
I broke down crying: Canadian video game creators face grueling crunch hours - monsieurpng
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/burnout-crunch-canada-1.5109599
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tonyjstark
My fist job was with a company that had also hardware projects and we had a
hard deadline to not miss the re-stock of supplies of big retailers. So since
management decided to change one of the core features 6 month before the
deadline we worked on weekends in exchange for money. I was young, felt very
close to the team and also needed the money to pay off my student loan. After
a summer without weekends to relax I was pretty burned out and I realized how
the money wasn't worth it.

After working there a while I also realized how the company used the coolness
factor of the products and the feeling of belonging to the team to get people
into working a lot while paying less than the rest of the industry. I think
this is also often done in the game industry

My question is: after your first crunch time, don't you think about priorities
in life? Also, at least the programmers won't have a really hard time to find
other jobs why do you stay in this rather abusive industry?

~~~
mntmoss
The industry filters first against people who don't want to crunch or to move:
the old hands of game development are almost uniformly workaholics and willing
to uproot themselves to a new country for each gig. They are numb to these
particular pains. But most people are not, and it shows in the turnover
numbers.

The second promise that keeps people in tends to be built around having
multiple tiers of employee: the ordinary worker, and the
lead/senior/director/etc. - where the higher rank gets more sway and less
vulnerability to layoffs, as they are the "core" of the studio identity, and
as a core member they hold some more bargaining power and creative freedom.
Most of the employees are there to fill in the ordinary stuff - the small
props, environmental details, and minor features.

Even with the programmers this holds true: the core technology groups of the
large publishers tend to be at some distance from the teams working on a
product. These top level people are also the folks that can most easily
crossover from high-profile tech in games to high-profile tech in another
field. Many of the people who write shipping code that is not the core
engine(customized gameplay features, event scripts, etc.) get positioned -
willingly or no - as specialized grunt labor, making a career move harder
later. There's a lot of little stuff shaping narratives here.

On that note, one of the things that is on the table for game unionization
efforts is standardization of job titles.

~~~
JohnFen
> standardization of job titles

I've long thought that this was needed industry-wide. As it is, job titles are
largely meaningless. It shouldn't, and doesn't have to, be that way.

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JohnFen
It may be worse now, but the computer game industry has long been one of the
worst in terms of the conditions that devs work under. It is, perhaps, the
most cutthroat sector of our industy.

That's why I left it -- I can do exciting, impactful, cutting-edge things in
other sectors without having to endure death marches and crunch times.

~~~
safanycom
Obligatory Coupland reference
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPod](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPod)

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Creationer
Just work for a small game company that doesn't ship products or advertise
physically and hence has much less crunch requirement (much easier to delay a
digital product). Plus, typically the Owner is working himself as a designer
or programmer, so any crunch for the team means crunch for him.

With the launch of the Epic Games Store and the coming explosion of platforms,
plus mature middleware like Unity and Unreal, times are great for well-
organised Indie teams.

~~~
JohnFen
Smaller companies tend to have less financial room to maneuver, though.
Delaying a release means delaying revenue while at the same time still having
to pay salaries, etc. Sometimes, a company can't afford that delay.

Still, my personal bent is that I'm more likely to be willing to do that for a
small company (whose owner I likely work with, and I have a greater personal
investment in) than a large one.

That's one of the several reasons that I prefer to work for small companies.

