I dunno what it is about the gaming industry relative to other software-related industries, but they have a horrid reputation for effectively treating employees as disposable.
Not coincidentally, a lot of games end up having technical problems from the constant rush.
People romanticize working in games and are exploited for it. Once you realize the string allocator you’re coding isn’t much different than the one that other person working on enterprise software is making, but you’re getting paid 1/2 what they are and on deadlines dictated by a calendar based on $200 million worth of marketing decisions, you jump ship only to have your void filled by someone exactly like you a couple years more novice.
Yup, the pay thing is a double edged sword too because most studios are usually in high CoL locations.
When I left the industry it was an instant 2x income increase. I went from paycheck to paycheck to being able to actually afford living in the Seattle area.
I remember running the numbers on the hours I was working at my salary rate and realized that I would have been better off flipping burgers instead. It wasn't the breaking point but it definitely was a contributing factor.
I know someone whose entire reason for going into computer science was to become a game programmer and eventually hoping to be a game designer. Years after when he realized his career wasn’t what he thought it was he quit, and now he’s working as a security guard somewhere.
People romanticize working in games and are exploited for it.
Ain't that the truth. Lots of young men (teenagers) aspire to be gamer programmers. When my son uttered those words, I immediately schooled him that it was one of the worst places on earth for a programmer to work. He got it.
A lot of people want to work in games, so your junior people are easily replaced. Projects are episodic, and often do or die for small companies or even studios in larger companies. So the choice is perceived as maybe burning out a team or probably shutting down.
Games are also one of those things where there is a big reward for being first and best, and little or no reward for being competent. Even though, as an audience you may not see it that way.
Games need a wide range of things some but not all of them get stuck in a crunch. You can have smaller well managed teams working reasonable schedules to get the core game play worked out then bolt on the AAA stuff once you have a winner.
Crunch does have some advantages to the company, but it's also high risk.
We're not talking about a extra week of hard work here and there, it's months of sustained 80-100hr work weeks. You're so exhausted after just a few weeks that you make a ton of stupid fucking mistakes, which compounds the whole situation.
If crunch worked you'd see it more widely across our industry, however it has the benefit of both burning out people and putting them in a state where their output is lower than it could be at sustained reasonable hours.
Any asshole who thinks otherwise needs to be called out on it.
Source: Ex-gamedev, where I watched crunch crater two different studios.
I guess it kinda depends on how your company does "crunch".
I've been lucky in that in the crunches I've been involved in, although I've worked nights and weekends, we had a good division of responsibilities and guards against overworking. So while the team was through a multi-week crunch, I personally would be working only for a week and half stretch. But perhaps that is not what you mean by crunch.
I guess my point is that occasionally it isn't bad to have a tight deadline and give it your everything to get it to work. If you do get it done, it feels mighty good. But I agree that it wouldn't be something I would like to do on a regular cadence.
A week and a half isn't crunch though, I'm talking about sustained long hours over a month or more(usually 4-6 months).
Working a strong week is totally fine if followed by some recovery time. As long as it doesn't go longer than 2 weeks that's possible to do without destroying productivity, although you still run the risk of burning out your employees.
I think the original idea of 'crunch' is that short period but games (and, in my experience, vfx) tend to just normalize that constant long hours (though they'll hire you saying that hours only get bad at peak times without mentioning that it's always a 'busy' time).
60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry.
The difference is Google/software as a service, does not have the same kind of hard deadlines. But, when you start talking about major launches and boxed software or startups you really do see crunch.
PS: By crunch I mean unsustainable pace leading up to a hard deadline.
Not only are you doing worse work than you normally would at a sustainable rate but you're also putting tons of pressure on people's home life. I saw 3 divorces at my second studio from people working hours along those lines.
If you really think that's sustainable then you have no place in this or any other tech industry. We aren't in emergency service or work in an environment where lives are on the line. Those hours have no place here.
> We aren't in emergency service or work in an environment where lives are on the line.
Obviously these jobs have occasional acute long work times but I'd say that jobs where lives are on the line is precisely where society doesn't want chronically sleep deprived workers.
It's 10 to 12.5 hour days six days a week. My sister is an animator for Disney and they do this every other year. But they also have significant bonuses associated with these crunches it's not unpaid overtime.
Not something I want to be part of, but 30+k bonus for six months of hell is a choice many people would happily take. Hell look at fishing boats they do 15 hour days of hard and dangerous manual labor. But, again they tend to pay people for that effort.
What does the 2 represent? I assume the 4 is 4 weeks and the 6 is 6 months. The 35 must be the high end of 60 to 75 (instead of, say, the average), minus 40 hours. A normal non-crunch work week is more like 45 hours due to breaks and meals, not counting the commute.
That's better than what I thought you were doing, dividing by 2 years or a 2-week pay period. But I don't think it makes sense to adjust for overtime here anyway. Would an $8/hour retail worker say, "I don't want to work overtime for the holiday crunch. Those extra hours are like working for only $8/hour after adjusting for overtime"?
First your not even using my range assuming 60-75 just means 75 and assuming a normal week is only 40. People still get sick and go to dentist appointments etc during crunch. They just don't take 2 week vacations.
So, it's closer to 46$ / hour: 30,000 / (52 weeks * 1/2 year * 25 hours)
Anyway, if you consider doing this 1 out of 4 years that's 60k extra for a 'hell' year not bad for a 22 year old. And again 30k is for entry level people it can go up quite a bit.
Alternatively, many Animators only work crunch they end up working 6 months a year and taking 6 months off.
> People still get sick and go to dentist appointments etc during crunch. They just don't take 2 week vacations.
Yes they do and they catch a ton of shit for doing it. I got tore into one day because I dared to leave at the early hour of 11:00pm having got to the office at 8am that morning.
Look, it's obvious that you haven't been on one of these death marches and so you don't really understand what type of a toll that it puts on a team. My example of hourly rate was to point out that it's an awful trade on one side for putting your family through 6 months of hell.
If money was really the important factor here then people wouldn't be working for entertainment companies because compensation is worse across the board(from engineers to animators/artists and designers). I work with a ton of ex-gamedev people who've made the transition out and there's literally no comparison.
Your $46/hr rate for instance doesn't even crack based Google SWE pay, not including their bonuses.
I get that there's a prestige and a sense of accomplishment of working at Disney/your dream studio. That still doesn't excuse them from grinding people into the ground with these insane hours.
This is not the pay of Google SWE, these are Animators that start at far lower base salaries. Some people get 100+k bonuses for doing crunch, it's really relative to salary.
Look I have done the whole you work sleep or eat and nothing else for peanuts. That does not mean everyone who works 50+ hour weeks is getting shafted.
As to family obligations, not everyone is in that boat. Sure, working insane hours may not seem like a great way to spend your early 20's, but it's also not required that everyone do this. You can make a solid living without pulling crunch time, but it's reasonable for the option to exist.
Really, step outside your bubble. Some people working 80 hour weeks pull in a few million per year, they have options and still chose that lifestyle.
PS: And nobody is forced to do this, if nothing else quitting is an option.
Considering you cherry picked that and skipped over how I know animators making a significant increase outside of the industry doing similar work makes it clear you're not really interested in a discussion here.
I leave my comments as is, anyone advocating for crunch has no place it any part of the tech industry, full stop.
I have not been advocating crunch. If I was trying to convince you it was a good idea I would say you're expenses are already paid, so a little extra money at 22 can quickly snowball. A little suffering now is an easy ticket to retire by 45.
But, again I am not saying it's a good idea as general practice. Just that it's not nessisarily irrational behavior.
That said, you seem to be ignoring what I have actually said in favor of your own personal rage. I suspect you would be happier setting that aside.
I do know 3 people who did by working insane hours in their early 20's. Less time to spend money + more money makes saving 50+k per year after taxes viable. None of them kept working those hours for that long but compound interest works much faster with a larger nest egg.
Now, they used a second job to get there, but having your boss pay you for extra time also works.
I currently work in legal/accounting. We do plenty of work in crunch periods varying between 12 to 15 hours a day, including or excluding weekends.
People lose effectiveness within a week at that volume of work. Consistently. They become forgetful, need things re-explained to them, act irritably, produce work that needs additional levels of revision, etc.
If the work is largely rote, that might be acceptable; perform an extra 10% work to quality control the 50-75% surplus in gross work product. If the work is strategic or synthetic, it is often not.
Over time, however, small performance degradations turn into health complications and morale problems. This is intentional. In high churn industries, individuals who are at the top of the ladder prefer that those they're leveraging lower down perform more work, leave before their positions are threatened, and use the corrosion of their health as a shield against the ambition of entry-level staff.
> 60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry.
How is this not an issue to you? It would be one thing of software developers were this highly specialized group of people where you have a pool of a few hundred in every state. Developers aren't scarce though. For every mediocre developer, there are 5 more than replace that person.
Scarcity aside, why would you want to subjugate yourself to that lifestyle? Most people aren't even productive for a full 8 hours/day, so how does adding 4 more hours in a day make business sense?
I don't care for our industry to unionize, because I don't want to be beholden to some organization fighting for basic human decency. But when people brazenly say, "Yeah 60 hours is fine! You have months before you burnout!" Good for you, but I have interests and people that don't involve work.
If you're a certain kind of asshole - the kind of asshole who finds a certain kind of management role attractive - the reward isn't system efficiency, product quality, or even just product shipping, the reward is in the sense of power that comes from bullying economic inferiors who depend on you for a pay check and can't answer back to unreasonable demands.
It's drama, it's danger, it's excitement, and it's probably fuelled by a coke habit.
If you enjoy that kind of power you'll happily kill a company to experience it.
Games dev isn't unique in this kind of toxicity, but it's more pressing because projects are often huge group efforts with massive resources and long time scales where most of the work is done by young and relatively inexperienced employees who are motivated as much by the games scene as by a pay check.
In the same way that #MeToo called out sexual harassment and abuse, we really need a corporate equivalent that calls out toxic working conditions created by insane management.
We had that moment years ago with EA Spouse, sadly it didn't really move the needle very much. That's probably because there's other places where people with skillset from gamedev can find a saner environment.
Not what I said, total burnout = zero work done. Yea, they might only be 1/2 as efficient as someone doing a 40 hour week, but meeting etc add overhead so it can still be a net gain even with dramatic productivity loss.
> 60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry.
I think the game industry can get away with this because some people really, really want to work on games, and there aren't many companies in the industry with more reasonable hours that one could switch to. But the rest of us eventually figure out that we can demand to be treated well or we can find another job.
A week or two of crunch time can happen every once in a while at most jobs. But 6+ months of "crunch time" is really a permanent company culture of working long hours.
No, that rate is still quite evil. That is also unsustainable, and there is absolutely no excuse for any management that decides that their company is more important than an employee being able to live their life outside of work.
On my third game I tried very hard to make a game with a generous schedule and no crunch. One thing that I discovered was that it was very hard to get members of the team to let things go. If you are passionate, their is always room for improvement. So you had to create deadlines that put pressure on people.
Sure, but that seems like the opposite. Creating a deadline as a reasonable limit on the amount of work put in is a lot different from demanding the same amount of work in an unreasonable time.
Unless you align incentives correctly, you're not paying your developers to ship software, you're just paying them to write code.
Setting a deadline is one way of aligning incentives (ship by this date or else...) and can work well so long as there is a good conversation around requirements, appropriate milestones are set, and developers are trusted to make good faith estimates. However, it is not the only way.
But the company doesn't really bear any of that risk. If something goes wrong, they just fire the staff, and start over. Upper management doesn't feel any pain.
Games are perceived to be date-driven hits. So there is a "magic date" you need to meet -- a major holiday, for instance, or a big industry event like E3 -- or your project is "toast". So you wind up with crunch time, and a lot of quality problems, and ship a bad, buggy product that gets bad reviews (but hey, you shipped by the magic date, so that made it all better, right?)
Crunch time generally happens with consumer products; I've worked on these products practically my whole career, and it will burn you out unless you can find projects with enlightened management. I've also found that getting your own piece done solid, ahead of schedule, only means that you get dragged into the swamps and help out other teams with their issues -- you get to work on the really nasty bugs, the integrations with APIs designed by people too clever for their own damned good, you get to see the real sausage being made.
I argue that shipping a good product late, with a smaller team [the tendency is to add a bunch of staffing to meet deadlines, and we all know how that story ends] will result in better reviews and sales, a team that has better ownership of the product, and much better retention. But try telling that to a Suit whose only skill is to order people around.
[When I wrote my first game cartridge, I gave a detailed schedule of 150 days. It was October and marketing wanted the project to ship by Christmas, which left about two weeks for development. Even a clueless management stack knows that you can't compress work by that much, but it did take some effort to convince the marketroids that they couldn't just have 20 or 30 engineers sit down for a week and write the code. I did burnout hours for several months and finished up within a week of what I'd planned].
I regularly counsel "kids" not to get into the game industry early, and to concentrate on getting wide experience to a bunch of technologies, because game studios need more than just graphics and pretty lights. You can be a hero for doing a provisioning system, or a secure real-time networking layer, or a great storage system, and this stuff is just as necessary and as valuable as those flashy effects on the screen, just not as sexy or visible.
It’s not just holidays and E3 (and dodging releasing at th same time as the largest flagship titles). The main schedule constraint is that marketing spend must be paid months in advance for the purpose of reserving specific time windows. That spend is often equal or greater than the development budget. And, if you miss your time window, too fucking bad. You will have no marketing, no more money to buy in again and your game is now a flaming money hole.
I once worked on a sequel to a semi-popular Xbox game that was tremendously better than the original in every way -except that it lacked marketing. It sold 10% of what the original did because no one noticed that it shipped.
Shipping late is often not an option. Either ship on time or cancel the project near the end of development after 90% of the budget is spent. Layoffs and possible studio closure will certainly follow.
> The main schedule constraint is that marketing spend must be paid months in advance for the purpose of reserving specific time windows. That spend is often equal or greater than the development budget. And, if you miss your time window, too fucking bad. You will have no marketing, no more money to buy in again and your game is now a flaming money hole.
That's a good argument for being date-driven. However it strikes me that the best way to deal with that is to have a disciplined project management process so that you have a good estimate for when product development will actually be done.
That's the theory. And, everybody claims that's what they do. But, in practice it is exceedingly difficult to estimate not just software, but software that is premised on delivering novelty, creativity and a volume of original and highly-technical art greatly exceeding the budget of the engineering team.
On top of that, there is pretty much no defined path for learning how to be a game production manager. People come in, in myriad ways, pretty much completely unskilled as junior producers and mostly learn by following their seniors. As a result, project management skills in the industry are generally quite... poor.
> That's the theory. And, everybody claims that's what they do. But, in practice it is exceedingly difficult to estimate not just software, but software that is premised on delivering novelty, creativity and a volume of original and highly-technical art greatly exceeding the budget of the engineering team.
I hear ya. I don't have a background in game-dev, but I have done some tech R&D, and worked with others who have a lot more such experience, and so I understand the challenges of setting a delivery date when the problem is so open-ended. It's helped when you can spend some time upfront trying to eliminate the biggest sources of risk via prototyping, etc. Would that be called something like "pre-production" in game-dev?
However, and I don't mean to be glib here, but it seems to me that most creative software development isn't so revolutionary that it can't be estimated (or, at least isn't so radical that the feasibility of given due date cannot be determined) by a team with deep domain experience. I suspect, though cannot prove, that the fact the industry tends to burn people out after only 3 years is largely what causes the burnout. If they did a better job at retaining experienced engineers the need for crunch mode might diminish greatly.
> On top of that, there is pretty much no defined path for learning how to be a game production manager. People come in, in myriad ways, pretty much completely unskilled as junior producers and mostly learn by following their seniors. As a result, project management skills in the industry are generally quite... poor.
I think that's probably true for the software industry more generally. It's no knock against the people who are project managers, I just don't think there's often clear guidance for what the project manager is really supposed to do.
People are willing to buy broken, exploitative games filled with monetization strategies, built by a committee of the damned. As long as it’s profitable to behave this way, and unregulated, companies making games will keep on being bad actors.
Not coincidentally, a lot of games end up having technical problems from the constant rush.