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[Stuart444]

Basically, the longer you force people to work the most mistakes they make. The more mistakes they make - especially in tech - the more time they'll have to spend fixing those mistakes. The fact tech industries the world over haven't figured this out yet despite the mountains of evidence shows how incompetent they are.

This is true, I thought it'd be obvious. The more tired or overworked you are, the more likely you are to make mistakes - mistakes that could introduce new bugs which needs fixing.

It's the same no matter what you're doing, even playing a video game, you are more likely to make mistakes or not see something obvious when you're tired. Working slower, making easy mistakes, etc.

It's all very very obvious to anyone with even a lick of sense.

 

[Bert]

Unionize.

It doesn't seem like any governments in the US are going to regulate fair working conditions any time soon, so I'm surprised I hear absolutely nothing about unionization. The problems with burnout and crunch have been well documented for years, and that goes for a lot of tech industries outside of gaming, too.

Doesn’t mean shit. Teachers in the UK also suffer from burnout at similar rates and higher level teachers are in short supply because of it. They are one of the most unionised workforces around.

If you’ve got a constant supply of dreamers, you can do what the fuck you want.

 

[Duderino]

Don't really understand why anyone would want to work in this industry. Just seems shit.

The work is highly rewarding and the compensation can actually be quite good depending on factors like your level, job position, the company you work for, and the city you live in.

 

[Spuck-uk]

I left the industry after ~7 years, which seems fairly standar, I was I think 32 at the time.

It's staffed, as an industry, with incredibly passionate, hardworking people, BUT:

The hours are terrible
The money is terrible
A lot of the employers are terrible
Job security is laughable

The thing is there will always be a tonne of wide eyed people eager to come into the industry, by and large they get exploited and burn out or drift away.

 

[Spuck-uk]

I know somebody who's just entered the industry recently, he's thankful he's staying indie with his friends from the game course he took, especially after the horror stories he's heard from those within the industry. He still has the dream of joining some of the big boys though, for some reason.

Being an indie developer frequently means you work even more hours for even less money, sad to say. At least you have more control over what you want to make.

 

[Spuck-uk]

I'm curious as to how promotions are handled. Is it the workaholics who get ahead? Like is refusing to work because your kid has a baseball game tonight going to throw you off the track?

Refusing to work overtime would be a good way to never get promoted and/or sacked at the nearest convenient opportunity.

 

[RoninChaos]

Guess what, most games are commercial products designed to make money. They were in the beginning and they will continue to be in the future. Nothing has changed. It's pretty simple: These companies make products, and if people find the value proposition to be good enough, they'll buy them. If it's not good enough, they don't buy them (or they buy them, have a bad experience, and refuse to buy the next product that company comes out with).

Also, I'm sure this isn't going to really register with you, but I'm going to try anyways: It might be easier for your narrative to think of them as cartoonishly evil, "ferrari-driving ass clowns" who are out to screw "average joe out of his $60," but in actual, adult reality 99% of people who work at publishers and developers are just hard working, basically good people just like you or I.

The problem is most of the companies that you see doing this shit with microtransactions and things of that nature are doing so because they have a sub par product and are looking to maximize the most that they can from the little window they have for selling a shit product.

Further, are you seriously going to take issue with the fact that I brought up that millionaires were trying to shame the average consumer that bought used games to save money? REALLY? I'm sure this isn't going to really register with you, but I'm going to try anyways; I wasn't talking about the average developer. I was talking about the John Riticelos, the Cliff Blizinksis, the Bobby Koticks, who tried to shit on THEIR OWN CONSUMERS for making a monetary choice that worked in their favor instead of that of the publishers. I cannot believe you have a problem with that so I'm guessing you didn't really read what I wrote.

I work in software, and I work for a company that hasn't overextended itself and makes sound financial decisions. The videogame industry is littered with execs who made shit choices and destroyed the lives of the people under them. I don't have an issue with the developer making their living trying to create games. I have an issue with the greedy fucking publishers who tilt the game in a way to make it so microtransactions are even necessary. I have an issue with greedy publishers who make horrid financial decisions and crash their companies because they make stupid ass decisions. I have an issue with idiots like the aforementioned people who went around the last generation shitting on the customer base they need to appeal to in order to even stay in business.

 

[Huw_Dawson]

I left the industry after ~7 years, which seems fairly standar, I was I think 32 at the time.

It's staffed, as an industry, with incredibly passionate, hardworking people, BUT:

The hours are terrible
The money is terrible
A lot of the employers are terrible
Job security is laughable

The thing is there will always be a tonne of wide eyed people eager to come into the industry, by and large they get exploited and burn out or drift away.

This is a serious problem, especially with the UK industry, and especially in London. Anyone good enough to write really strong C# code for a London-based Unity dev, for example, could probably walk into any financial services or fintech software house that uses .NET and get a job at double the salary.

The solution is to get dev wages up and get the need for crunch and bad working conditions down. Which means either games need to be more efficiently made or they need to make much more money.