McTeddy said,

I have a buddy who was part of that whole thing. What I find really amusing is that his outlook on the situation is much brighter. His stories are full ways that the company tried to compensate the employees for overtime and improve the process. Not to say it wasn’t bad… just his exact words are “People are overdramatic”.

That said, the place we worked before had all the poor management issues without any attempts to make us feel human. I remember the owner coming in one day to tell us that we needed to “Give more for the game” after /i’d had five days without sleep.

But ,tbh, I don’t see these as an issue with AAA Development as much a problem with the the management itself. My company was set in its ways and ran our large team like a small one. This doesn’t work.

The problem right now is just that companies need to learn HOW to run large scale projects rather than keep doing the same thing because thats how they’ve always done it.

Rampant Coyote said,

I think both of you speak to a similar problem – scaling. You can’t just go from being an indie / modding studio to a AAA studio based on nothing but heroic capabilities of your principles. Sure, that can work for a little while in a 4-person or 6-person team, but when you scale it up to modern AAA levels, it’s a whole ‘nother story. And getting those processes in place for larger-scale development is something that plagues the entire software industry, not just games. But I think games have it worse, for a number of reasons.

Rampant Coyote said,

I haven’t seen that quote, but I suspect I’d wholeheartedly agree.

As you add more people, you add more “overhead.” This is automatic. If I’m working by myself, making all the decisions, I can (theoretically) be 100% productive. If I add a partner, some percentage of our time will be spent communicating and cooperating with each other. Let’s say that’s 10%. So now I’m 90% productive. Times two of us, that’s 180% as productive as one of us.

Now I add a third partner. Under an otherwise ‘flat’ hierarchy, each of us spends 10% of our time talking to each of our two partners, so now we’re all 80% productive. So now three of us are 240% as productive as one of us. Not as big a gain.

At 4 people, now, we’re only 280% as productive (4 x 70%), at 5 people we hit a maximum of 300% (5 x 60%) effectiveness. Adding a sixth does nothing (6 x 50%), and at seven people we go backwards in productivity back to 280%.

Naturally, somewhere in there – probably starting at around 3 or 4 people – we need to change how things are done, introduce processes to reduce that overhead (For example, meetings that allow us to reduce communications redundancy). Processes and hierarchy can allow for greater team growth, but I don’t think it can go on indefinitely.

Then there’s another problem related specifically to games: Ownership. With a 3- or 4-person team, its easy for each contributor to feel a strong sense of ownership in the final product. This is how great games – which are as much art as science – are made. But when the team sizes grows to dozens, or over a hundred, it’s easy to feel like nothing more than a cog in the wheel, and to lose sight of the game as a whole. With great, passionate leaders who *can* concentrate on the game as a whole, this might not be a disaster, but it does lose some of the advantages that you’d otherwise expect from having so many eyes and hearts involved in the project.

Rampant Coyote said,

It’s pretty high there, but I’ve no idea how it compares to Europe. The cost of living – and doing business – is pretty high there. California (one of the MOST highly taxed and regulated states in the U.S.) has been bleeding a lot of businesses and jobs out here to Utah, which has kept this state from suffering quite as badly during this… uh, what do the call it now, “The Great Recession?”

Maklak said,

What does “AAA” stand for? I was wondering about it for a while.

LateWhiteRabbit said,

@McTeddy
I totally agree about the lack of Work/Life balance being a major reason for a lot of the industry’s problems. This leaves you with a perpetually young and relatively inexperienced work team, or at least social misfits. Right now, game developers can work like slaves with no life right out of college, but within 4-5 years (the average burnout rate in the industry) they have wives and families and have been treated badly enough they abandon the AAA development studios. It is screwed up the industry even HAS an average burnout rate.

I’ve only worked at one studio, and it was a film studio, but we were doing digital special effects for shots and had milestones, etc. so it was pretty similiar to a game development house. We had the same problems with scaling and work/life balance and poor management.

I distinctly remember working on a major milestone shot to be delivered soon, and having spent literally 38 hours out of the last 48 hours working on the shot (along with several other artists), taking all my meals at my desk, and SLEEPING at my desk to avoid wasting time commuting, and being told by the team leader we needed to buckle down and show some more dedication if we were going to get the shot completed on time. Apparently the managerial style of a lot of these studios is to recite platitudes from leadership handbooks, reality be damned.

“Gee, I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have slept those 4.5 hours each night in my desk chair after working for 19 hours straight, even though my job requires precise hand-eye coordination. I’ll stay up 48 hours straight next time and be a team player.”

And of course, the studio I worked for no longer exists. So not only do game developers have to put up with horrible life/work conditions, they have to consider the very real possibility that an unnerving amount of studios don’t last past one project these days and they may not have a job when it’s all over and done with, no matter how much they slaved.

Bad Sector said,

That was an interesting read (and this Polygon site seems to have nice articles in general). I’m not sure that this is the state with AAA games in general though, i think it is more of a case where all we hear is the bad cases because, really, why would a studio or developer come out and say “hey, we’re awesome, we’re actually treating developers like normal people”?

Even if that was the case though, the defeating behaviour that the guy with the ending quote has doesn’t help the issue really. “This is how video game development is”? Well, it wont take a magic fairy to fix it, people who are harmed and experience these bad issues are those who should fix it.

Xenovore said,

My experience with professional game development is similar: working for months, often with 70+ hour work-weeks, only to have the projects cancelled because of some publisher whim. And then you get laid off.

So, as much as we might still want to work in the game industry, stability and, well, having a life become more important. So we go do something else, something completely not game development. Because there’s a pretty good chance that the next game company we go to work for will be another great opportunity to be mismanaged, overworked, and ultimately laid off.

I’m not entirely sure why the game industry is like this, but I can point to a few things.

For one thing, there is a metric shit-ton of false optimism, e.g. “Our game just needs these killer features and it will be the coolest evar and sell millions!” Or, “Yeah, our game isn’t fun right now, but we still just prototyping, of course it’ll be fun later,” and then they wonder why their game still isn’t fun a year later.

Also, there’s just a lot of mismanagement, e.g. programmers getting promoted to managers or becoming CEOs, in spite of the fact that, although they are fantastic programmers, they don’t have an ounce of management or business experience. Or on the flip side, managers and producers that have business/management degrees but don’t know a damn thing about game development.

Finally, there’s just straight-up abuse of talent. Game companies know there’s a seemingly endless supply of overly optimistic talent straight out of college that they can burn through, while the more experienced talent either “moves up” or, more often than not, becomes jaded and leaves the industry.