’ve never worked there, but I’ll quote someone who seems to
know: “certainly being exploited, often in ways that violate labor laws.”

Are you honestly comparing what people are describing here to side projects?
honestly: what side project have you ever worked on that treated you that way?

~~~
sidlls
The amusement is from the comparison to the use of side projects as a
proxy/signal for "passion" as part of the job application process and resume
support, not side projects in general.

Of course more generally the exploitation of open source work by commercial
entities is also ignored in this context, which is also amusing. The number of
side-projects that are used for free by commercial entities profiting off them
dwarfs the number used to generate income by consulting or as a business. But
that's just fine because "open source."

------
microcolonel
This is what happens when you do something that a lot of other people aspire
to do. Growing up, many of the girls in my schools would talk about how they
want to go into fashion or interior design (thankfully most them figured out
that it would be hard to make ends meet unless they had some particular
talent, and the luck and patience for sales and marketing); many of the boys
talked about how they wanted to get into game development, many of them
acquiring poseur-level knowledge of the field, playing around with development
tools.

When you have a continuous supply of giddy, overjoyed young applicants who
have dreamt since childhood of working a position and want nothing more than
to pour their life into what you're making, they will gladly accept pay and
working conditions below the general standard for the applicable skills.

~~~
smallnamespace
There is literally a part of labor economics that studies these issues:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential

tl;dr people get paid more for doing unpleasant things, and take pay cuts for
jobs that people like

~~~
vanderZwan
What that wiki page is missing is a discussion of _actual_ desirability, and
_perceived_ desirability of a job (I'm sure actual academic discussions of the
theory do include it).

Because game development seems objectively more unpleasant than some of the
other programming jobs. It certainly seems more unpleasant than _my_ work
situation, and with worse pay.

~~~
microcolonel
Markets are subjective, not objective. Measures of _objective goodness_ have
absolutely no place in market phenomena.

If you want more objective markets, you will have to influence the actors
through a side channel (and you have to be actually right, not just think
you're right!).

------
ekianjo
> The average American game developer earned $83,060 in 2013, according to a
> Gamasutra survey, or less than half the pay of a first-year associate at a
> New York law firm.

What kind of comparison is that? Most people in the world earn less than half
of what a first-year associate at a NY Law Firm makes. So what? A proper
comparison should be against similar professions, in the entertainment
industry. Did the author do any research at all?

~~~
spaceseaman
Did you read the enclosing paragraph?

"Their income pales in comparison to what’s offered in other fields with
reputations for brutal hours, like banking and law. The average American game
developer earned $83,060 in 2013, according to a Gamasutra survey, or less
than half the pay of a first-year associate at a New York law firm."

Your answer is right there for goodness sake! The author compares game
developers to a first-year associate because both are "fields with reputations
for brutal hours."

The author is also Jason Schreier, an editor at Kotaku which has frequently
covered these topics. I would argue he's quite aware of the issues developers
face, many journalists are close friends with developers in the industry.

To echo your demeaning tone: did you do any research at all?

~~~
ballenf
The author had the universe of salaries to choose from and chose ... lawyers.
And not nationwide, but lawyers in literally the highest (or very close) paid
market in the world. A comparison to Hollywood union rates would have been
much more logical and probably still supported the writer's thesis.

So, yes, I think it fair to call it a lazy comparison and criticize the author
for that point. Even if it doesn't really undermine any of the other well
known issues with the field.

The other reason the comparison is so flawed is the education requirements for
lawyers in that market and the enormous debt usually incurred in getting
there. (These characteristics are not unique to lawyers, but are not totally
shared with game devs.) Large NYC firms will only hire from a dozen or so law
schools and those schools accept students from relatively small pool of mostly
pricey undergrads. Without scholarships or aid, you're looking at $2-350,000
in student loans over the 7 years of school. Then you generally don't work for
6 months after graduation in order to study for the bar exam because you
didn't expect $300k to teach you _that stuff_ did you?

------
sien
Is there any part of the entertainment industry that isn't like this?

It seems that trying to be a writer, actor, game maker or a musician is
incredible amounts of hard work and a small number of people do well and
everyone else does badly.

~~~
minimaxir
The video game industry is especially bad as it combines the bad aspects of
the entertainment industry _with the bad aspects of software development_.

A good story of the combination of overwork and technical mismanagement is the
Mass Effect: Andromeda debacle (written by the same author as the NYT
article): [https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-
andromedas-t...](https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-
troubled-five-1795886428)

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
The problems extend to beyond the confines of game developers and publishers.
It also doesn't help to have to contend with a deeply critical and
particularly cheap audience and overly influential terrible game
'journalists'. Many of the customers, if you've ever played online, are
downright abusive actually. The customers, many of whom are young and immature
want everything for free. If publishers try to charge for anything at all,
it's 'a rip off'. Even though game prices have remained the same for a couple
of decades while games become vastly more complex (and hence more expensive to
make).

Basically games are not valued. The only reason they even get made is because
there's enough people who love making them without sweating about not having
the best salary, and enough young people who keep coming in to replace the
people who've finally decided they've had enough.

~~~
kuschku
> Even though game prices have remained the same for a couple of decades while
> games become vastly more complex (and hence more expensive to make).

A decade ago I paid 40€ for a game, and maybe 20€ for an addon.

Nowadays I pay 60€ for a game, plus about 60€ for DLCs, plus another 40€
addon, and I'll also have to pay for microtransactions to circumvent the
blockades the game constantly throws at me.

How have proces remained the same?

And this is in a field of the industry where games just got easier to make,
because, instead of building custom engines they're now all using Unity or
Unreal, and delivering cookie-cutter content.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
They are not all using Unity or Unreal and even the ones who are - it doesn’t
necessarily make games easier to make when expectations are constantly rising.
You still need to recruit and pay large numbers of the most talented people
from a wide range of disciplines for several years to get out one game.

I don’t like the dlc / add-on approach either btw but it’s all done to get
better margins while attempting to avoid the ‘sticker shock’ that would result
if they charged one time to get the margins they actually want.

Everything would be able to change if naiive young people didn’t put up with
bad conditions in the industry but I think this isn’t a problem just for
games, this is how many industries keep ticking along. It’s a cycle, the young
don’t believe the old, they think they’re cynical and this time they’ll do
things different. I hope there is change.

------
SoulMan
Well, it's true. I've worked on both gaming and enterprise software
companies."Crunch" is everywhere. The only difference Games (especially casual
one) has very short lifetime and changes are frequent and sometimes targeting
some event or season like Christmas. With this, the work load becomes very
uneven throughout the year. There are months teams are waiting for a solid
project (otherwise management keeps them busy with some "New IP" experimental
work which is destined to fail crossing approval gates ) and there are spikes
where they have to work 6 or 7 straight weekends. Some regions where labor
laws are not strict (or in culture itself work-life balance is not expected)
its for irratic. In one hand the crunch time is extreem where employees are
asked to spend very long hours sometimes overnight at work on the other hands
they may have to wait for months for a project to be outsourced from the
studio that is holding the IP.

~~~
zer00eyz
Holiday hell: welcome to e-commerce.

Redesign, relaunch, rebuild, replatform, add vendors, remove vendors, deal
with poorly built contracts that allow for shenanigans because no one in tech
signed off on the deal you just made.

I think our whole industry is hell bent on consuming youth and self
destruction. No one in tech is immune but some have it worse than others.

~~~
freedomben
I know a guy in his late 30s that just had a _freaking heart attack_ as a
result of chronic stress and overwork. Worst part is his is self-imposed! He
is an entrepreneur and does lots of contract work.

Sometimes we don't realize what we are doing to our bodies with overwork,
stress, poor diets (you know it's true), and insufficient exercise. It's good
to get reminded every once in a while.

~~~
abawany
I agree. I have left jobs that were grinding me when I realized that the end
purpose was not something that I felt was moving the world forward.

Bill Watterson said the following via Hobbes (08 Apr 92, pg 56) that rings
true for me: 'I don't know which is worse...that everyone has his price, or
that the price is always so low.'

------
tptacek
Since you have to assume every executive funding or managing a gamedev studio
knows that developers grow up dreaming of working on games, it seems like this
is a pretty good example of a sector of tech ripe for collective bargaining.
Unchecked supply and demand ensures abusive working conditions for entire
generations of game developers, unless they can find a way to in some way link
the fates of veteran developers with newcomers and allow engineering teams to
bargain for some control over and sanity for their shipping schedules.

Until that happens, though, the classic tech career advice remains true: don't
go into gamedev. There is comparably interesting, creative work elsewhere in
tech that is also lucrative and relatively secure.

~~~
valesco
I am curious as to what those other creative fields are (honest question).

------
makecheck
These extreme development environments aren’t even creating games that are
that _fun_ , certainly compared to some older games.

First, there are so many bugs and obviously-unfinished things. “Ship now, pay
now, pay _again_ later and _maybe_ it’ll be fixed later” is the new normal.

Then there’s the huge production costs. Games suffer and become boring because
they take forever to develop these photorealistic scenes and don’t have time
to produce a lot of actual game content!! Instead of spending an eternity to
create a handful of amazing-looking things, focus on just-OK-looking opponents
and make a much bigger and better game.

------
quizme2000
This is ripe in the animation and CGI studios also. ILM/Lucas Arts were
notorious meat grinders of young professionals. There must be an upper bound
to hours worked in a shift/day/week legally for salaried
employees/management/executives. No game or movies is worth working someone to
death to keep on budget.

------
AdeptusAquinas
Classic example of supply and demand. More people want to become game devs
than there are jobs, and so they can be abused knowing that if they complain,
they will be replaced.

Tools like Unity, Gamemaker etc are part of the solution : lower the barrier
of entry to expand the market, which might even eventually introduce IT level
employee competition.

Might also be useful if the current generation of game dev 'elites' retire.
Props to them for their games, but it often seems their success bias allows
them to view crunch and other terrible development practices as normal.

------
didibus
I think this raises many questions that are somewhat similar to raising
minimum wage.

Can companies survive without this "cheap" accessible labour? Are the game
devs being screwed by their employers or the markets? Is it better to regulate
for higher salaries, and potentially less total jobs and maybe less games per
year?

I think the answers to these questions are hard to find, but ultimatly would
dictate the pros and cons of the current situation.

If execs are just pocketing all the money, ya, that's a problem and maybe
unions or regulation is needed.

If game development of the current scale just isn't sustainable by the markets
given higher salaries, we need to explore what kind of game development scale
can? Is it one which reduces the number of jobs? If so, we have the taxi vs
uber dilemma... Is it better for fewer people to get good wages, or for more
people to get lesser wages?

Finally, we must explore the lengthy crunches. Are they truly delivering
productive value? Is management in the game industry just poorer? Would
reasonable hours impact cost and profits? Maybe it wouldn't, if we believe all
the science about how lack of sleep and overwork nullifies productivity.

This is all a complex problem.

~~~
pfranz
> Finally, we must explore the lengthy crunches. Are they truly delivering
> productive value?

They're not. It's a huge waste of money. It's all poor planning. But each
company has to learn that individually, over and over, before an industry
figures it out. There's some quote about making movies (or art) that the hard
part is making the movie the first time. Once they knew what they were making,
doing it a second time would cost 1/10th as much.

A lot of the leadership at Pixar talk about how difficult Toy Story 2 was on
the staff [1]. '"a full third of the staff" ended up with some form of RSI by
the time the film was finished.' 'In one instance, an animator had forgotten
to drop his child off at daycare one morning and, in a mental haze, forgot the
baby in the back seat of his car in the parking lot.' Even though 'Pixar did
not encourage long hours, and, in fact, set limits on how many hours employees
could work by approving or disapproving overtime.'

It created a huge culture shift at Pixar. Luckily, they've in a comfortable
enough position to carry out and keep up with those changes.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story_2#Controversy_and_tr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story_2#Controversy_and_troubled_production)

------
aaronbrethorst
"They may gaze with envy at their colleagues in the film industry, where
unions help regulate hours and ensure overtime pay."

Why gaze with envy when you could organize instead?

------
baron816
Haven’t we known for a long time that this kind of stuff is counter
productive?

~~~
pfranz
It's well known. I think it's hard with creative industries, especially since
digital has sped things up and communications has allowed way more people to
collaborate. Now you can have many more people making last minute
changes...throughout the last 6 months of a project.

I've heard lawyers talk about what it was like before fax machines. Turnaround
on documents were expected to take a week because they went out through the
mail. Now you can get a txt message and expect to turnaround in minutes--no
matter where you are.

It's just a tempting feedback loop and I feel like as a culture/society we
need to set some boundaries.

------
unexistance
some 'update' since EA Spouse and corresponding lawsuits ~10 years ago

[http://www.gameqol.org/igda-qol-survey/](http://www.gameqol.org/igda-qol-
survey/)

------
bagacrap
How does one limit bathroom breaks?

~~~
CommentCard
I believe the answer is in your name.

------
jstewartmobile
When you look at what a lot of games end up doing to a lot of gamers, does
anyone think there might just be a _little_ bit of karma mixed-in here? Just a
little?

I've seen so many otherwise well-adjusted people blow their time, health, and
sanity on these things rather than deal with their own real-life problems.
Then there are the newer ones where they nickel-and-dime people actual money
for digital cornfields and lollipops.

~~~
maruhan2
well, i think that's a conservative point of view. My point of view is
different. Video games spur a ton of technological advancements because
there's always so much demand from consumers. Technological advancements are
always slow and under-funded if it's not backed up by common consumers. There
aren't many things that common consumers crave more than entertainment.

~~~
jstewartmobile
i think that's a grossly sub-optimal arrangement. we got VASTLY more bang for
our buck out of the ARPA guys like Minsky, McCarthy, Kay, Sutherland, etc than
we ever did out of the gaming and entertainment industries, and we did it
without exploiting the competitiveness and compulsiveness of children and
children-at-heart

edit: to be fair, some games have risen to the level of high-art, but I doubt
many artists are going to complain about the pay or the effort when they know
that they have accomplished such a thing

------
Insanity
I wonder what the point is of these crazy hours. We are encouraged at work to
not make overtime too often because it decreases code quality. More of a "go
home, come back fresh" tomorrow.

As a consumer I also rather have games delayed than delivered in the EA style,
full of bugs.

But I might be a more understanding consumer as I work in IT. I really do
doubt these hours have a positive impact on code quality though.

~~~
steeleduncan
Does code quality matter as much for games? Automated testing is rare and much
of the heavy lifting is handled by libraries such as Unreal Engine and Havok,
leaving one-off glue code.

The majority of sales happen in week 1, and the DLC is usually shipped within
a year. Unless the game attains classic status and requires porting to new
platforms one day, it is unlikely you will need to work on that code in the
future even.

Don't misunderstand, I rarely even play a AAA release until a few months in
when the bugs are quashed because they irritate me so much. However I suspect
EA et al optimise for release frequency rather than code quality. Presumably
the affect of the latter on the profit & loss is dwarfed by the affect of the
former.

~~~
Insanity
You're probably right there. There is pressure to release because of
competitors (like BF, and CoD used to do) and because customers start to
expect it.

But better code quality can also mean losing less time fixing bugs that could
have been prevented in the first place. Thus, actually reaching the expected
release date, but attention focussed elsewhere.

I'm not familiar enough with that world though to really understand how
complex their code is. As you said, I assume libraries such as UE, CryEngine,
.. take care of the truly hard bits.

------
diogenescynic
American corporations are destroying their workers. Most companies do not care
about their employees. There are some that do, many that claim they do, and
more that give it lip service. Most Americans are overworked, underpaid, and
don’t get enough time off. We need to change the system so it works for us,
not the other way around.

~~~
pfranz
It's not just America. Heck, the article quotes a co-founder of very well
known Polish studio as saying he "sees crunch as a necessary evil." There were
a lot of negative articles talking about how brutal The Witcher 3 crunch was.
Mass Effect: Andromeda, made by Bioware in Alberta, Canada "ended up building
most of the game during the ensuing 18 months."[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect:_Andromeda#Game_de...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect:_Andromeda#Game_design)

------
chaotic_clanger
10+ years, working in 3rd or 4th game studio.

no issues, but with certain employers the crunches can be quite intensive.
escpecially when promised 'relief after crunch' never really comes.

with decent employer and if you like math and coding as such, it's an amaze-
balls (i believe is the expression) job to have: very broad spectrum of
problems that the coding of the games involve and almost free hand in
realization and the best part is that performance and memory really matters,
and there's no way around it. what i like the most is lower level (sometimes
significantly) of corporate bullshit, and that's true even for bigger studios.
it's a bit like in quantum physics: "shut up and calculate!" except we code.

------
oelmekki
And on top of that, your users will probably hate you.

Complaining is a thing on the whole internet, but I'm always shocked by how
common it is for gamers to trash those who basically make their leisure
possible.

Indeed, this industry seems to be the most toxic one for developers. Among all
recruitment mails I receive, gaming industry ones always stand out. They're
basically always in the line of "want to work in your dream industry?" and
make me feel like they actually are doing me a favor by sending me a
recruitment mail. "lol" is my usual thought while closing the mail.

By the way, to game developers : don't feel too bad. Once MR will be a thing,
you'll be kings of the world, just like webdev from 2000'.

~~~
Noos
It doesn't surprise me. Video Games tend to rely on stressors to provide
eustress and a pleasurable experience. This is okay with single player games,
but multiplayer games wind up adding a ridiculous amount of additional
stressors that developers can't compensate for and often can even make it
worse. you're often invoking fight/flight responses and potent stress
reactions; why is it so odd that players over time start to turn on people who
do this to them?

~~~
oelmekki
I see your point, but you make it sound like they have no choice but play
games :) Ultimately, they do that to themselves and they _want_ it (because
they want to beat it). It's like watching an horror movie and insulting actors
for being scared.

------
garfieldnate
I've thought for a long time that public school should include material on
understanding and preventing abuse to yourself and others. I had a parent that
was emotionally manipulative and grew up accepting it. When I went out into
the world I put up with a lot of emotional abuse and let myself get whipped by
jerks because I wanted to avoid confrontation at all costs. My wife deals with
poisonous people much better than me, and I regularly use her as the voice of
reason when I have trouble with some people.

------
shmerl
_> Mr. Iwinski, like many other top video game creators, sees crunch as a
necessary evil._

Some developers have a lot of critical things to say about working environment
in CDPR. Extreme crunch is one of those.

~~~
BadassFractal
Sad that The Witcher 3 is such a phenomenal title, yet it caused so much
misery in the making. Are there examples of extremely successful games that
were made in a boring 9 to 5 fashion?

------
jbb67
I went for an interview at a game company before I got my current job. As well
as the technical questions, a large part of my interview seemed to be
indirectly about my attitude to working many extra hours and days.

I explained that surely in a properly managed company, with proper planning
such things would rarely or never be necessary.

Surprisingly I got asked back for a second interview (which I declined because
I'd been offered a much more suitable job elsewhere)

------
jon_richards
I've heard similar things about places like SpaceX. So many people want to
work on something cool that the companies can afford to not be the best places
to work.

------
maruhan2
I wonder how much of this applies to Blizzard who delays products as long as
possible or would even cancel big projects that's been long underway

~~~
cjslep
It still exists, but I'm unsure to what exact degree as I only know from
multiple firsthand sources. If you're on of the old guard you are paid a fair
enough wage to live in Irvine, and the job is generally fun. If you're one of
the masses of new guard then good luck affording Orange County, have fun
chaperoning Blizzcon, etc etc. That's the sensation I got.

------
aluhut
Someone should talk to Tynan Sylvester from Rimworld. Guy took some months off
in the middle of the hype and it didn't hurt the game.

------
shinners
I'm interested to learn how these gaming companies are able to retain talent
with conditions such as this. Perhaps they just churn through entry level Devs
who move on to better jobs after gaining some exp.?

