Rockstar Employees Badly Overworked, Say Wives 633
juicegg writes "Wives of Rockstar Games employees in San Diego recently published an open letter on their Gamasutra blog. The authors say that Rockstar employees are seriously strained by unending crunch periods of 12-hour work days and 6-day weeks. High levels of stress are leading to serious psychological and physical problems for some of the employees. They charge that studio management uses arbitrary, deceptive and manipulative practices to get employees to work more unpaid overtime hours at greater intensity — despite over $1 billion in Grand Theft Auto revenue. Among the blog comments, some current and past Rockstar employees are confirming problems with the studio. 'Ex Rocker' writes: 'What makes R* crunch periods different then any other studio is that they tell you the game has to be finished in 6 months, so let's start our final push to get this awesome game out there! 6 months turns into 1 year, 1 year turns into 2.' Other comments reveal worker hopelessness and general mismanagement at the San Diego studio. This turmoil is affecting development on upcoming games as well."
Read on for responses from Rockstar itself and other members of the industry.
An anonymous reader adds, "Everyone is talking about the fact Rockstar Games has addressed the accusations that it has forced developers at Rockstar San Diego into unpaid overtime to finish imminent titles. But I've noticed that a former GTA3/Manhunt designer (Chris Kruger) has a comment in this piece published Thursday about crunch in studios, suggesting the problem goes beyond Rockstar San Diego and is company-wide.He says in Develop's Jury-style debate that the damage caused by excessive overtime can upend the out-of-work relationships developers have: 'Crunch is totally damaging, but much more so to the individuals involved. An almost failed marriage in my case. To the company the cost of crunch is very hard to define but any benefit at all is easy to measure. That's why it's such an easy decision to make for most companies. Unless there is a push back and the cost is made clear, it won't change. In my view self regulation doesn't work, and the only real solution is external regulation or utter agreement from the vast majority of staff on how to approach the matter.'
There's no easy way around the topic, but crunch is clearly damaging. When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?"
Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. "Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team" looks pretty good on a resume.
They should quit and get into creating applications instead of games. Yeah, it's not nearly as sexy, but the pressure is MUCH lower. And the pay is probably better, too.
EA still like this (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of mine was, at 29, a 10 year veteran of EA and in team management position. He left when his boss met him coming in one morning and said "Hey! Look, we redid your office! Isn't it awesome? Look, the couch folds out into a bed!" He said this sort of thing was well understood at EA to mean that he wasn't spending enough time in the office, and quit.
Easy problem to solve (Score:5, Interesting)
Only one of those over stressed people would need to report that to the DOJ. The laws on over time pay are laid out pretty clear, and this if true is not at all legal.
The employee that reports it is guaranteed to get 300% of the income they legally are entitled to, as will all the others that come out in the DOJ investigation who wish to join.
Then there will be tons of fines towards the company measuring in the tens of millions of dollars.
I always love to see the excuses why particular members of management are allowed to remain on the payroll after costing the company tens of millions of dollars in illegal activities.
Unless the employees do not wish to start legal action. Which means there is no problem at all.
Union, Yes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Those guys need to unionize. They need The Animation Guild [animationguild.org], Local 839, IATSE. The Animation Guild represents Hollywood cartoonists at Cartoon Network, Fox, Disney, ILM, MGM, Universal, Warner, etc. Here's their current standard contract. [animationguild.org] They get the traditional time and a half for overtime after 8 hours or five days, double time after 6 days.
That's what prevents "crunches". The film industry has "crunches", but they cost the production money, so considerable effort is made by producers to avoid them.
The jobs performed by Animation Guild and IATSE members are very similar to those of many game developers, especially on the art side.
The best time to organize is during a "crunch". Management isn't in a good position to face a strike.
Re:Welcome to Capitalism (Score:1, Interesting)
Advocating unions or government regulation makes you sounds like a socialist.
Is there a problem with that?
Re:How to get management to listen (Score:5, Interesting)
Braid had one artist. AI War had no artists. World of Goo had one artist. I don't know how many artists Osmos had, but I'm guessing it's one or fewer. Machinarium claims to be six, but most of them are under "Additional", and I suspect the bulk was done by two people.
I worked on a full commercial PS2 game, Everquest: Champions of Norrath. We had seven artists and five coders.
No, we weren't going to be able to make something like God of War 3 or World of Warcraft, but don't underestimate the strength of small teams. If you spend a tenth as much on development, you only need to sell a tenth as many copies to break even.
Re:How to get management to listen (Score:4, Interesting)
They'll address it when people stop standing for it. If their developers quit, and they can't find replacements, then things will change. Unfortunately, my experience in the industry has taught me that most developers are willing to put up with enormous amounts of crap so as "not to rock the boat".
It's not just developers. This is why we have unions and labor regulations. They can always find replacements: even in good times, one person in twenty is unemployed at any given time, a figure that the Federal Reserve works very hard to maintain lest it create upward pressure on wages. And most people prefer shitty working conditions to the uncertainty of finding another job, never mind actual unemployment.
Re:How to get management to listen (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike auto workers, IT workers do NOT need huge factories and massive teams. Little studios of 2 or 3 developers have created commercially successful applications, including games. Yes, it won't sell like GTA, but neither do you need GTA's total income to support 2 developers. You pull down a few hundred grand a year and you're in business - that just isn't that hard to do.
The only reason to stay with a situation is because you believe you're better off than *not* staying with it. If you don't think you're better off, by all means, leave! You'd be crazy not to.
I spent 6 years running my own little software shop. I won't lie, it's hard work, but it's perfectly possible. You don't *have* to put up with anyone else's shit if you don't want to, and you certainly don't need to work for a shop you don't like. Those who say it's "impossible to leave" are playing up the victimhood angle because being a victim is a powerful position to be in - it let you wield public opinion to your own benefit. But the reality is that mobility is higher in our industry than in just about any other. If I walked out the door tomorrow, I guarantee you I could be employed again within 2 weeks. There are thousands of places to work, and if you don't like any of them, it's *very* reasonable to start up your own, so you can run it exactly as you wish. But I guess that wouldn't leave some people with anything more to complain about, so they wouldn't be happy unless they could feel oppressed by somebody.
Re:How to get management to listen (Score:3, Interesting)
They don't even need to quit! Just refuse to work the overtime! Most places require some reason to fire people. Not working overtime for free isn't a valid reason. Nor will most managers be willing to have to go to the effort of finding a replacement and dealing with ramp up time.
Uh, after reading about an Army of Wives performing a "mass attack" on a blog about these issues, I seriously doubt the solution is THAT easy.
I mean, when was the last time your spouse went off on a rant to your boss about work ethics? Seriously.
Re:This is ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think part of the problem is that you will have a crunch time on a game. Because of the way game development works, you are almost certainly going to have a crunch time, and probalby a pretty heavy crunch time near the end. The long part of game development, where you are getting together idea, assets, an engine and such can take a number of years and be pretty normal. However, once you've got everything ready and it is time to put a game together, you are on the clock. You can't spend years in actual development, or your game will be dated when it comes out. You've got to get it all put together in short order.
Ok well that leads to some crunching. Also, in most cases you probably have a commitment to distributors and such to be ready on a certain date, and as such may have to crunch even harder near the end.
That's all well and good, and many jobs have short crunch times. My job has a crunch time at the beginning of every semester when students are coming back and professors are finally getting around to asking for software for classes.
The problem then comes in that management sees the amount of work that gets done in a crunch and says "Man, we could get so much done if we worked like that ALL THE TIME!" Of course there are tons of problems with this that are easy to see, but they ignore that.
Re:This is ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
Noticing that duplication isn't a job for "Management",
It's always management's fault. If they hire the wrong person, hire an incompetent or (as you say) simply fail to hire a necessary person they're still responsible. That's why they get the big bucks and the stock options, and the rank-and-file are lucky to get health benefits.
Re:so why is Rockstar losing money? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a big secret that some managers don't seem to get. (It's mercifully less common here in the UK, but I have seen it).
Now, this is a huge secret. I'm not sure I should be posting it here. But anyway - listen closely...
A man working for 60 hours per week will not necessarily produce 50% more than a man working for 40 hours per week. In fact, it's very likely that once he gets tired, he'll make mistakes which he'll then have to fix once rested - and time spent fixing mistakes made through exhaustion is time not being spent on new features.
There, I said it. If you'll excuse me, I have a bunch of managers with torches and pitchforks at my door and I need to set the dog on them.
Re:How to get management to listen (Score:1, Interesting)
Also see here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8469532.stm especially the comment by James Mahon.
I can't believe I'm so lucky to know the only Korean that are overworked. I think it's a well known fact that Koreans have the longest working week in the world, even if officially Korea has changed the working hours. 8 hours a day 5 days a week is heaven even compared to the UK, so excuse me if I don't believe you (even if your name is korean.ian).
Re:This is ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
He could be describing Electronic Arts. Look, the game industry has been run this way for the better part of thirty years. I worked as a coder for a couple of game companies back in the mid-eighties ... and I left for the reasons described in the summary.
I totally agree: I worked for several companies during 20 years in France, and this behavior can be found in 50% of the companies.
But it's the fault of the employees, because they don't know how to set limits.
Since most of the developers are young or inexperienced, they don't have a life outside of their work.
Once I realized this trick, I told them that I will start at a given hour, and will return home at another given hour, and I was probably the only one in my company to do that, and I became their most efficient coder.
I also remember a job interview, where the project leader told me that doing an all-nighter occasionally was very beneficial for the group (WTF !).
As much as I enjoyed that line of work, management practices were abusive even then.
It's true, but it's because:
- the managers don't know how to lead a project (90% of the cases)
- the managers are not coders themselves (95% of the cases)
- the managers never finished a game before (99% of the cases)
- the managers never encountered another way of work (100% of the cases)
The problem is managers that use simple metrics like lines of code written per day to determine a developer's value.
No, this is not true.
What is valued is the number of hours you do every day. It doesn't matter if you do something or not !!! I worked 8 hours a day, but was less considered than some other guys who were working 2 hours, but been present 10 hours.
Also, socializing is an important part if you are ambitious and want to be paid more, so it's necessary to spend your time chatting with the management, otherwise you'll be ignored (of course, I never did that and my salary stagnated).
In general, any project is already late as soon as it begins.
Working 12 hours every day won't help the game finish in time (and in general, it does the opposite by draining the energy out of the team).
The problem is that the games start with too much elements, instead of building progressively.
So, you have to code everything from the beginning, and that's very bad.
And worse, the final goal changes constantly.
Also, when a game is really on time (by some miracle), managers tend to add even more features, because they suppose that the programmers will easily code them.
The real solution is to stop building large games at the very beginning, and simply add one feature after another.
When the time runs out, you'll have at least something to deliver, not incomplete parts everywhere.
upper management is hiring sadists to run their development teams
No, it's just that everybody only knows this bad way of working, and nobody intends to change that: they don't have the time to try other ways !!!
This work process is so bad that 30% of the coders leave the company at the end of an exhausting project.
That's why there is so much turnover in game companies.
Re:How to get management to listen (Score:3, Interesting)
No, most programmers in the US work for companies who CLAIM they are classified as "exempt". There are specific legal requirements for such classification, and the truth is that the vast majority of programmers _do not_ meet them.
Read up on real employment law, don't just go off common knowledge -- it's almost always wrong.
Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but (Score:1, Interesting)
There's a reason EA and Rockstar take young 20 year olds just out of school, and expect them to be gone by 30. Kids buy into the myth of 'work hard, play hard', don't know what quality of life is, and haven't yet had a shitty work experience to stand up for themselves.
And young 20 year olds just out of school haven't yet had a shitty work experience to pay off their massive college debts yet either.
They also haven't had a shitty work experience to put on their resume since every decent job requires at least 2-4 years of experience in the industry.
Re:How to get management to listen (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is ridiculous. (Score:3, Interesting)
Amen. I found the same thing when I worked at Konami in the late '90s. The guys on schedule who went home at a reasonable hour were looked down upon; the guys behind schedule but who were in the office all night got the praise. One guy had a cot under his desk and went home about twice a week to shower. But the quality of his code was absolute crap. It was supposedly C++ code. That's the compiler we used, anyway... I pretty-printed his main() function once, with 1-space indents. The middle of the loop had more than 80 columns of leading whitespace! And he's the one who got the management recognition, not the people who wrote solid code the first time around. I would have sworn that the company's motto was "Work harder, not smarter."
That is so, so true. It's a great industry to get out of.
Re:This is ridiculous. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've fought the over time battle before. I got called into the managers office and was told there was no more over time, my response was "sweet so i don't need to come in this weekend?", no no you still need to come in. i blinked for a moment and then asked point blank "do you expect me to work without pay?" to which i recieved a talk about how i'm being put on a salary (which was exactly the same as my wage).
starting the weekend i never answered my phone after hours if it was the work number, and never showed for anything after hours even if i was asked, and i was always at my desk dead on time and out the door right on 5:30pm. while i was at work i still put in the same effort as before so as to not give management any ammo against me.
and you know what? they NEVER said a word about me ignoring phone calls or over time requests. i really expected them to say something the first few times i failed to show up on a saturday, but they never said boo about it. I think basiclly once i called their bluff they gave up on the idea.
Re:How to get management to listen (Score:3, Interesting)
The classification is done by employers despite what the law might say. It's been going on for the 25 years I've been around and the government has made little or no effort to challenge it. In fact its common practice on defense contracts, so clearly the US government is OK with it.