I think the video game industry is literally run like the movie industry except there is no union to help the people who make the actual magic happen unlike say the entertainment industry. I realize that some hate unions but some things on this world literally could not happen unless we respect people, their time, and their families. Some things are worth more than money and I"m grateful for the games I get to play. I wish there was a way to say give people in the gaming industry money, say grants, and artistic investment - I bet there are some great ideas out there that some burned out artist or developer will never get to realize because he got burned by a company who wants super solder 17...
I see these games coming out of other countries that are amazing and these studios seemed to have got grants and investment from the government i.e. HellBlade, , . Do we not do that here stateside? It's also unfortunate some of the most talented dev's I've met even quit CS field entirely after doing game development. Do video game creators get the same mental health services those in the entertainment unions get?
One other parallel that interests me comes up in this article. Frank D’Angelo got into games because he loved them as a kid. And that's ultimately what guaranteed that he'd be treated poorly: so many people want to get into games that there's always another sucker to take his place.
It's the same thing with acting. The number of people who want to be Hollywood actors is much smaller than the number of people who end up succeeding. So LA is full of would-be stars waiting tables looking for their big break. That makes it easy for exploitative jerks like Harvey Weinstein, so much so that "casting couch" is a common metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casting_couch
This comparison goes further - the vast majority of people who want to be actors suck at being one. Or musicians. Or writers. Or any other artists. Few who have talent/luck/x-factor get money and fame, the rest wash out.
Yet, somehow, it's believed that games are completely different and everyone who wants to make games is good enough to be able make living off it.
> This comparison goes further - the vast majority of people who want to be actors suck at being one. Or musicians. Or writers. Or any other artists.
Most people realize they suck and don't try to make a career out of it.
If you look at the truly dedicated actors, musicians, or whatever, out there... the ones who practiced during High School and/or pursued Drama degrees in college... they're for the most part, as high quality as any other Hollywood actor.
You can pretty much go into any off-Broadway or even local Theater and find excellent singing, dancing, and/or acting technique.
That is to say: "Good Actors" truly exist, and most people that I've personally met in the field seem to be of "good" quality or better.
Unfortunately, life sucks for them. Just being 'good' isn't enough, you basically need to reach "Star" status to get anywhere these days.
"Stars" are often worse actors than these dedicated unknown folk actually. The thing about "Stars" is that they've built up brand recognition and have learned to generate free press through (often contrived) magazine drama.
Long story short: being a successful actor is COMPLETELY different from being a "good" actor. A good actor can take on a variety of storyline roles, memorizing lines, creating characters, holding a stage presence, etc. etc. Stuff that takes lots of practice, but there really are a LOT of people out there who are really, really, really good at this.
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To put it into technical / programming terms: no one really cares if a game programmer has excellent architecture and bug-free code. Hell, the Speedrunning community seems to prefer bug-ridden code for the credit-warp glitch, sequence-breaks, or whatnot.
> the vast majority of people who want to be actors suck at being one.
It's difficult to reduce the dimensionality of people down to one continuous variable, let alone one binary variable; though some actors, I will concede, could almost manage this.
There's few objective criteria we can actually define a good/suck scale on. Acting quality is very subjective. I tend to find unknown European actors far more convincing than many big name US actors who are chosen to play basically the same character over and over again and perform the same limited two-or-three facial expressions from the set of {happy, sad, angry, confused}. As we've come to learn recently through scandal, performance on screen may not always be the first consideration of some studio execs.
If you're talking financially, that's great: we have an objective measure. If the whole point of being an actor is to make money for themselves, then I can tell you who the great ones are. To the studios though, perhaps it's the actors that will pull in the crowds but not cost too much that are the best. In other words, the amount of money they are expected to make for the studio.
Let's look at the games industry. To be a successful games developer we think we can probably agree on what is good. But to a manager I should imagine a good games developer is someone who helps ship on time and doesn't come to their door telling them what nobody else dares tell them that the bugs that QA found are deep, hard to fix and morale is low. Again, if we define by earnings tor the individual I'm not even sure where pays well.
If we define developers by money they are expected to make for the studio, I'd imagine EA and King employees must be pretty high up.
As Hollywood was originally mentioned, I did not think it needs clarifying that I am talking about professional careers. Of course somebody could be an amazing actor playing Santa at the mall from the point of view of children sitting on his lap.
> If we define developers by money they are expected to make for the studio, I'd imagine EA and King employees must be pretty high up.
It depends on employees, both EA and King own multiple studios and have thousands of people working on projects, which don't make a dime of profit. However, on a studio scale you will notice that studios making successful games repeatedly do not have many horror stories about them and if you look into credits for those games you will see the same individuals working on such games for many years.
> As Hollywood was originally mentioned, I did not think it needs clarifying that I am talking about professional careers.
The majority of Hollywood actors are good at being Hollywood actors. Much of that seems to be more about maintaining an off-screen presence. For some reason many are celebrated. My point is that they may have fantastic careers and be household names, but that does not seem to correlate to acting ability.
> Of course somebody could be an amazing actor playing Santa at the mall from the point of view of children sitting on his lap.
I was not talking about actors playing Santa at the mall. I was talking about professional actors that are relatively unknown because they act in non-Hollywood productions. Few of these actors would be of interest to Hollywood.
If you look at European actors careers, they make a fraction of the money of their Hollywood counterparts but seem to have a multiple of the ability. I have watched some play different characters, all very different, to the point where you wouldn't recognise them by the character they play. They are believable as that character and bring the character to life. I struggle to say this about even the more respected Hollywood actors, because they are often cast to be very similar to the character they were in something else. There are actors that do buck this trend to avoid becoming typecast.
To me, acting is a skill where you try to bring a character to life. It involves understanding that character, feeling what they feel, portraying that feeling on camera. This is something that is lacking in Hollywood productions.
> It depends on employees, both EA and King own multiple studios and have thousands of people working on projects, which don't make a dime of profit.
Indeed. But this is true of Hollywood. There are films with big name stars in it that have been complete flops. Blade Runner 2049 had Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford in it, both successful actors, but made a loss. Alcon entertainment, the main production company, certainly has overall commercial success.
> However, on a studio scale you will notice that studios making successful games repeatedly do not have many horror stories about them and if you look into credits for those games you will see the same individuals working on such games for many years.
The phenomenon you describe to me would in fact suggest that it is less down to individuals than the studio attracting the right people or at least not rejecting them. Perhaps people who are more passionate about making good games can't suffer being in a team that is churning out bad games. I'm not sure this is simply down to the one-dimensional projection of the people being bad developers. You can be passionate about development and have limited development skill. I'm not sure it's necessarily better to have the technical skills and be dispassionate.
>The majority of Hollywood actors are good at being Hollywood actors.
Sure. And people who come to LA want to become one too. I am sorry if I've made you think I am talking about European actors when I replied to a comment mentioning Hollywood, Los Angeles and people coming there.
>The phenomenon you describe to me would in fact suggest that it is less down to individuals than the studio attracting the right people or at least not rejecting them.
Studios are not intelligent entities, they don't hire people by themselves. Hiring people is a job for individuals and one can suck at it just like at any other job. If you look at the events where a studio had been disbanded/went bankrupt but the significant number of staff banded together and formed a new one or it had been saved by an investor, you will notice that the new studio with the same people performs the same or worse than the original. It's up to you to decide if it's because of skills, passion or anything else. I just pointed out the phenomenon of being unable to make living from selling games one's made and its prevalence.
This. I wanted to do games since I was a kid, so I assumed I would be the best at it just because I loved them so much, until I got the job. Then I realized I sucked at it. I left the field for a few years, relearned everything from scratch, reset my goals and tried again. Now I'm much happier.
> Few who have talent/luck/x-factor get money and fame, the rest wash out.
This is an important point, most of the people who have the talent have spent their lives in their fields of talent and have little idea how to make money off of it and neither have the contacts to such people who can help them do it.
It took me along time to realize this but, Actually, the exact opposite might be true. Look at the consumer reviews of most games: over and over you see "uhhh, great way to kill time... etc". On the weekend, I can see my brother playing yet another iphone game, repeatedly tapping away at the screen mindlessly clicking the same spot over and over. Most consumers simply aren't that selective. They go with whatever game they happen to find within 30 seconds (usually whatever's at the top of the app store listings). And guess what, that's more than good enough. So all those indie devs and video game companies trying to innovate beyond the current state of gaming often just end up wasting their time. The problem isn't that many games aren't good enough, it's just, that there's too many games available. And, for consumers, if the top games are good enough to "kill time", there's no reason to go searching for more.
There is gaming industry beyond mobile phones. But even on mobile phones there are still games making millions per day and games with <1000 downloads. So people making the former kind have very different careers than people producing the latter.
The problem with Hollywood is that a pretty face and sexy body is valued more than good acting. When market value of a good is diminished to a single dimension (which is sexiness in case of Hollywood) it's a sign of market commoditization with price being the single advantage. And a highly commoditized market is a cruel place. Always.
If most Hollywood movies featured mostly ordinary looking actors but with excellent acting, then I would've agreed with you that the acting ability is valued more.
There are a few genius actors that made their way into Hollywood because of acting, not looks. But they are an exception to the rule. The vast majority of movies are mediocre and feature rather attractive actors (actresses in particular) whose acting is very basic and non-remarkable.
The fact is, there are way more attractive people than there are talented actors. So it's easy for Hollywood to make being attractive a prerequisite, and still get good actors
> I realize that some hate unions but some things on this world literally could not happen unless we respect people, their time, and their families.
The cornerstone of the case against unions isn't that we should stop respecting people, it's that unions are often no longer the best way to accomplish that goal.
Not to detract from early labor movements, the fights for basic workplace safety and overtime in the twentieth century and those people standing up to violence and harassment for basic human rights were heroic.
I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time.
Even without Hoffa-style criminality, they can become unintentionally, institutionally abusive. I've worked blue collar jobs in the rural US and had coworkers rant about their family getting eaten alive by the system. They'd explain how the unions would abuse their new probationary employees by making them work triple shifts in order to drive them away from the profession. I've known career extras desperate for a SAG card basically excluded from doing what they love because the slots are capped, and they're aging out of their passion while they wait their turn. Paying your dues can have a few meanings for people in those jobs. That's even setting aside how it creates steep power differentials that become a magnet for predatory gatekeepers like Weinstein.
I don't feel like typical pro or anti union positions do justice to the complexity here.
I think you have to acknowledge that unions have put a spotlight on massive social failings. But I think we also need to recognize their pathologies as well. Generally we need to move those solutions into less partial laws and courts, instead of creating another unchecked center of power over workers.
>The cornerstone of the case against unions isn't that we should stop respecting people, it's that unions are often no longer the best way to accomplish that goal.
>Generally we need to move those solutions into less partial laws and courts, instead of creating another unchecked center of power over workers.
Those most in need of the labor rights and respect unions traditionally afford are often those who have almost no access to the legal system. Fundamental problems like that are very difficult to fix, so in the meantime unions are the best way to accomplish that goal.
> Those most in need of the labor rights and respect unions traditionally afford are often those who have almost no access to the legal system.
This seems like a powerful concern in theory but the facts make me more optimistic. I haven't found, say, OSHA to be toothless in practice, the DOL routinely brings aggressive overtime violations cases, and enforcement of the civil rights act against particularly southern hotels and gas stations by federal courts are all powerful counterexamples.
They are not comprehensively solved problems, but clearly demonstrate that organs of state power can and have been used in defense of marginalized groups. I'd say especially Federal courts, but several agencies have done impressive work too.
"OSHA has fined Tower King II Inc. $12,934 for the death of three workers who were attempting to install a new antenna on a communications tower in Miami. This is the maximum fine for one serious citation. "
"U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges For Deaths in Workplace"
> I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time.
someone standing up for your rights and asking for compensation to do it is a lot more than any kind of ridiculous disruption mode you can imagine.
so much of the next generation is being told coding is the only job skill they'll need, what do you think will happen when they've flooded the market? we live in a plutocracy waging a war on workers rights, we are gonna need unions and we're gonna need them immediately.
In my defense it's a complex topic and I'm trying to credit some good points on both sides.
And ok, I was too flip in my last comment, frustrated that its parent seemed to completely ignore my main point. At their best, maybe some unions do still work that way.
Many don't though. Most blue collar guys I know found the teamsters especially abusive.
Separately, investigations into construction in New York invariably find its unions rife with mafia-ties and racketeering.
But there are some good cases out there too, I'm sure. I just think the best of both worlds is to incorporate fair practices into our legal structures, rather than create new centers of power.
You've nailed it: the criticisms you have are literally all about centers of power. It's said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely: I guess that's confirmed again.
The thing is, in the absence of corrupt union power, you got nothing and there's only corrupt corporate/employer power.
If you can solve for that, it'll be great. And I agree it's tragic and awful when the corrupt corporate power is only balanced by corrupt union power, none of it giving a damn for ordinary people. But that's power for ya.
It's funny that you're worried about criminality on the side of workers, not the owners:
"Eventually, however, it was corruption that led Scrivano to leave the industry, after one of his studio’s investors stole the majority of the company’s funds and disappeared without trace."
Clearly, the person who made off with the money would not benefit from a union.
Any organization that centralizes power will become a target for others (individuals or orgs) to leverage/abuse that power. This is not limited to unions. We have centuries of laws and evolution of governance models to address known threats. The certainty of new threats is insufficient reason to abandon organized cooperation, because we can develop new defenses.
e.g. how about decentralization into smaller, independent, labor organizations focused on local issues, which build on open-source legal artifacts for governance, negotiations, threats and defenses?
Legal structures are meaningless without the political and economic power to enforce them.
But beyond that, it’s about values. You can’t start with a business culture that rewards competitive greed and narcissism over empathy and cooperation and expect it to suddenly start acting against its own core ethics.
Jelly raised this above too. Pasting my reply at the end here.
But I agree with you that values are central. I'd back more investigations to uncover corporations with internal cultures more like Enron and root out bad actors in such places earlier, if we could do that fairly.
> Those most in need of the labor rights and respect unions traditionally afford are often those who have almost no access to the legal system.
This seems like a powerful concern in theory but the facts make me optimistic. I haven't found, say, OSHA to be toothless in practice, the DOL routinely brings aggressive overtime violations cases, and enforcement of the civil rights act against particularly southern hotels and gas stations by federal courts are all powerful counterexamples.
They are not comprehensively solved problems, but clearly demonstrate that organs of state power can and have been used in defense of marginalized groups. I'd say especially Federal courts, but several agencies have done impressive work too.
"The cornerstone of the case against unions isn't that we should stop respecting people, it's that unions are often no longer the best way to accomplish that goal."
But those making that argument never bring up a workable alternative for accomplishing that goal, other than everyone should quit their jobs.
"I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time."
I cannot take this argument seriously when the management side of things is acting in the exact same manner, and no one seems to bat an eye.
> I cannot take this argument seriously when the management side of things is acting in the exact same manner, and no one seems to bat an eye.
Because it isn't the case. Short of actual slavery, management does not hold a monopoly on an individual's employment. If someone's employer is crap, they can move to another job. If they don't like their industry, they can try going into a different one. At least here in the US, labour is in relatively short supply.
Working in Iceland gave me a weird close-up perspective of unions in a somewhat different context. Icelanders and other Europeans are free to choose whether or not to be in a union (at least in my industry, which is very broadly labelled "office workers"). However, non-European foreigners are required to get the "opinion" of a union on the work visa form, and of course the union won't provide an opinion unless you're a member, thus you're forced to join (and stay on good terms with, if you want your work visa re-application approved) a union.
Despite this blatant extortion, I really have nothing else against the union. Their cut is quite small and they provide services and subsidies you can get your money back through (not that I've ever taken advantage of because everything's in Icelandic, but still...)
But on the other hand, I was almost forced to stop working and subsist on the peanuts the union pays because of a strike that had nothing at all to do with my own working conditions or even those of my co-workers or even people in the same industry (one of the side effects of unionizing in such a small population is the union sphere of influence is quite broad).
So from my experience, I think you've hit it on the nose.
Unions can be an important part of the commercial ecosystem but just like any other part, they get toxic if they're too powerful. They need to be well balanced against corporate interests to create a healthy and productive work environment.
AFAIK in the movie industry few publishers and or studios actually have any production staff on hand. Instead what happens is a core team write and pitch a movie idea. Only after they've gotten funding and done preproduction then they hire contractors short term (1-3 months) to make the movie.
In games most studios hire all the staff. They then have the issue that between projects 90-95% of the staff have nothing to do. There's no income and the company is burning money.
Unions may or may not help those movie contractors get a good price for their services but they don't guarantee jobs any more than the game industry AFAIK.
Should video games be run more like the movie industry?
As for your idea of "getting burned" because a company wants to make a different game, I have a game designer friend who used to think that way. He seemed to forget he was being paid $80k a year for his game ideas regardless of if they got used or not. If he wanted to profit from his own ideas he needed top stop selling them for salary to his employer.
It’s not run like the movie industry yet. But, gamedev managers have been trying to push it that way for well over a decade for exactly the reason you mentioned: It’s really hard to keep a large team busy enough to pay their own salaries all the time. Many people’s jobs are focused on early or late in the process (ex: concept art vs testers). Pipelining multiple games is the obvious solution, but keeping everything lined up is much, much easier said than done in such a chaotic industry.
However, the conversion to Hollywood-style waves of contractors hasn’t happened in games largely because the workers aren’t as interchangeable as they are in movies. Game pipelines have been very custom and quirky. It takes a long time to ramp up and get effective at a particular studio. That makes hiring and releasing a whole team for a single project very inefficient.
Or, at least it has been that way. All this is a big reason why Unity and Unreal Engine have become so popular. By becoming standardized pipelines, they “make hiring much easier” because new hires can show up already familiar with the engine. Give it another decade and the Hollywoodization of gamedev may yet happen.
Also companies have seen what has happened to contract VFX houses who have experienced an enormous race to the bottom and where the situation is even more exploitative than games. Which is not to say this won’t happen in games but that if it does it will more closely resemble that situation than more traditional movie roles protected by strong unions.
The situation now is more like the old studio system - they broke down in the 60s or so, partly because of government anti-trust action (studios also owning theaters, etc.) and partly because of increasing unionization (that model makes it quite hard to switch jobs for better pay, especially when there are very few players).
I don't think the video game studio system is under that kind of pressure, but it also allows independent studios to function.
(I find the modern movie and TV industry similar to the tech world, where each movie is a startup. That's even how a lot of the business are structured - directors and writers put together a pitch, sell investors or production companies on it, and then form a company to produce the film.)
> He seemed to forget he was being paid $80k a year for his game ideas regardless of if they got used or not.
Money is one reason people do things, but rarely the only one. Especially smart, creative people. The notion that people lose the right to complain as long as the paychecks keep coming is poisonous.
I'm not saying you shouldn't complain but on the other hand to me it's like a director complaining someone didn't watch her movie under perfect conditions or a book author complaining someone read the last chapter first.
the game designer sold his idea to his company and then complained the customer didn't use the product the way the designer wanted. it might be frustrating but it's not the designer's choice. the designers choice was arguably not to sell the idea in the first place. once sold it's no longer theirs to control
in general that designer's attitude was forgetting that they had actually gotten paid for their ideas. they took their salary for granted and forgot they had a business arrangement of getting paid for their ideas.
A major difference being that a book reader doesn't say they're doing anything in particular with the book. People hiring creatives, though, very rarely say, "Well, we'll give you your money, but there's a 70% chance we'll fuck you over." Important other differences include exclusivity (readers aren't), amount of time wasted (after the book is published, each additional reader consumes approximately zero author time), type of relationship (readers are consumers; creative employers are collaborators), and expectations of control (which are common for creative workers).
A closer analogy is a film director being upset that the studio didn't live up to the expectations created during the deal negotiation process. That happens all the time with films, and approximately nobody tells directors, "You got paid; STFU."
>got grants and investment from the government i.e. HellBlade
Googling that it seems to be a little more interesting:
>Biomedical research charity Wellcome Trust gave Ninja Theory a $395,000 grant to do research on mental illness, and that helped Ninja Theory make such an ambitious and research-based game on its own as an independent studio.
Wellcome Trust isn't a government organisation - it was set up by Sir Henry Wellcome who made a fortune in phrama.
Also Ninja Theory's history is pretty messy with bankruptcies, layoffs and deals gone wrong.
Yes. Are you not aware now that kids are more likely to play video games than watch television yet we pay into PBS. Are you not aware that much of what we enjoy and work for in life was because of the awareness brought by an artists passion. Arts are just as important to fund as research. Otherwise life is not worth living.
The military has been involved in back-channel funding of video game development for 10-15 years now. Every triple-a shooter title out there has a team of active duty military members in the credits. They make for excellent recruitment tools.
For better or worse, entertainment shapes public policy. So it's no surprise that the government gets involved.
> I think the video game industry is literally run like the movie industry except there is no union to help the people who make the actual magic happen unlike say the entertainment industry.
I know people in both industries and guess what. You are so utterly correct.
I work in the game development all my life, and I will fight against unionizing with all that I have.
Unions, above all, help those on the lower part of the bell curve. They commoditize labor, introduce standard metrics, push towards mediocrity and destroy competition between individual contributors. I am now on a third week of crunch, without weekends, all to make it to the Steam sale; something that a union would fight against. But it's a crunch I'm highly motivated for, and one I will personally benefit from; a union would limit my ability to push forward and advance my career.
I can also negotiate quite well on my own behalf with employees. If I was in a union, I would, through involvement in collective negotiation, effectively share my strong negotiation position with other developers in the industry, bringing them forward and print me back. Why the hell would I do that?
" I am now on a third week of crunch, without weekends, all to make it to the Steam sale; something that a union would fight against."
No, a union would just make sure you're actually paid for it, instead of being coerced into giving away your life for absolutely nothing.
"I can also negotiate quite well on my own behalf with employees. If I was in a union, I would, through involvement in collective negotiation, effectively share my strong negotiation position with other developers in the industry, bringing them forward and print me back. Why the hell would I do that?"
I was in the game industry for twelve years and the GP's comments illustrate why it would be so difficult for unions to form, especially if it included software developers - so many think they are the ne plus ultra of developer but somehow they are not John Carmack famous or giving away the source code to previous game engines for people to learn from because they write something revolutionary every few years ala Carmack.
"The Games Industry" is a shit hole of illegal corporate exploitation. I am one of those rare "long term game developers" - but not, because I left after 15 years of trying to develop some/any collaboration against the exploitation. I was one of the OS developers for the 3DO and the first PlayStation, a lead tech at both E.A. and Sony, lead engineer of games I know you played, and I can state first hand the illegal employment behavior is rampant to the degree those in the industry are 100% blind to actual ethical working conditions.
Life is too short to spend time in an industry of assholes. I love my friends, but collectively the games industry is a hate machine, exploiting the enthusiasm of impressionable youth to create mindless crap - just like the Abe's Oddysee world of corporate slave drivers.
In the past, I've read so many horror stories of working at EA, that I always steered away from the gaming industry for nearly a decade.
Then one day, a recruiter contacted me and told me all about a notable exception: Kabam. I ended up working at Kabam for 5 years and I have to say it was one of the best places I have ever worked, with decent pay and good work life balance, with lots of perks. I realize this is a rare exception, in the games industry.
My first job was bagging groceries in Safeway, and I remember vividly watching the minute hand on a big clock slowly tick around to the end of my shift. I was thinking, when I graduate university I don't want a job where I am always so bored I'm just wishing my life away so I can go home. I can honestly say after 25 years working on video games I have never once been bored. There is a vibrant industry out there which has never had so many different platforms and delivery mechanisms. In the next 10 years we will only see more. My advice for those that want to make games is try it out; don't be shy to move around different companies and work on different types of technology until you find something you enjoy and team you like to work with. Do the same every few years and you'll have a long career ahead of you. And most importantly, do not crunch. A few extra hours of work here and there is fine, but any extended death march is bad for your health, bad for the product and ultimately bad for the company.
When you're paycheck to paycheck(which I was in gamedev, yay high col) "not crunching" isn't really a choice when you risk getting labeled "not a team player" and slow-rolled towards the door.
This is partly because most gamedevs lack confidence. There's nothing stopping you from walking out from abuse -- the door is right there.
It's harder to admit to yourself when your job is abusive. Harder still: admitting you don't really like your job, and you're ok with finding a new one.
Finding a new job can be difficult for gamedevs, but transitioning out of gamedev is surprisingly easy. At the end of the day, it's our collective willingness to put up with abuse that allows crunch to happen.
Of course, if the alternative to that abuse is literally living on the streets it's not really a choice anymore (except in the most inane sense). It then becomes "if you want to live, you will let daddy corporate tell you whatever he wants" - coincidentally, this is precisely what we're seeing.
A long career is certainly possible, however, you will earn far less over that career, and see more stress than doing something less exciting. I still miss working on games, playing my own creation with music, graphics, game logic all coming together is the most rewarding thing I've done. Meanwhile, writing code which is judged by output in a console is much more boring, but much more rewarding in other ways. It certainly doesn't make you look at the clock, though, as there are interesting problems to solve everywhere.
Oh, I certainly agree that if ones goal is to avoid boredom and maximize money then games may not be the way to go. However, there is certainly a decent living to be made. My main point however is that if you want to make games, it certainly is possible to do so if you are patient and focused and avoid those who would have you crunch incessantly.
I believe that part of the problem is the attitude of major publishers towards game development. There is absolutely no consideration for the artistic value of their works - they will manipulate the end product, and the developers, in any way to maximize short-term profit at the cost of everything else.
Take as an example - the current loot box (gambling) controversy. Publishers have pushed this mechanic to an extreme. They are only relenting now (somewhat) due to the scrutiny of various governments. That's how far they'll go to earn an extra buck, even if it compromises the rest of the work.
Of the point of the article: publishers will continue to hire almost exclusively temp workers, since it is more profitable in the short term. They will do this until they cannot; they know that day will come eventually, but not in the short term, so they are unconcerned with the problem, and will continue milking their various resources for every last dollar.
Sony, Paramount, Disney, etc. all respect the motion picture as an art form, despite being for-profit, since they know that defiling their products will end poorly in the long term. EA, Activision, Bethesda, and the like have no such respect for the art of video games.
Perhaps it is because the medium is in such an early stage of its life.
Almost every worker/contributor in the movie/TV industry in North America is represented by a union/guild or is trying to get into one, there are non union projects/studios but those are in the minority.
"attitude of major publishers towards game development"
So very, very true. I just gave notice at my video game developer, and it made me sad to do so. The company is great, it really is! Fantastic people, etc.
But the publisher (in Southern CA naturally) is destroying it by pushing, and pushing, and pushing, and completely disregarding any semblance of proper planning. And no, they don't give two shits about the game itself - just selling more lootboxes.
I remember saying "I have a hard stop at 5:30 because my kid's day care closes at 6:00" and they thought it was just HILARIOUS to laugh about "can't their mom do that? LOL HAHAHA?"
>There is absolutely no consideration for the artistic value of their works.
Artistic value derives from uniqueness. The commoditization of the game industry may be a sign that not much distinctive artistic value is created nowadays, that games increasingly look like each other.
No, it doesn't. Art is 95% craft, 5% inspiration. If an artist doesn't put in his 10,000 hours learning his craft, then being unique won't save him from being mediocre.
Artistic endeavors are much like PhDs in that you're making a small dent on the edge of pop culture. Without the long hours learning craft you'll never reach the edge. Everything unique you do will be stolen by people who know the craft better and they're the ones that will get famous from it.
I grew up in a time when no one thought there was a chance to have a job making video games. I remember before I finished college, someone from EA called me about a shareware game I made (distributed on a floppy! imagine). In those days EA was a small company. The guy was trying to see if I wanted a job and I didn't even think to ask. Later, in grad school, another small company, Activision put a poster advertising jobs. I'm glad I replied.
What I have learned after twenty plus years in games is that you can make enough money to retire, but nothing guarantees a chance to keep working. At the top level the pressure is intense and new talent is always cycling in. No one writes an article about how uncertain a career is in film, or music, or theater, because everyone knows it is nothing you bet on. I was super lucky to be in the write place at the right time, like someone who got a job at a record label in the 70's or a movie studio in the 80's. I got to do something exciting that I didn't know could be a career. There is probably something else I have never heard of happening right now which is what a young person ought to be doing.
Great comment, as a slight tangent this line stood out to me:
> There is probably something else I have never heard of happening right now which is what a young person ought to be doing.
The way you point out these special opportunities that existed every decade is very interesting. The common theme is an exciting new industry with a talent shortage. I guess mine was getting into programming at the dawn of the Internet.
But I have a lot of friends in their 20s, and no one seems to have found that thing--it might not exist for this generation which would be very concerning.
(The obvious answer would be that it's blockchain but I don't agree with that answer...)
Social media, YouTube, Twitch influencer? I was one of those kids born in the mid 80s that grew up wanting to be a video game developer, while spending time online during the early stages of the internet. The idea of being an online influencer wasn't a thing that existed back then.
Now, I hear that a lot of kids want to be YouTube stars when they get older, and there's obviously an endless stream of people trying to be Instagram celebrities.
So, that's a ship that came after video games for the next generation, and it has likely already sailed for most since the market is flooded.
---
Another one is mobile app development. 15-20 years ago I played around with a Palm Pilot, but no one considered app development as a career at that time. Now look at that industry. That was a big opportunity for people growing up in the early 90s to get in while it was taking off.
"Another one is mobile app development. 15-20 years ago I played around with a Palm Pilot, but no one considered app development as a career at that time. Now look at that industry."
Consumer expectations of software prices driven to zero by app stores, hard to make a living without being sleazy...
You wouldn't say it's machine learning? Despite the daily "sky is falling, AI is dead" posts on HN, we've very suddenly (over a few years, faster than the home computer revolution by far!) gained the ability to spoon some of this deep learning 'secret sauce' on top of just about any problem of the form "map X to Y" with a fair chance of it 'just working', and it's accessible enough that individuals can get results that would have been impossible for a high end research lab ten years ago.
Just because strong AI hasn't sprung fully formed from a CNN yet, it doesn't mean there isn't a huge range of newly-tractable problems just waiting for someone to solve them.
Sadly, most of the video game industry is a crappy place to work. I speak from experience here, having been the lead game engine developer in a studio owned by one of the largest publishers. I don't want to out them, so I'm being vague on purpose.
There is little work life balance. No matter what happens, no matter how many people you destroy, you will do whatever it takes to ship in time for the Christmas season. If you miss Christmas, your ROI plummets. Huge franchise games are an exception, but those of us not writing FIFA Soccer, Madden NFL, or HALO really care about Christmas. Why do people accept this kind of employer abuse? It's because there is this attitude of having your name in the credits of a game being some huge honor, for which you will sacrifice life, pay, and health. People who work on games are passionate about gaming, they love to play them, work on them, and the rewarding feeling of shipping your game is intoxicating. When you sacrifice everything to make Christmas, you sacrifice code quality, maintainability, even reproducibility, leading to a very slow start on your next iteration, and the cycle of crunch/crash repeats itself.
If you are into games, you put up with this for a while, but over time, you see your friends and colleagues get jobs in other industries, and they make more and are happier working on non-game stuff you consider boring. You celebrate with them as they buy their first home, or a nice car, and start to think that maybe the fun work (when it is fun), isn't worth being paid a lot less. It's not like game companies give stock options, and whatever profits are made don't trickle down.
Eventually, you get older, you start a family, and you want to spend time with them, and a game company isn't going to be friendly to that. The benefits aren't as good, the crunches are still there, the pay isn't great, so you decide to move on.
You hire some young developer, who is gushing with excitement about working on games, as you were once upon a time, and you do your best to train them without letting your disappointment in the industry show, and you move one, the cycle repeats.
I honestly have no idea why it is this way. Naturally, not all studios are like this, and there are exceptions, but the majority of the less successful studios are stuck in this seemingly unbreakable cycle.
I have since worked in many software companies, some of the making exciting things, others doing dull enterprise things, and I've been a far happier person in all of them. The passion for games is still there, ever since I bought my Atari 2600 with paper route money, but as an engineer, I'm done, never again.
An endless supply of passionate, naive, and young talent. I guess at least 50% of my graduating CS class at one point or another wished to create a game. Far fewer wished to create a database engine, an operating system, or a B2B web service.
When you have that many people who want to make a particular type of software, getting a chance to do so acts as something economists call a compensating differential. Working on games is actually part of a game developer's compensation, and thus the companies can afford to pay them less in other ways.
The supply is not endless for good software engineers, I had a very difficult time hiring junior folks, since the Facebooks, Googles, and Apples of the world pay so well, and yet, some people are delusional enough to accept.
Artists are easier to hire, and I think that your explanation holds nicely.
The easiest to hire are playtesters, who think playing games for a living is awesome, until they realize that making Kirby jump over that cloud 800 times to reproduce bug is hell. Playtesters have the biggest swing from excitement to disillusionment.
One thing I observed (and in some real life non-gaming projects) is that crunch in the end is treated as inevitable and something that just happen. Not like a failure of planning, organization, estimation that should/could be fixed or at least improved. It seems to me that the slow start is predictable. That technical dept is predictable too. That one issue is with planning that ignores these repeated problems and does not even try to fix them.
The other thing I observed IRL is that oftentimes the crunch is only go to solution for scheduling problems. It makes people feel like heroes and looks good in front of management. However, things like requirement management (saying no to features or simplifying them), effective organization (lets get rid of wasted time) etc are less likely to be used.
Crunch over 6 weeks is ineffective as everyone gets tired, but it is talked about as a go to solution to schedule problem. At some point it is more effective to take rest and think things over, but that is somehow taboo (or at least makes you seem lazy and target of resentment of those who don't rest) in crunching environment.
The problem here is that there is no incentive for the companies to do things reasonably, because as many people is saying in these comments, there is a virtually unlimited supply of young, exploitable workers.
For any midsized or large company, the system is working as intended (small companies often have legitimate problems, though). For the workers, not so much; but again, the companies don't give a shit.
There are a lot of bullshit excuses for not having unions (half of them come from propaganda from the managerial class and pro-corporation ideologues, the other half from people parroting said propaganda), but I'm yet to see a single one that outweighs the benefits of having an union and having workers actually stand for their rights and for the respect they deserve.
Is it working well? Even OP used the "but the majority of the less successful studios are stuck in this seemingly unbreakable cycle" expression. While I guess that similar dynamic can be found in successful studios, the focus here were less successful studios.
While the supply of exploitable young people is large, they leave industry after 5 years on average. I am willing to bet that they get more productive after few initial years of experience - but they leave pretty much as the benefits of it should kick in.
Then there is self-selection. Passionate dreamers are heavily over-represented in your pool. People who investigate before they do major decisions and people who based their decisions on more practical considerations underrepresented. To large extend, games are art and as such require that emotional side in their creators. However, work might be more effective when there is presence of the other type of personality - the people who will tell you openly that "feature is cool, but we should postpone it to dlc anyway".
As a counter point - I work in a studio owned by one of the largest publishers in the world(I'm a C++ programmer), working exclusively on the biggest AAA titles known to everyone, and it's the opposite of what you described. The work-life balance is great, most of the days I come in at 8 and leave at 4, "crunch" as such only exists maybe for a week before larger releases, but for me that means a week of 9-hour days, it isn't too bad. I'm actually getting above the EU-mandated paid time off(28 paid days off a year) + obviously unlimited paid sick leave, year of maternity/patterning leave if I need it, gym membership, discounted bike scheme/free metro tickets...
Sure, the money is slightly better in other companies but it's not too bad here - I've only been in the industry 4 years but I'm about to put a deposit down for a house later this year and buy something with my partner.
And au contraire to the article - we have 1 person with 25 years at this company, a few with 20 years, several with 15 years and loads with 10 years at the same company. People generally stay longer here. So yes, I guess like you said - not every studio is like this.
I got into programming as a boy in the 80s because I wanted to edit snake, went to college for programming and every project I begged teachers to let me warp the requirements into something video game related.
But by the time graduation was coming, even 20+ years ago, it was obvious that the video game industry was a terrible place to work. Low pay, bad hours, no security, bad publisher arrangements.
So, for a long time I never understood why so many engineers go through that. In my arrogance I would think "... surely _engineers_ immediately see the abuse and turn away." I guess that calling is just stronger for some than it was for me.
I got into computers because I wanted to dev games. I got the homebrew gameboy & psx dev kits and wrote code for those platform. Then some of my friends got into the industry and seeing what they went through in one year killed that idea for me. I told myself I would do it as a side hobby and that might have been the best career move I ever made! I never thought I would do enterprise, but I now love enterprise. :D
The article dabbles, but ultimately misses an opportunity to present the piece I want to read: that the ideal shape of a game development team is not unlike an early stage software startup. Remain small, take your time, stay healthy, and put some love into it. Recent years have birthed some real gems from teams of one, three, or single digits. In this category I'd vouch for Hollow Knight, Celeste, Ghost of a Tale, and Crawl. Whether these games make enough money to warrant the investment of their creators versus being at a large company is a worthy debate, but to me it's apparent that we're in a golden age of games made by small groups of visionary creators.
Put another way, there's an exodus from unwieldy large teams that lack responsibility and a sense of craft and ownership.
There's also the problem of 'backlog fatigue'. There's only so much time in life for playing any game, which makes you purchase them much more carefully and for different reasons than you did even five years ago. For me it's much more in the spirit of thanks and support than as a transaction.
>Put another way, there's an exodus from unwieldy large teams that lack responsibility and a sense of craft and ownership.
Is there data for this? EA, Activision, Blizzard, Ubisoft etc seem to be doing fine with massive teams.
The game industry seems to be moving with the rest of the entertainment industry. As technology progresses, the barrier to entry lowers and its easier for small teams to make things.
Sure there are some great independent films but we continue to see Disney behemoth blockbusters breaking records every year or so. I assume there will continue to be room for all types.
Not all projects at EA, Activision, and so on, succeed. The success of these companies are dominated by a few successes, which also tend to be milking existing IPs without much innovation. Even so, the average developer at these companies is still stressed out, because of the Zipf's law nature of project success. That is, it's very likely the project they're working on is not doing so well and will not succeed, and thus, they're overworked, etc.
I'd say there's an exodus much like the web tech industry, a shift from behemoths like Microsoft and IBM to smaller startups like Uber, etc.
For me, the ideal shape of a game development team is to just make games for yourselves. If you find that people love your games, too, then great! If not, then that's great too. Once you start chasing and building on success, the work stops being about scratching your own itch, and moves away from building stuff for yourselves.
Gamasutra could write an article about the ideal shape of a game development team so that all those people out in the industry could learn what they are doing wrong. It sounds like the bdefore is the person who should write that article.
Game developers: very sexy, easy to show off, has a (very) large supply of talent. Pay not bad, not good, work schedule very demanding.
COBOL developer: extremely unsexy, almost don't want to admit it publicly. Tiny supply, relatively much larger demand. Pay very good. Work schedule very predictable, not demanding. Almost a vacation.
I don’t think it’s really about the availability of talent but rather about the business end.
Video games are projects and comparable to movies. You need different talent to perform different tasks at different times. Once that talent delivers, you probably won’t need them again.
Unless you’re an established studio, that’s capable of rotating staff from project to project, then there is really no feasible way of keeping staff around that is no longer necessary.
COBOL programmers on the other hand aren’t workin projects where they become unnecessary, because the systems they work on are forever.
Basically you can say, that nobody is working on Rail Toad Tycoon today, but there are COBOL programmers who are still maintaining main frame software that was build before Rail Road Tycoon even released.
I’m not sure how you’d run video gaming differently though.
It's easy to slide into a maintenance role. I wouldn't say the pay is especially better. There aren't "maintenance engineers" making substantially more than "development engineers".
Extraordinarily long hours, toxic open office work environments (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6vCBQKN0F8), poor management guided by auteurs with nothing to back up their plight and a culture of being outed when you're too old, or overpaid, is why I'm no longer there.
I think the best answer to this is the fact you can very easily still create outside of these environments on your own. The trouble is finding the other like-minded folks who still want to work in the industry but are outside of it.
Created this account to echo your comment; I strongly encourage everyone who is curious about entering the industry (especially youth/students) to view this brief and cogent video.
Seeing it brought back many fond memories of auld.
> Only seventeen percent of the 30,000 attendees to this year’s Game Developers Conference worked in the industry for seven to ten years, and just thirteen percent for between eleven and fifteen years.
So 30% of attendees have 7+ years experience? Strange way to slice statistics.
It's been the same story for the last 20 years (or longer but that's when I started). There's an infinite supply of young naive people who will work for poor pay and under terrible conditions because "games". There's nothing you can do to help. Young people are physically incapable of learning from someone else's experience. Companies are happy with that situation because they don't mind not having experienced devs. Those demand higher salaries or sane working hours - can't allow those. I mean what's next? Pension funds?!
Several people in these comments are comparing the video game industry to the movie industry. I think the key difference is that the movie industry tends to value experience with everyone but the actors, with the exception of big name stars. I know lots of people in the movie industry, from set builders to producers, and they’ve all been working in the industry for years except for the actors and actresses. The video game industry doesn’t seem to value experience with the exception of a few big names and some developers with rare talents. Not a single one of the game devs I worked with 15 years ago are still in the game industry.
The talent pool for game designers and developers is very broad and, sorry to say, very shallow in places. It's like the talent pool for screen actors.
There are ten thousand hopefuls for one hundred decent jobs. Many of them are motivated by good things: respect for the games they've played, a hope for success, and the motive of the Blues Brothers ("We're on a mission from God!")
This means the executives in the game business can get away with exploiting people, in the ways this article describes.
I know a young female aspiring game designer who's been laid off a few times, dissed,, blamed for silly stuff, and generally mistreated. One exec even tried (without success) the casting-couch schtick on her.
Her diligent work to learn her craft (rigorous BFA, internships, lots of practice) hasn't helped as much as it would have were she an aspiring software engineer, accountant, plumber, or truck driver. It's a problem with the blockbuster approach to game sales.
Many people are trying to solve this problem. Unity and Unreal lower the barrier for indie game developers. Humble Bundle did a good job getting exposure for indies, and still do even after the Steam buyout. The free-to-play model (with small ongoing transactions) has potential to stabilize game-publisher finances.
But the big win will come when games of various sizes can all succeed. Standing in the way of that is the superstar / blockbuster business model.
In the meantime, I hope my young friend gets an executive position.
I don't think this is new. 20 years ago, I loved game programming.. I even chose a game dev library in C++ as my senior (college) project. But my obsession also led me to read all I could about the industry, and the stories were the same. I got nervous about the 14-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week eternal crunch time, the pay, the job security, the lack of prospects without moving around. I chickened out.
I still like my job, but it's nothing like the passion I felt when I built games. Still, I don't think that passion is enough to justify the strain it would put on my family through financial risk, not to mention my work/life balance (or in this case, work/slightly less work balance).
Since it was the same then as now, I suspect it may continue to be. After all, it's a job with inherent joy for people who want it, and those tend to have the luxury of materially rewarding workers less. Much as bars can basically pay bands little to nothing in order to have live music, because there's no shortage of people wanting it just for the inherent joy, I imagine game companies will continue to have a pool of creative technicians willing to work for less. Maybe the higher barrier of entry to learn tech work will change something one day, but it doesn't appear to have done so, so far.
Even if you got experience, you will never get leverage in thise industry. The reason is the mythos of the gamedeveloper, drawing in new people (mostly young "I-want-to-make-a-game" idealists) with Stars in theire eyes.
Its the same-thing, that allows Hollywood to abuse young actresses- who will not resist, because there "are millions more where you came from". Supply and demand.
Idealists make for excellent rocket fuel, and if they are burned out, you dump the husk and make another run for it with new material.
You cant unionize this, because this cycle is the default operation mode and students joining up dont have unions or reasons to join one.
You cant either unionize the actors or fashion-model industry. What can be done - is destroying the glamorous image in the head of the youth.
Which has partially happened allready, and is why everybody wants to go indy.
When he was ten years old he would write letters to his favorite game developers and publishers describing his love for their games and seeking advice on how to become a game maker.
Yea I did that too.
I fondly remember one such response from Seth Robinson, the creator of the Dink Smallwood PC RPG. I was asking him how to get into making RPGs and if I could help him on some project in the future maybe. I believe I was 14 at the time and had done some mods to MCM, Carmageddon and was working on a space shooter with the 3DRAD and the just unveiled Unreal engine.
His curt response was that he wouldn't start talking with me for less than $100,000.
Always a great way to interact with kids who are trying to get into your industry.
The truth is that in "gig" based economies guilds and unions are essential(portability of seniority, benefits, etc). If done right it benefits both the employer and the low and high end of workers.
Also, the truth is that in tech this hasn't caught on because, we just like to think we are special.
Building games and being over worked can’t possibly be worse than a soul sucking 40 hours as an equally underpaid enterprise dev. I’d rather be over worked but making something interesting rather than sitting in meetings all day barely writing any code and going home with no mental energy left and nothing to show for it.
In my experience, enterprise devs are not really underpaid (this could vary a lot depending on your geographical area, of course). I also don't find corporate jobs to be exhausting at all, but YMMV and it probably varies from person to person. I don't care sitting in meeting if I know that they will end in time; I'd rather be coding but I'm getting paid anyway.
Some years ago I had a hip, theoretically non-soul sucking, job (not video games, but still, a hip software company from my country). The hours were horrible and the pay wasn't that awesome. I now have a 8-to-4 corporate job and I love it. There is little stress; the technical side is a little outdated but still acceptable, and comfortable to work with; the pay is nice; the hours are sane; the managers are reasonable and planning works; and so on. Sleeping as much as I want every day, and not being overworked or stressed over my job, are awesome, underrated things.
The projects might not be super-awesome, but I learned a lot of time ago that if you want something fun to work on, your best bet is to look for it outside your job. That way, you stay in control: you work at your pace, you decide when to start or stop a new project, and in the case of software, you can spend time gold-plating projects to your liking.
Why do you think game development is interesting? It is when you're in a 3 person team where you do everything, but in the AAA teams you may be assigned arrow behaviour as your sole mind numbing task... 60-80 hours per week... :)
And don't think you're going to write engine code, no one writes engines if they can avoid it.
"Building games and being over worked can’t possibly be worse than a soul sucking 40 hours as an equally underpaid enterprise dev."
Yes, it is. Mainly because, as an enterprise dev, you get to go home at the end of the day and see your family. You get to go home and work on something you care about. You get to go home and have hobbies and do other fun things in your off time.
Of course it can. For starters, during so-called "crunch time", 40 hours isn't that much. Social pressure to take overtime is so high it actually takes some courage to take a strong anti-crunch stance in this industry.
I’ve been a game developer for decades. Companies that are categorically in the game industry tend to be full of shitheads and oversized egos. I have mostly solved the problem by working in game organizations within BigCos.
But isn't this the exact rule that Bill Gates violated when he moved to build a software business at a time when software development (for personal computers) was mainly a hobby?
I read the whole article and I didn’t get a sense of exodus at all — its just a steady and high rate of churn in an industry with surplus new talent willing to burn it all in order to ship on time.
I think the comparison with actors is a valid one and we can draw parallels with the YouTube “creator movement” basically actors/performers who are too smart to fight the herd and went out on their own.
If you’re being asked to work more than 50-60 hour weeks consistently and not paid for it you must do what you can to change jobs/industry/city/country.
“The day that I joined I had to sign a contract that basically said anything I created during or outside of company time is owned by ZeniMax. Even on my own hardware, or at a game jam.” Kelly wavered for a few moments – signing the contract would limit any chance to work on side projects -- then decided to sign regardless. “To be clear, many people worked on personal projects and for the most part ZeniMax didn’t care,” he says. “I think it was more on principle [that] I had a problem.”
No, this is a legitimate concern. Clauses like this should be illegal. What you do in your spare time is yours. What the hell, what are you, a slave? These clauses are there to disincentivize you doing things beside your work, so that your employer can take up even more room in your life. I would never sign such a contract.
I see these games coming out of other countries that are amazing and these studios seemed to have got grants and investment from the government i.e. HellBlade, , . Do we not do that here stateside? It's also unfortunate some of the most talented dev's I've met even quit CS field entirely after doing game development. Do video game creators get the same mental health services those in the entertainment unions get?