Stop. (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, October 25, 2018, 11:58 (2008 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Everyone does it, so it’s fine? Sorry, that’s reddit-tier completely asinine logic right there, and it’s not helpful towards actually changing anything.

Yes. It's fine. Nothing needs to change. That's the point of my post. You want to get paid to work in games, you need to actually finish the games. If your company has crappy management, and you have to consistently crunch to meet deadlines, you should self-evaluate whether the work is worth your pay.

And then you quit if it's not? Where do you go? To another studio that does the same thing? Get a job in some other field even though your only work experience is in video games?

Yes, yes, and yes. Not every developer treats their employees the way Rockstar supposedly does. Rockstar’s reputation in this regard is long known and well established (a high profile industry veteran once said to me “Rockstar games are like the Pyramids... we [game developers] all look at them and say ‘why can’t we make something like that?!’, and then we remember that the pyramids were built by slaves”).

We live in a free society (or at least the most free that human beings have ever achieved in all of history). It’s up to each of us as individuals to decide what career we work towards. Want to work in the games industry? Maybe do a little research about what the conditions are like for developers. Don’t like the industry trends? Then go do something else, or start your own company that makes games the way you want to make them. Most disciplines within game development can transfer quite easily to other industries.

“Crunch” has plagued the industry since just about the very beginning. It’s destructive and harmful, and it needs to change. No argument about that. But it’s not catching anyone by surprise, either. Nor is it the role of government to step in with legislation. Successful boycotts certainly do get attention, but as Cheapley pointed out they directly harm the developers you’re looking to help. Ultimately, this is a struggle between employer/employee. Maybe a union is the solution... I’m not sure about that. They seem to cause almost as many problems as they solve.

The gaming industry is still relatively young, and for some reason it got up and running without remembering some of the core lessons that just about every other industry has learned, such as “talent that stays healthy and happy is more productive and profitable in the long run”. There are studios out there who are finally learning this lesson. Slowly but surely, those studios are attracting more and more top talent. It’s not like it’s easy to get a job at Rockstar. You have to FIGHT to get there. Anyone who’s joined Rockstar in the past 10 years should have known what they were getting into. But people still fight to get in so they can have their name in the credits of the next GTA. Do I think that’s wise? No. But people made these decisions freely.