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Programming Entertainment Games IT Technology

Quality of Life Issues Holding Back Game Industry 99

Posted by Zonk from the programmers-talking-about-programmers dept.
zenrender writes "With all the craziness regarding EA_Spouse's blog entry, it looks like some more organized groups are starting to chime in: Open Letter from the IGDA (International Game Developers Association). See Also Quality of Life White Paper, also from the IGDA."
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Quality of Life Issues Holding Back Game Industry More

Quality of Life Issues Holding Back Game Industry

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  • What's it like in Japan? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ronfar ( 52216 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @02:34PM (#10844988) Journal
    I'm wondering what work is like for game developers in Japan. Now, I know the Japanese are notorious workaholics, so I'm not sure what I'm expecting to be different, I'm just curious.
  • I would really love to play Half Life 2, because I am a person who really enjoys weapons, blowing things up, shooting people in the head, shooting people multiple times with shotguns, watching them bleed, seeing them fall on the ground, writhing in pain, or better yet, seeing their bloody hamburgerfied bodies smeared on the walls.

    But, I can't, because computer games are the product of human misery.

  • Change of Mentality (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VGMSupreme ( 228396 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @02:51PM (#10845213) Homepage
    This open letter does show a good point. A lot of the mentality of the new recruits that are passionate about working in the gaming industry (or any industry for that matter) is to work the extra hours or do the large amounts of extra work to prove to everyone they can do what others who are already in company are doing. If this mentality can be changed or proved to not be a driving factor, then we can get the companies to stop working their employees to the bone cause of a notion that has not really been proven to work.
    • In almost every job these days employers look at employment as a gift they give their workers, and they expect their workers to treat them as benefactors.

      Until there is a decent job market or workers unionize employers can afford to fire or force out those that refuse to be treated this way.

      And this is happening to $8/hr jobs. I couldn't imagine what it would be like in an industry as competitive as video games.

  • There's something wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alpha27 ( 211269 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @03:09PM (#10845421)
    Workers should not have to go through all these hours of developing on a regular basis to launch a product. If a product can not be made under normal working conditions (8-10hr days/5 days a week), then the product can't be made by the deadline set.

    If the time schedules are constantly being scheduled so that I work more and more hours each week, where I essentially am working the amount of 80+ hrs in a single week, then something is absolutely wrong.

    I have a life. I have a family. I need money to pay my bills, but I shouldn't have to work as if I had two jobs to pay bills for things, that at this rate, I hardly use. This practice of constantly asking (or demanding) workers to put in, above and beyond the call of duty, so many hours should be against the law, or at least with some vacation time to compensate. The human body can not take so much of this for long durations.

    I've done the long hours in the web development field for years, fortunately not for long stretches of time. It's really not worth putting my life on hold to work at a company under these conditions. I had things in my real life slipping away and things that needed attention that I couldn't due to the long hours.

    Overall, I wouldn't work for a company under those conditions, and would find employment else where. I would even go as far as boycotting the company.
    • I think it would be a little spoiled to expect 40hr work weeks for every job. Many "common laborers" work 50-60 hrs a week regularly (with a six day a week work schedule). High level managers and owners of a business often put in 100 or more hours in a week. Some people don't even get "normal" hours and have to work night shifts, or as in the case of truckers, salesmen, pilots, and other traveling positions, the work for long streches with brief breaks in between to catch up with their family.

      Ideas like 4

      • Thing is, the US is backwards in securing workers' rights, mainly because of Americans' distrust of the state as a guaranteer of citizens' rights. In Europe, the 40 hour week is a basic legal right. If you work more, you have the right to overtime. If your company refuses to pay you overtime, you take them to court. If they fire you because of your refusing to work overtime, you take them to court, you win and you get a pretty good settlement agreement.

        There was only one job that required me to work 60+ ho

        • Thing is, the US is backwards in securing workers' rights

          I take the opposite stand that trying to secure rights via the government, unions, and other organizations results in a net average that's worse off. There is only so much money in the ecomony for labor. Artificially restricting what can be bought with that money only serves to reduce the number of jobs available and raise the cost of goods. Furthermore by removing many competative elements from the job market you create a situation, prominant in

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • > So when you do get freetime, you can actually spend it relaxing.

              You are neglecting that I choose to work that long because I enjoy it. I found the work relaxing and fulfilling. That's the point of my post above. If people arn't finding these things in their job (no matter how short the hours) it's not worth working there. I'd much rather work for 60-80 hours and enjoy it then work for 40hrs and be missrable.

              > Life is too short for one to spend that much time at work

              I'd say that life it too s

        • 40 hour week is not a basic legal right in Europe. Maybe if you work for the goverment or an international corporation (which have special deals with the unions). Most engineers and scientists can just forget about compensation. You work as much as you have to or you're laid off. And it's not easy to get a new job in Europe either...

      • Re:There's something wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by J4 ( 449 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @08:37PM (#10849204) Homepage
        Uh, laborers get paid overtime, business owners are reaping the fruit of their own labor, cops, firemen, truck drivers and pilots all get comp time and have legal protection WRT consecutive hours worked. They're also union jobs (surely just a coincidence, right?).

        Programmers get abused because they put up with it as a group. Think a bit on the whole "managing programmers is like herding cats" meme and who really benefits.

      • Re:There's something wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by humblecoder ( 472099 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @08:50PM (#10849291) Homepage
        A couple thoughts...

        First, maybe I am just not superhuman enough to work in the game industry, but I find that if I work insane hours for more than a couple of days, the quality of my work suffers dramatically. I have noticed it isn't just me either. I've code reviewed programs that were written under extreme schedule pressure, and most of the time, the code was terrible.

        I wonder if the 80+ hour week mentality is self-propogating in the sense that long hours leads to more bugs, which leads to more long hours to fix them, etc.

        Second, most places I have worked have rarely required putting in more than 40 hours a week. Ocassionally I've had times where I've put more for various reasons, but that has been the exception rather than the rule. This has held true at both small startups and large Fortune 500 companies, so I do have a good sample of companies to go by.

        One common thread in these companies has been good project management. They realize that excessive schedule pressure is more likely to kill the whle project, rather than help it. If you are constantly in crisis mode, quality suffers.

        I know that game companies like EA stress being able to ship by a particular date, but, as a consumer, I would rather wait for a solid product, rather than get something that is half baked. Take Neverwinter Nights, for instance. That game was constantly being pushed back for one reason or another, and the delays certainly haven't hurt overall sales. Actually, delays of an anticipated product seem to feed the hype and the excitement, with the added bonus of allowing developers to put out a solid product.

        Finally, you can't really compare the number of hours a business owner puts in relative to an employee. A business owner is the one taking the risks and the one getting the rewards, so they have a vested interest in putting in insane hours. For some of the other occupations you mention, there are rules (at least in the US) about how many hours truckers and pilots can work. And "common laborers" usually get overtime for their efforts, so many of them actually WANT to work more hours. Code jockeys don't have any limits (other than physical ones) and they usually dont get any overtime for their efforts (although that may change pending legal challenges).

        Personally, my feeling is that I have no problem pitching in with extra hours from time to time. However, if the extra hours becomes the rule rather than the exception, then there is a serious problem with project management and scheduling that needs to be addressed by the company. If the company's management is so bad that it cannot properly plan its projects, then it is probably a company I would not work for. That last point may explain why I gravitate away from such companies.
        • It's not just NWN. Diablo 2 took for ever to finish, but it sold like hot cakes because it was a good stable well-designed well-balanced product. Diablo 1 also came out of nowhere as a game that didn't even copy last year's best-seller, but it sold like crazy. Why? Quality. Or Epic and Id pretty much officially have "when it's ready" as a policy, and I you can't say they're going bankrupt because of it. Etc.

          True, noone knows in advance the secret handshake that _guarantees_ a bestseller, but if you look at
        • First, maybe I am just not superhuman enough to work in the game industry, but I find that if I work insane hours for more than a couple of days, the quality of my work suffers dramatically. I have noticed it isn't just me either. I've code reviewed programs that were written under extreme schedule pressure, and most of the time, the code was terrible.

          I wonder if the 80+ hour week mentality is self-propogating in the sense that long hours leads to more bugs, which leads to more long hours to fix them, etc.
          • I've worked with a couple of refugees from the game industry, and the stories that they tell are similar to what you are saying. Based on my small sample size, game programmers are among the most talented programmers that I have worked with. However, they seem to "burn out" after a few projects and go into a less demanding area.

            I wonder if game industry is shooting themselves in the foot by letting all these talented folks get away with their draconian practices. I suppose there are enough young, ambiti

    • It is called "having a backbone" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Safety Cap ( 253500 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @06:15PM (#10847754) Homepage Journal

      Workers should not have to go through all these hours of developing on a regular basis to launch a product.

      If you let them get away with it, then they'll keep taking advantage of you, forever. If working crazy hours is the expected norm where you are, then you

      1. Have incompetent (non-existent?) project managers,
      2. Work for grossly incompetent management (who never read/don't understand The Mythical Man-Month)
      3. Need never expect it to get better unless you do something about it,
      4. Don't need the government to do something you can do yourself (do you honestly think they'll get it right?)

      Take some responsibility for yourself and draw the line (diplomatically...), but if that doesn't work, then you have basically two choices, suck up or get out.

      Understand that not every place is like what you describe. Where I work, I put in no more than 40 every single week, unless *I* want to work late. When management first squawked about how long the project was taking, I whipped out the work breakdown and said, "Okay, which features do we cut first?"

    • Not everyone is like you. I have a life as well. I have a family as well. I no longer need to work to pay my bills, because working hard enough for the past few years has landed me in a very easy situation.

      I work two jobs a day (2x8hours), work after hours as much as possible, sleep 4-5 hours a day. I work weekends as well. In doing so, I save huge amounts of money not spent on other stuff, which I invest to get even more money. The purpose? Trying to get rich. Quick. While working, and enjoying what I do

  • Game programming is a vocation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bay43270 ( 267213 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @03:11PM (#10845449) Homepage
    People don't get into game programming for the money and the good hours. Neither do priests, teachers, firemen, policemen or soldiers. Complaining about the long hours in the video game industry is like complaining about the color of the sky. Just deal with it or pick a different profession.

    With half the skills an EA job requires, you could get a very nice low-stress job working half the hours. My job isn't especially interesting, but it pays the bills easily and it's very low stress. Plus, I can start working on my more interesting hobby-programming when I get home (between 4:30 and 5 in the afternoon).

    Or if you can't settle for less than an interesting, high-demand job, then you must really enjoy what your doing -- in that case, shut up and get back to work!

    • Re:Game programming is a vocation (Score:4, Insightful)

      by startled ( 144833 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @05:02PM (#10846842)
      Your response to the article is a non-sequitur. The point is, as the headline says, that quality of life issues are holding back the game industry.

      Their assertion-- read the white paper for more on this-- is that these practices are resulting in worse products. Even if your attitude is "fuck it, I hate all of humankind, and wish for all people to eternally burn in searing pain", if your goal is good games, current practices are counterproductive. How is that possible? How can it be that demanding maximum hours per day from all employees could actually be counterproductive? First, clearly output quality falls as hours and stress increase. Perhaps more importantly, conditions are driving experienced game developers from the industry in droves.

      In response to their QoL survey:
      * "Only 3.4% said that their coworkers averaged 10 or more years of experience."
      * "34.3% of developers expect to leave the industry within 5 years, and 51.2% within 10 years."

      Do you really think driving away experienced employees is a good thing for the industry? Do you think the knowledge drain somehow benefits game production over the long term? If so, I believe you severely undervalue the types of knowledge that only come with long-term work in a field.

      Do you want all your generals to be 25? Do you want all your priests to become atheists at 30? Should all teachers retire before hitting middle age?
      • Your right. I wasn't responding to the study, but to the spouse's blog entry. I should have said so in my post. There are two separate issues here:

        - These companies are tearing themselves apart with by taking advantage of these programmers (your point)
        - These programmers are allowing themselves to be taken advantage of (my point)

        I can't imagine anyone thinking that exploiting employees is in the long term best interest of the industry. The debate seems to be over what to do. The way I see it, we have
      • This model is the same which is used in science research. The people in the lab, doing the research are all around 25. Once you've put in 10 or 15 years as a lab rat, you're expected to move on to management (or professorship), and out of the lab.

        My boss can get things done much faster than I can, and has likely already solved the problems I face. Why does science take its most experianced workers out of direct research?

        While my boss may be a better lab worker than I, the most efficient use of his time
      • I get it now! You see, all of this illogicality is just part of the "system". Wait, I won't speak any more of it, because if you knew what I was talking about, the "system" would collapse.
      • Though as a software Developer I agree wholeheartedly that poor work enviroments, long hours and undue stress cause inferior products I do think their is another important point to consider. What is happening in game development is nothing new, it's happended in other industries, and in those industries it has changed. The reason it changed because the people being misstreated refused to be mistreated and the customers of the products they built became dissatisfied with the products.

        In the game industr

    • The professions you mentioned are known tobe of an altruistic nature, the compensation comes from a work well done.

      Many in the gaming industry in particular and the IT world in general have glamourized the image of the overworked gaming programmer (and for extension anybody related to the industry), to the advantage of the gaming industry of course.

      In any case, your reasoning is a fallacy. Any industry could claim that and then launch in a escapade of employee explotation.

      Some things are immoral, no matt
    • I do hope you were not trying to compare video game developers with priests, teachers, firemen, policemen, or soldiers. People choose those jobs because they benefit mankind. People choose to write video games because they think such a job would be cool.
      • Your list is interesting. There are quite a number of not particularly nice people amongst soldiers and policemen from my experience. I don't think those I'm thinking about chose their profession for benefitting mankind. More because they like to play with various bits of hardware, they like to order around people and they don't seem to have too much of an inner life.

        There is a wide variety of games developpers and some of them, those who develop games for young children, do a remarkably similar job as tea
        • " Your list is interesting"

          Not mine. I was responding to another post who had compared the motives of game developers to those of the professions on that list.

          "I don't think those I'm thinking about chose their profession for benefitting mankind."

          I'm sure there is a wide variety of motivations for every profession. We were talking about generalizations.

          "Most of them do a good job as entertainers, is there anything wrong with that?"

          No, as long as you don't try to claim their motivations are the s

  • I've worked as a programmer and web developer in a demanding work environment for 7 years. It does take a toll on family life, but part of it isnt just demands placed on me by a corporation, part of it is the love of the job, getting a sense of accomplishment when I complete a demanding project, its a good feeling. Yes, other people suffer because I work too much, but the blame isn't just on the company I work for. With this profession, comes a love for your work, a feeling of accomplishment, and the extra
    • "Blame can be put on the programmers, as or more so than the companies that require these positions."
      Interesting. Sure long hours can be part of any job that has a crunch time but... There are laws that say you have to pay people for it. It is perfectly legal to reguire more than 40hours a week of work but you have to pay time and a half for each hour over 40. That is where the companies are doing wrong. Someone else comparied game programing to being a Doctor, Nurse, Fireman, Police Officer, or Priest. Wel

  • There is no excuse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kuwan ( 443684 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @03:29PM (#10845646) Homepage
    There is no excuse for this kind of behavior in the gaming industry, or any other industry for that matter. If I recall, the gaming industry is expected to make more money than Hollywood this year. An industry with these huge revenues can afford to treat their workers humanely. In fact, I believe that it is the developers and artists that make a game successful, that these are the people that should be getting the biggest share of the profits. Not some nitwit CEO or other executive.

    There are those that say that working in the gaming industry is a privilege, that there are tons of people out there that would die for your job, that these programmers shouldn't complain. Well, frankly there are tons of people out there that want my job or that want your job. That doesn't mean that they will do it better than you or I do our jobs. And that sure as hell doesn't give my (or your) employer the right to treat me like an animal and work me until I'm burned out.

    Employers like EA need to change and they'll eventually be forced to if they keep burning through their talent.

    --
    Sounds like a scam, but it works. [wired.com]
    Free Flat Screens [freeflatscreens.com] | Free iPod Photo [freephotoipods.com] |

  • IT needs a Union (Score:4, Insightful)

    by helfon1 ( 307170 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @03:42PM (#10845834)
    Gaming is not the only area of IT that is treating thier employees this way. After 2.5 years working as a consultant at one of the largest consulting firms as an out of college grad I finally left to go to a smaller firm with less required overtime.
    The consulting firm set what they called "stretch goals". Goals that were lofty and perhaps unreachable to force workers to work 60-70 hour work weeks.
    People died for the 40 hour work week around the turn of the century. This is the reason for labor unions. Since the IT industry doesn't have a strong union companies will force their staff to work as hard as possible to make the most amount of money.
    I can at least empathize with this person while sitting on the 40th floor of a downtown chicago building on a sunday afternoon in 98 degree heat (inside) because they don't turn on the air conditioning on the weekends. IT needs a union.
    • > 98 degree heat (inside) because they don't turn on the air conditioning on the weekends

      Surely the people doing this realize that the laws of thermodynamics coupled with the inefficiencies of modern cooling systems means that in most cases you'll loose money by doing this.

    • Re:IT needs a Union (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Ok, so let's say for the sake of argument that IT shops actually let their workers form a union. Then let's say that said shops actually let the union set a 40 hour work week. The shops that didn't get rid of half of their force altogether and outsource as much as they possibly could will probably fail, leaving everyone in the shop out of work. The workers will then take whatever job they can get elsewhere, union or not. Unions are fine when the shops don't have the availability of cheap labor like they do

  • the indie route (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BortQ ( 468164 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @03:54PM (#10845989) Homepage Journal
    Here's a discussion on the EA issue from the perspective of some independent game developers:
    indiegamer.com forum thread about EA work conditions [indiegamer.com]

    A lot of the guys there are creating games and then releasing them for sale on the internet, totally ignoring the whole publisher/retail method. It's a real alternative for game devs. I am supporting myself in just this manner by my own game.

    • I am supporting myself in just this manner by my own game.

      Supporting yourself with just one game? Very impressive. If you don't mind me asking (which I understand if you do), what sort of marketing approaches do you use to get the word out about your game other than your site and forum?

      What resources do you use for information on legal and tax issues?

      You seem to be living the life I dream of living.
      • what sort of marketing approaches do you use to get the word out about your game other than your site and forum?

        Google is my biggest driver of new traffic. Both using natural results and also using adwords. Software download sites also provide some traffic (more so on the macintosh side). And my slashdot sig brings in a surprising amount of people =)

        What resources do you use for information on legal and tax issues?

        The internet at large has a lot of information if you go looking for it. I am a member o

  • You're all a bunch of wimps. (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheAdventurer ( 779556 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:28PM (#10846396)
    You guys are such wimps! I work 168 hours per week. Every christmas I take a day off to sleep, but then I'm right back on the job. I ship four games per year and my supervisor has complimented me many times, saying that his golf vacations have become even more pleasurable knowing that I'm hard at work making his money.

    Frankly, I think you guys just should just suck it up and learn how to be men. Real men sit in soft chairs for 99% of their life and stare at glowing phosphorus tubes so that adolescents can pretend they are football coaches. What did you expect from life? A wife? A sense of intrinsic happiness? A healthy body? That's not how it works.

    Life is hell and everyone who doesn't enjoy that fact is wussier than me.



    [for the love of god, note the sarcasm] =)
    • That's nuthing...

      I wrote an artificial intelligence system that emulates 8 workers (yes, modded voice response units to tell them apart)

      My bosses, in between golf games, stripped me of benefits and moved me from senior developer to tech support, and I'm on call 24/7/365, as I know primarily maintain the system.

      I wasn't fired because they're too lazy to figure out the gui.

    • As a game developer, I must say that that post is quality.
  • Isn't this what unions are for, so that skilled, talented and experienced people can band together and demand better hours/wages/benefits for themselves?

    Of course, the corporations can settle for inexperienced/unskilled/untalented people who aren't (or can't be) part of the union, but their product will suffer as a result.

    Meanwhile, someone else will form a game company, hire the union guys, and put out a killer product that makes them tons of cash.

    I'm just sayin'.
    • Short term that's the idea, but long term unions calcify the relations between the employer and labor. This calcification prevents major improvments, limits worker flexibility, and tends to reduce job satisfaction. End the end this hurts the employer and then the employee. See the UAW and the Teamsters for examples. These problems are the reason the modern trend is toward professional societies.
      • read that like this - calcification == greed

        The union's generally become an entity of their own. And they work to solidify the *union* first. They end up not doing what they were originally intended to do - protect the *worker*.

        Personally, I'm thinking of the UAW as I type this.

    • Uh, no (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Capitalist1 ( 127579 )
      Unions are for the benefit of those workers who want to receive multiples of the benefits of doing a job without having to actually do the job. Unions are also for those who have no problem profiting from this sort of institutionalized graft, namely politicians and organized crimimals.

      The competent, valuable employees are never the ones who benefit from unionization, in any field.

  • Hi, does anyone know how to find work as a game programmer? I'm willing to work cheap because I love games. Any ideas? Where should I start?

    Much Thanks.

    • Re:How-to: Getting a job as a game programmer (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You and the many thousands like you are the reason that EA can grind up and spit out its employees. They know there are people such as yourself falling all over each other to replace each person they burn out before the remains have stopped smoldering.

      That being said, I've always wanted to work in the game industry too, but I'll wait until the lawsuits create better working conditions before I take one of those jobs at EA :)

  • Congratulations, games are now art (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sien ( 35268 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @05:19PM (#10847066) Homepage
    There is a push to get games recognized as art. Perhaps people should compare the working hours and the rewards of other arts like music, novel writing and the film industry.

    All these industries have a common compensation scheme. Many, many people work very hard for very little money, a small fraction make a great deal of money. Read this for how writers [goinside.com] make out. If you look there are countless other examples of this.

    It is partly due to the nature of entertainment. Our tastes are fickle. Some Hollywood producer famously said Nobody knows anything about what films will be successful. (Check out William Goldman's book Adventures in the Screen trade [amazon.com] for the quote). Who can really predict which one of the hundreds of projects starting this year will produce a great new game? Sure, EA can buy huge franchises and make a reasonable amount of money, but even there games like Pro Evolution Soccer threaten their name based primacy.

    With music, in almost every town there are bands that are 90% as good as REM, U2 or whatever band you like. And they make very little money and work pretty hard and tend to be pretty smart.

    Entertainment is not now, nor has it ever been stable. That said, working people huge hours tends not to produce inspired work. But making anything great, or even good, involves a lot of time and the economics of entertainment isn't likely to change either.

    • Entertainment in theater (movies) or music has FAR less strain on a person basically trying to make a 1 million piece puzzle without knowing what puzzle pieces they have to use.

      They work MUCH harder than say, Joe Schmoe painting the set or actor X saying a few lines with "emotion". In a work of 'art' of a video game, everyone is the artist honestly. The person who is getting paid the least does the most work where the person doing almost nothing gets paid the most. It may be art but it's FAR closer to
    • And yet, all those other entertainment industries have unions that protect their workers... except game developers.

  • Isn't there another alternative? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CodeWanker ( 534624 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @11:05PM (#10850182) Journal
    I'm not sure, but I think there's another option open to people that hasn't been addressed here (or it's so unpopular it's been modded below my threshold.)

    If you love the gaming industry and you've got a gripe, then you're probably just not in a situation that rewards the kind of effort demanded. But if you REALLY love gaming, then you've got a good game in you screaming to get out, right? /. has had good stories about how open source game dev yields less-than-stellar (and generally non-lifestyle-supporting) game projects. But what hasn't been covered is forming a startup to make your game and either 1) reward you appropriately for working insane hours or 2) prove what some people above have said about the optimum value of working a limited number of hours a week.

    There's a lot of venture capital out there. People aren't giving it away on the street corners, but if you've really got a good game inside of you you ought to be able to find a marketing/business guy who loves games and will pitch your idea to the VCs because you've got a good game inside you. Ditto the art/creative people you'll need. If you can't build a good creative/technical/business team to do this you either 1) don't have a good game inside you or 2) don't have what it takes to make it a reality.

    And before you rip my head off, you need to know that 1) I was the technical brain behind a startup that raised $750,000 in capital after the .com bubble burst and 2) I am making my first feature-length movie in my spare time in addition to working full-time as a software architect. People need to put up, shut up, or go to work coding the database behind some mega-store's on-line shopping cart.

    Okay, NOW you can rip my head off.
    • Are there any other Pro-Life atheists out there? Hello? Anyone?

      Is a pro-life agnostic close enough?

    • Question on the venture capital, could you provide details on how you were able do this? I've been working on a game for a while now in my spare time, and starting to think I should turn it into a business. It's an MMORGP that I've have been working on in my spare time for the last 6 years. Most of my time I spend is on the game server and DB client. I've had working 2d clients in PPC and PC but now have ditched them and moved in the last 2 years to a 3d engine client instead (Torque.) I've gone to Game
      • Wouldn't you know it, there's a Dummies book [amazon.com] for it. The steps are to
        1) write a business plan that clearly explains what you need to become a money-making venture and what kind of money you expect to make. These expectations have to be documented, preferably by using real-life independent MMORPG projects (Non Sony, Non EA, Non BLizzard... You know, niche MMORPG creators that people like Penny Arcade talk about) that have made it to profitability/viability. You also need to explain why your venture will
    • From what I understand, currently the problem with forming game start-ups isn't with finding capital or producing the product (god knows there's enough amateurs out there), but with the publishing end. Even established firms with hit titles (for example Troika, and I'm sure there are others that I don't follow) have trouble negotiating agreeable publishing agreements. Just look at the squeeze Vivendi tried to put on Valve over Steam. Big publishers have retailers locked down when it comes to distribution (r
  • I didn't realize what I was missing in my life until I meet my wife. As my GF and now my wife she has always been somewhat insistent that my job not be the highest priority and more often than not leave work (and leave my work at work) at 5:00pm. My life has been my better since.
    • Same here. The older I get, the more I see this happening. They settle down, get married, get the house, the kids. How priorities seem to change through those years with all that happening is amazing :)

      The longer I've worked, the more I see employers trying to hire younger, single IT'ers (on the cheap). They promise them big raises over the next few years to compensate on the low-starting-salary. And the naive kids fall into the trap. :(

  • It's not just the gaming industry. I'm a senior level sofware engineer in the semiconductor capital equipement industry and am currently working 60+ hour weeks and am on call basically 24 hours a day. In addition I'm an hour away from work so at least 14 hours out of the day is involved in work. A lot of time I also need to VPN into work from home to solve an issue. It's tough (especially being salaried and not getting any extra money for overtime) on my family. Especially when I'm working a bad shift
  • EA games can put out shiite because from what I understand, most of their games are monopoly franchise. Blizzard, maxis (I guess they are owned by someone now), id, and those other small companies you mentioned work in a competitve market. If EA writes an incrementally better version of their football game, people who want to play the best football game will still buy the new game from EA instead of someone else, because no one else sells a football game. If id writes an only incrementally better Doom, e
  • I work for a company that is very sales focused, and I admit, at times it is very frustrating and the deadlines seem impossible. However, I know for a fact that a lot of the projects i have worked on bring in over $1M in revenue to the company a year (per client). And a lot of the clients want to have the software in a given timeframe. We as developers are challenged to meet the dates set forth by the client - which for the most part are totally insane. I know this may not apply to the gaming industry,

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