The hiring bit might be from the spokesperson (which doesn’t invalidate either perspective in this case) but, per the article, the greater earnings are from the anonymous sources, to include discussions of people operating on high turnover for, at-the-time, high pay.

Sure we don’t have it granular, but the implication on employee compensation is that it is exceptionally high for the industry but that doesn’t necessarily make up for the workload.

Everyone I know in high stress positions in the film industry would take less money for a more sensible schedule. Everyone.

Sure we don’t have it granular, but the implication on employee compensation is that it is exceptionally high for the industry but that doesn’t necessarily make up for the workload.

Article goes over Epic paying substantially over bottom market price, as well as having trouble hiring people even though they are trying. So I don’t think that is the case here.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that management... simply aren't to be trusted blindly on such statements.

I'm sure that those people believe what they are saying, but they are also not examining their assumptions at all.

What we're suggesting here is that Epic Games-- the company that developed, licenses, and supports the Unreal Engine, which powers quite a few successful games in the market-- is unable to recruit enough qualified developers to work on what has (rather unexpectedly) become their flagship game, despite (they claim) paying "over bottom market price" which if you think about it, probably means below average market value, but not the *bottom*.

So my questions would be:

What is their median dev salary-- and what are they broken down by discipline, and how do they compare to industry medians?

How much experience are they looking for? How much training and professional development are they willing to do?

I would not be surprised if what this comes down to is that they want people who are experienced, already know all of Epic's preferred tools, are willing to work long hours for less than median pay, and are unable to keep enough of these around to fill the content pipeline without crunching. But as long as it continues to be more profitable to do that than to raise salaries, provide training, or increase head count, they will do so.

Absent labor organization, this is nearly always what happens-- the pressures that would normally cause head counts and salaries to rise get pushed back, and the result is crunch.

So why people don't make games at a normal pace, release them, let players enjoy them for however long they enjoy them, and then move on is beyond me. Like, there's a bazillion games out there. We can stay occupied until your next one comes out.

The only possible explanation is that those games are making more money despite the worse experience all around. Someone is looking at the books and seeing bigger numbers coming from those games. That won't mean that only those games get made, but sometimes there'll be a choice in front of someone, and they'll choose the one that's likely to generate bigger numbers.

I can only think of two scenarios where that business model suddenly makes less profit. One is players just abandoning them en masse, which is possible but not likely, for reasons explained here:

Just kidding. Mostly I've just been on an Archer quips kick.

The other, maybe, is that games employees finally manage to unionize. The games-as-a-service model might get more expensive to produce, either through higher wages or through unions simply refusing to put up with the hours. I can't actually say that'll make the model unsustainable - that's impossible to know without specific numbers. But it would necessarily make production more expensive by SOME degree.

In whatever the truth may ultimately be, I hope a design change can take place that can help balance out a model that increasingly feels to me to be structurally imbalanced, both in the work required to keep up, and the time needed to play it.

That's the whole problem and what journalists and writers should have seen from the beginning. It always takes longer to make something than to play it. You spend 2 years on a game and someone finishes it in 10 hours.

Your game as a service then necessarily means:

1. Working crazy hard to make new shit because otherwise the content is not rolled out fast enough.
2. You create a grind so that players can stay busy playing the old shit over and over because it's impossible to make stuff fast enough

It's just a bad idea for everyone.

I say it's not so bad for competitive multiplayer games, because those games can have a depth to them because of the human opponents that keeps players fairly occupied until new content is ready.

So why people don't make games at a normal pace, release them, let players enjoy them for however long they enjoy them, and then move on is beyond me. Like, there's a bazillion games out there. We can stay occupied until your next one comes out.

At the core of it all, how is such a grind any different then what these Game Devolopers are going through? I'm currently just becoming more and more convinced here that this model is not meant for humans, but machines. That comes across at first a touch on the melodramatic side, but the more I read about these stunningly abominable conditions, I can't help but see some parallels.

I tried to play Destiny 2 recently for the The Revelry Event Activity, and yea, there was fun... but then I saw all the "hours" I had to put in to get the cool stuff. In the past, I'd plan my time to do stuff I (sometimes) didn't want to do so I could get the cool stuff. It didn't before, but now it sounds like another job to me.

I'll end with this, this observation reeks gray. It is most definitely not a simple black and white observation. In fact, I might not be an Observation at all, but instead an example on how perception can change your outlook.

In whatever the truth may ultimately be, I hope a design change can take place that can help balance out a model that increasingly feels to me to be structurally imbalanced, both in the work required to keep up, and the time needed to play it.

More expensive games and more time between releases would be just fine with me. Games as service is basically the exact opposite of that.

Given the human cost, it just doesn’t seem like a good goal for either type of game.

Unionizing is probably the biggest key. Because the problem almost always seems to lie at the management-and-higher levels. We’d be hard pressed to see raised game prices (albeit I am not so majorly impacted by them and would not mind) given the current economic state of the world.

Games are adjusted for inflation the lowest price they have ever been. We could go to 80 dollars and be roughly where we were in the 16 bit era.

I feel you. I really do worry about the state of perpetual crunch in live service games. It really does seem like no one is winning (besides the rich guys at the top who have enough money anyway). Developers get to spend their every waking moment at work, and players get half-baked mediocre content every month or two. Like, let’s be real here. The Dawning, The Festival of the Lost, The Revelry. They are neat little events, but is that really compelling content? Would we not be better off to skip that shit and let Bungie take more time to make genuinely great stuff? I hate to #codywasright this, but I’d be far more interested in just getting a Forsaken every year, even if it means a year long gap between releases.

I personally love the mini-events. They aren't anything extra special, but I enjoy them every time. Not just for the content, but for the idea of them. I mean, I think they went over the top with the decoration this year and I love it. And yes, I just said that about a video game main hub. I even showed the wife who has basically no interests in games.

Most people might say that it adds nothing to the story, but I still see these mini events as the WW2 Christmas day where war stops for one day and we remember something before all the fighting. I like that. Sure, I've only played for about 2-3 days, but that doesn't matter. I don't have to play constantly for 3 weeks to enjoy the content. And if people think that is what it takes to enjoy content then... I don't know, just like, my opinion.

I'm tempted to say that Epic should hire more developers, but there is certainly a point at which just throwing more people at the problem won't actually solve anything.

Let's be honest. They don't do that because they've already reached the point of diminishing returns on the numbers of developers.

They do it because it's most profitable to do it with as few people, working as many non-overtime-eligible hours as possible, for the lowest wage the market will let them get away with.

And it's not just Epic, it's most of them.

Games-as-service has just turned the crunch boom-and-bust cycle into constant crunch.

The business surrounding making games is absolutely fucked. It's just depressing.

Unionize. Charge more.

Steps to solving the problem.