On the other hand both industries' "indie" sectors seem to treat their workers a lot better. And both industries let you make your first production from your bedroom, armed with very basic tools!
"They are energetic and excited about getting paid to do something they really enjoy (and probably have been doing on a small scale for years without pay). "
"Others think there must be a better, more humane and sustainable way to do this work, and they found their own projects with better conditions. This latter group seems less visible and prosperous, although more outspoken."
I've got a very close friend that was a game developer at EA for about 4 years. He went through a very similar experience. He eventually burned out, moved back home, went back to school and is now a Chiropractor.
He more or less quit gaming when he was a game developer. After about a year off he returned to gaming and now enjoys the occasional MMORPG or strategy game. He returned to gaming but I don't think he'll ever return to coding.
This is an interesting story that is all too common in the games industry. It does seem as though perseverance and 'blind' passion are the most important characteristics of game developers.
I wonder if other roles on game development teams, aside from programming, are nearly as rigorous. Obviously, they are all worked to death, but there seems to be something about furiously debugging for a prolonged crunch mode that sucks the life out of programmers.
During college, I was fortunate enough to take a class from gaming legend Warren Spector (of Deus Ex/Thief/System Shock/Ultimate fame). What impressed me most about him was his sheer, infinite passionate for the games industry. He knew gaming so intimately that I would go so far as to call him a genius. At 50+ years old, he is still going strong in the games industry.
This class brought several guest speakers that were HUGE names in the industry, notably Richard Garriot (Ultima/Tabula Rasa) and Michael Morhaime (Blizzard co-founder). These two guys entered the industry as programmers, but quickly moved onto higher roles in their respective organizations. I think that playing the position of a non-coder is crucial in their career success. There is simply no other industry that can foster the immense inventiveness and creativity required to produce successful games.
About 10 years ago my company was supplying a critical component to a major game developer. We showed up at the office the last month of development to help with debugging.
It was a scene out of some psycho's nightmare. 18-21 hour days; 30 people at desks in a room, in virtual lockdown. They looked like the walking dead. The producer was this 5'4" guy wearing storm trooper boots, he'd walk around like Hitler laughing at how fucked up everyone looked, and saying things like "The beatings will continue until morale improves!" No one was laughing.
What was stupid about it is everyone was so burnt they couldn't think straight, kept making simple mistakes. Productivity was probably around 10-15% of peak, if that. It was one of the more depressing things I had ever seen.
All entertainment sectors do this -- they sucker ppl in with glamor and rip them off. It's built into the business model.
I'm curious if this is true for all "game developers" or just the sort working at EA and companies that make EA-style games. If you work for Zynga or Playdom, for example, do you have huge crunches and frequent 80 hour weeks? Or is this just the way a few big companies are run.
Certainly not all companies. But it is rather common in this industry. And so far I haven't worked on a game yet which didn't at least have some weeks crunch-time before release.
The video game industry is great in my opinion, but then again, I work at a startup instead of at a monolithic corporation with over a thousand other employees.
Probably anyone working at a company that large would get burnt out, regardless of industry.
Yeah, I think you're referring either to Stevie Case, a "gaming grrl and Quake champion who became a developer and Playboy model" or "one fellow who took up game programming after he abandoned a shot at the ministry and become an exotic male dancer who went by the stage name Preacher Boy." http://www.amazon.com/review/R2DHVHM25YIBWO
Well, traders more specifically. You see plenty of 50-year old senior investment bankers -- they're the ones with the client relationships who bring in the big deals. It's pretty rare to see a trader over 40.
Corp finance and traders are rival tribes within a bank. The finance people think the traders are vulgar and the traders think the finance people are effete. Lumping them all together as bankers is like lumping developers, sysadmins, qa together as "computer people".
Unfortunately most people fail to realize that. In the last few months, bashing bankers has become a socially acceptable norm... and I don't know whether that anger is directed at investment bankers themselves (you know, the ones who do corporate finance) or at anyone who happens to work at an investment bank.
On the cultural aspects of traders, Tom Wolfe wrote a rather biased (not to mention obnoxious) article on that a couple of years ago:
"The traders are on the front lines moment by moment, pulling the trigger with only seconds to think about it. They are our kind! They are aggressive real men! Their plain vanilla C.E.O.’s know it too. They will pay a daring, battle-hardened trader $50 million and up per year to keep him from defecting to our pirate fleet. They pay them more than they pay themselves, because they are worth more, because they are real men, because they are willing to fight. What idiot thought up "boards of directors" anyway? My board of directors consists of me, myself, and I. My investors don’t have to love me. I don’t have to charm them. I have to do one thing and one thing only, make them money."
My anecdotal impression is that one of two things happens. Either they build up enough that they'd rather retire than continue building it, or they run into an up-or-out policy at the company.
I suspect that the public vastly overestimates entertainment industry earnings due to availability bias. Headlines like "<Star Name> earns $XXM for <movie>" are more common than "relatively unknown supporting actor earns enough to maintain SAG membership."
Likewise, young women probably perceive the porn industry to be much more lucrative than it actually is. I've read that they get paid between $500 and $2K per scene. While that sounds amazing to an eighteen year-old working at McDonald's, it probably translates into $100K annually for three or four years until younger talent takes their places.
100k annually for three or four years is like 400k. That's ten years worth of a decent middle class salary, which is what most careers are worth, except it's front-loaded so you can generally invest it and make more in the long run. I would not snort at that kind of income.
Nor would I. But, a porn-filled past is stigmatizing. The same men who paid for a DVD of the young starlet would be unwilling to hire her out of college at age 26 as a marketing assistant. She's tainted, you know! So, it's a nice nest egg if well invested, but one must factor future opportunity loss into his NPV analysis.
I doubt they make more than 1/4 of what the younger stars make. Plus (so I've heard) they do some pretty gross stuff, hard on the body and psyche. I don't think it's a glamorous profession for anyone other than the top 1%. That may be true of most professions.
This must be the reason that the large game companies such as EA are completely lack of innovation. They turn out the same games year in and year out with only slightly better graphics, ai, etc...
a large majority of those ship with a AAAish title (I guess in part eating your own dogfood) - think Lawrence World or Basecamp for the Web framework discussion... We're talking games like Quake X, Unreal (Tournament) Y, etc
So they probably hit the same kind of crunch as well.
