Do Games Made Under Crunch Conditions Deserve 'Best Direction' Awards? (kotaku.com) 146
The annual Game Awards ceremony awarded this year's "Best Direction" award to Naughty Dog studio's The Last of Us Part II — provoking a strong reaction from Kotaku's staff writer.
"I think it's pretty obvious that no game that required its developers to crunch, like The Last of Us Part II did, should be given a Best Direction award." It's no secret that Naughty Dog subjected its workers to unbelievable levels of crunch to get The Last of Us Part II out the door, but that's hardly an innovation when it comes to Naughty Dog or game development in general. Over the years, the studio has seen constant employee turnover as developers crunch on games like The Last of Us and Uncharted, burn out, and throw in the towel. Relentless overtime, missed weekends, long stretches of time without seeing your family — these things take a toll on even the most passionate artist.
"This can't be something that's continuing over and over for each game, because it is unsustainable," one The Last of Us Part II developer told Kotaku earlier this year. "At a certain point you realize, 'I can't keep doing this. I'm getting older. I can't stay and work all night.'"
Let's be clear: the existence of crunch indicates a failure in leadership. It's up to game directors and producers to ensure workloads are being managed properly and goals are being met. If workers are being forced to crunch, explicitly or otherwise, it means the managers themselves have fallen short somewhere, either in straining the limits of their existing staff, fostering an environment where overtime is an implied (if unspoken) requirement, or both. And as ambitious as The Last of Us Part II director Neil Druckmann and his projects may be, "questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits" are not required to make a great game...
I feel like the industry, now more than ever, is willing to discuss the dangers of crunch culture and solutions to eradicate it. But lavishing praise on the way The Last of Us Part II was directed feels like a tacit endorsement of crunch and only serves to push that conversation to the backburner again. A popular online statement, first coined by Fanbyte podcast producer Jordan Mallory, says, "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding." The message from all those who share it is clear: No game, not even industry darling The Last of Us Part II, is worth destroying lives to create.
"I think it's pretty obvious that no game that required its developers to crunch, like The Last of Us Part II did, should be given a Best Direction award." It's no secret that Naughty Dog subjected its workers to unbelievable levels of crunch to get The Last of Us Part II out the door, but that's hardly an innovation when it comes to Naughty Dog or game development in general. Over the years, the studio has seen constant employee turnover as developers crunch on games like The Last of Us and Uncharted, burn out, and throw in the towel. Relentless overtime, missed weekends, long stretches of time without seeing your family — these things take a toll on even the most passionate artist.
"This can't be something that's continuing over and over for each game, because it is unsustainable," one The Last of Us Part II developer told Kotaku earlier this year. "At a certain point you realize, 'I can't keep doing this. I'm getting older. I can't stay and work all night.'"
Let's be clear: the existence of crunch indicates a failure in leadership. It's up to game directors and producers to ensure workloads are being managed properly and goals are being met. If workers are being forced to crunch, explicitly or otherwise, it means the managers themselves have fallen short somewhere, either in straining the limits of their existing staff, fostering an environment where overtime is an implied (if unspoken) requirement, or both. And as ambitious as The Last of Us Part II director Neil Druckmann and his projects may be, "questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits" are not required to make a great game...
I feel like the industry, now more than ever, is willing to discuss the dangers of crunch culture and solutions to eradicate it. But lavishing praise on the way The Last of Us Part II was directed feels like a tacit endorsement of crunch and only serves to push that conversation to the backburner again. A popular online statement, first coined by Fanbyte podcast producer Jordan Mallory, says, "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding." The message from all those who share it is clear: No game, not even industry darling The Last of Us Part II, is worth destroying lives to create.
Shorter, worse games? (Score:2)
Indie games already give you that. Though not all of them are fundamentally worse. They may lack in the AAA-experience department: less-than-cutting-edge graphics, for example. And/or a more-primitive game engine with simpler physics.
There is still a market for big-budget AAA productions, though, and as long as that market exists, developers will continue to search for ways to deliver the demanded product. What can these big-budget dev offices do to avoid crunch without worsening the quality of their ou
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What can these big-budget dev offices do to avoid crunch without worsening the quality of their output?
Delay the release of the game. That's the most feasible option.
You can also do something like "avoid design changes halfway through" but then you can't respond to new information (like how alpha-testers respond to things).
Another option is to hire better programmers who know how to avoid bugs when they are writing code, that way they don't have a huge debugging period later. Unfortunately those types of programmers are rare.
Re:Shorter, worse games? (Score:5, Funny)
we have a joke in gamedev, that the first 90% of game development takes a lot less time than the second 90%.
Re:Shorter, worse games? (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, even with a major game studio like Naughty Dog, the chances are that they work with an even larger publishing house. The nature of the industry is that the publisher will often provide the game developer with a cash advance to help them deliver their next major title. So the problem for the game developer is that if they get to the point where the cash advance runs out, the only thing they can do is "crunch" in order to deliver a working product. You see examples of this being fudged from time to time, where a game release is either buggy as hell, or fudged in other areas [Mass Effect: Andromeda might be a good example of the second].
The second thing to consider here is the volatility of the game marketplace. The development time of a major, Triple-A title [measurable in years] is such that when a studio sits down to write their next title, platforms, tools and infrastructure have advanced so far that the developers have an all-new world to grapple with. [Example: look at nVidia, pushing hard to have Ray Tracing adopted in games, to give them an edge over AMD's Radeon cards...]. In other words, this isn't a case of simply cranking out a second piece of software with familiar tools and the same complexity as the previous edition.
Finally, as noted in the OP, the practice of using crunch tactics at game studios accelerates the burnout of developers, which means that experienced coders familiar with the inner workings of the engine from the previous game are no longer around to help with the development of the next one. It can be figured out, but it takes time and effort.
I don't see any easy answers here. The other choices seem to orbit around the crowd-funded concept. We could look at Star Citizen, the most successful Kickstarter of all time, which has raised over $100 million, but then observe that the game still hasn't been completed. To be honest, that one looks like they will keep on developing for as long as people keep on donating. Or you could look at the opposite end of the space sim spectrum and take something like Elite Dangerous... which got to full publication on a comparative shoestring budget (about $1.5 million, IIRC) and which looks beautiful, but which is desperately shallow and for which the enhancements are taking *years* to deliver and are still far short of the original Kickstarter marketing videos.
The real kicker is that the people who force the crunches at game studios are the managers or shareholders, who likely don't have to pull the all-nighters and who earn far more than those who do.
Typical.
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The reality is that games are time sensitive. If they aren't released in a certain time period, their graphics and gameplay are dated, and the game won't be popular.
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not exactly. getting out of trend is mostly a concern for "fast-follow" type of projects. the bigger problem is we're a hit driven industry and are in general not guaranteed a success, so any production delays incur additional risks, which the stakeholders may not be willing to take.
it is in general true that crunches are a logical consequence of production mismanagement, however it's a two-way street: these things happen because people who work in the industry allow them to happen. apparently for many that
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Depends on the game type. "Pixel" games are common these days, as well as overhead isometric style. I think it's a shame that a lot of players will diss a game based upon it looking 5 years old while ignoring all the gameplay. And this cutting edge in graphics tends to be in games with the smallest amount of gameplay, like the annual releases from a franchise that's played on the rails.
I think a much bigger time problem is that most games want to be out before the holiday gift-giving season. A January
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Another problem with this boycott-crunch-games idea is how you measure crunch. At what point do you start raising your SJW banners and protesting a game? And if someone does sit down and define a line that you can't cross, it's just become another case of Goodhart's Law where developers will still be forced to go into crunch mode but in such a way that they're just inside the line for measurement purposes.
And all that's assuming that game publishers give a toss about "Best Direction" awards, as opposed t
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"Another problem with this boycott-crunch-games idea is how you measure crunch."
Are you kidding?
35 hours/week: nice
40 hours/week: so, let's talk about the perks.
>40 hours/week: find another job
Easy-peasy. Next question?
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That just isn't realistic. Most time-sensitive production jobs in numerous fields are going to require 40-50 hours/week depending on what screwed up this week. People not showing up to work? Equipment failing? Yeah, there's gonna be a little overtime.
In game dev, labor isn't entirely fungible either. You can't just bring in another guy to do so-and-sos programming or design work when so-and-so is sick/dies/quits. You either change the direction of the project when you lose key players or you wait until
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Crunch doesn't mean putting in 50 hours, it means putting in 80 hours.
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Post to which I replied implied that anything over 35 hours/week was somehow exceptional or onerous. Realistically speaking, OUTSIDE OF GAME DEV, if you build or produce anything on a schedule, you should expect 40 hours/week MINIMUM, with 40-50 being more-realistic, and that's if things are going smoothly.
Exceptions being countries that outright ban more than 35 hours/week or similar, but well that's another story.
Re: Shorter, worse games? (Score:2)
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By the law however, you cannot be forced to work over 40 hours without extra compensation, in the United States. And it's much stricter in Europe. Companies get around this in a lot of jobs by claiming you're salaried, dumping an immense amount of workload on everyone, then claiming "we never asked them to work extra hours!" Also being spread is the myth that you must work 50-80 hours because everyone else is doing it. And there are indeed a lot of companies where the 40 hour work week is perfectly norm
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Bullshit. That's a typical US perspective, but Rockstar North (developer of the Grand Theft Auto series) is based in Scotland, where (in common with the rest of the UK and the EU) those hours would be very illegal. 48 hours a week is the limit, but e
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It's not typical "US perspective", it's "gamedev reality". If RockStar North has some magical formula for getting the job done in 48 hours/wk or less, why haven't other dev shops copied them?
There's no advantage to crunching 70+ hours/wk unless you're so desperate to get the product out the door that you have to crunch. Salaried employees aren't stealing company time by working less hours so long as the product works and launches in an orderly fashion.
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Re: Shorter, worse games? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Screw your ignorant rant attitude, please.
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Another option is to hire better programmers who know how to avoid bugs when they are writing code, that way they don't have a huge debugging period later. Unfortunately those types of programmers are rare.
In fact they're so rare it's almost like they don't exist. Weird.
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They exist, and it's not even that hard to be such a programmer, although you may not have met one.
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Game dev seems to be the bottom of the barrel for payscale. It's something you do when you have a lot of passion for games. As such, there are scads of other programmers looking to do the same thing as you. Make games? For a living? Sign me up!
Supply and demand being what it is, you wind up with a lot of cheap game programmers entering the field every year of varying degrees of quality. It's tempting to snap up a bunch of the cheap, new ones and just run them into the ground as they learn their craft on
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Unfortunately those types of programmers are rare.
And they generally have more experience and so they know better than to work at a place that has a lot of crunch.
They could also try adding more room for slip in the schedule at the very start.
Keep increasing the slip until crunch becomes rare and short.
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The article says that crunch indicates a failure in leadership, however it's not. The leadership realizes that crunch works and it saves them time and money. And it helps of course that there's a workforce that accepts that they must do crunch because they've been told over and over that the 40 hour work week is archaic nonsense and doesnt apply to tech. There is no incentive whatsoever for the leadership to remove the perpetual crunch culture.
To address your points, often most of these workers needed du
Re: Shorter, worse games? (Score:2)
How about simply not set an official release date until the game is basically, you know, done? Especially these days when most sales are digital (so a drastically reduced need for disc production). Dont slip the quality, slip the deadline
Re: Shorter, worse games? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about simply not set an official release date until the game is basically, you know, done? Especially these days when most sales are digital (so a drastically reduced need for disc production). Dont slip the quality, slip the deadline
This is a classic Engineering dilemma, for example civil engineering projects face this every time you propose a new road/bridge/tunnel. It would probably be a great leap forward in management capability if software "managers" were forced to take some kind of systems engineering classes, even auditing such a class would surely give these id10ts a clue.
If we can solve it for roads and bridges, we can solve it for software... notably everyone reading this board probably has at least a minimal exposure to the exact solution - you do a pretty thorough pre-project plan based on projects that are similar, plus-up the cost to provide some margin for overruns, and then you delay the opening (side-note, every freaking time...).
In otherwords, complex systems engineering projects are all the same, they are more or less all much harder than you think at first, and beating the workers trying to build the bridge is not acceptable practice. On the other hand, road-workers have a union, while programmers are pretty libertarian by mindset and seem to be unable to recognize when a union is in their best interest.
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If we can solve it for roads and bridges, we can solve it for software...
There is a big difference: requirements for roads/bridges are not as volatile as software requirements.
That being said, crunch time works only for about a week or so. If you try to do crunch for longer then the overall productivity drops. People get tired, make more mistakes (which generates additional work for coworkers); personal errands are being handled at work, focus is lost, idle chat time increases ...
Re: Shorter, worse games? (Score:2)
> If we can solve it for roads and bridges, we can solve it for software...
It's not like civil engineering projects are never late or over budget. Not sure how they've "solved" it any better.
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Re: Shorter, worse games? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because a huge majority of game sales happen at the end of the year. If you miss that window, it can make an order of magnitude difference in how many copies get sold. That's why Cyberpunk 2077 was pushed out the door buggy AF. Missing the window basically means pushing the game out another year.
Thing is, it's gotten so bad that as long as CD Projekt Red follows through and finishes the game, they will be forgiven for essentially releasing a beta and collecting their wages a few months early. As long as they do finish. Because we understand that it was a matter of survival.
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Cyberpunk 2077 was already delayed several times.
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Re: Shorter, worse games? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's been done before. A few games succeed with this formula (Team Fortress 2) while many others have been abysmal failures (Ultima IX, Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana). Or you can look at the bizarre situation with Star Citizen/Squad 42 to understand why you don't throw money at a game dev effort ad infinitum.
If game devs only ever had one platform target could ever target without shifting technology, that might be possible. That doesn't work in the real world. Platforms change, APIs change, expectations change. If you don't set some kind of a deadline, shops quickly lose momentum, get caught up in useless feature creep, and miss even the most-lenient targets. Big-money publishers make things worse by driving deadlines like slavers. They could ease up a bit, but they've seen what happens when dev houses have a too-lenient set of deadlines. Publishers with any sort of memory are determined not to allow that to happen again.
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Movies still have larger budgets and development times measured in years. They just allow themselves to take longer or have more hands involved. They outsource pieces to effects houses. It's true that programming can't always benefit from more hands, but a good game will still be good a year or two later.
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Keep in mind that AAA is entirely subjective and companies would fight tooth and nail to prevent it from being given an objective and measurable definition.
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Tell that to yourself the next time you compare something like Hollow Knight to the latest Call of Duty franchise. You can spot the differences, and the stakes involved.
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A company with billions of dollars doesn't stake anything at all.
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Call of Duty Advanced Warfare would like a word with you.
. . . and so would Fallout 76.
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Yes I'm sure they lost a lot of money on those but they still exist and continue to exist because they make loads of money off MTX bullshit.
Absolutely Not (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely Not (Score:5, Informative)
No, not really.
"Direction," in the creative arts, is dealing with the artistic and visual product, not "directing" the below-management workers who do the behind the scenes work. They deal with the look, the way the actors perform, and how the story unfolds.
The word you're looking for is "Producer."
Some directors also produce, but that's not the issue here.
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Yeah, I'd agree that 'best direction' in a game should focus on how the story was put together, how the game art and story combine, how the characters are portrayed and feel.
The director in the game can't even be blamed if there are continual changes to the game's story, or rewrites of major scenes/interactions; that's a management issue, and separate to the final product.
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Part of me thinks that heavy crunch times should bar the game from getting any awards. Abusive labour practices should not be rewarded.
On the other hand though the individuals may be deserving of an award for their work and it seems a little unfair to deny them because of the actions of others, probably their managers. Maybe banning awards is the lesser of two evils though.
Just to funny to be real (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Just to funny to be real (Score:2)
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"I want to keep paying my employees until their productivity goes negative," says no actual capitalist.
Is this a game-industry only thing? (Score:2)
I've heard so many times about devs at game companies crunching, burning out, etc..., but I don't recall an instance where any other type of development had the same level of, shall we say, "abuse", of its developers (expecting constant overtime, etc.)
I've heard of some people putting in 80 hour weeks to finish up (non-game) products, but more often than not, those working that hard were doing it more out of passion for their work, rather than feeling forced to do it...
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Actually it seems to be endemic to "the Valley" and any corporate entity that trys to emulate the valley - for some examples see the recent book 'Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World' from Clive Thompson [amazon.com] where he documents this kind of crushing workload from Twitter to Facebook to Netscape. Thompson suggests that this is a self-regulating and self-actuating behavior on the part of "Coders" because of the experiences and traits that make for a 'good' programmer. He's pretty spot on
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Actually it seems to be endemic to "the Valley" and any corporate entity that trys to emulate the valley - for some examples see the recent book 'Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World' from Clive Thompson [amazon.com] where he documents this kind of crushing workload from Twitter to Facebook to Netscape. Thompson suggests that this is a self-regulating and self-actuating behavior on the part of "Coders" because of the experiences and traits that make for a 'good' programmer. He's pretty spot on about a lot of it, and its an entertaining thought.
Thanks, I'll check out that book.
Re:Is this a game-industry only thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many modern workers are salary. I work for a German company, and my engineering counterparts over there are hourly. Specifically they are contracted for 37.5 hours a week. There is hell to pay if someone works over the daily limit (10 hours, but I might be wrong). Some of the limits lead to odd behavior, but it is very rare that they work a weekend. Working a Sunday requires authorization up at the senior VP level and is paid double time. Far more people there seem to have lives outside their work-lives than here.
Companies will pull any lever available to be more productive, and if hours past 40 are free, why not? A company would be stupid not to wring every last iota of free hours from employees if it is legal and all their competitors are doing the same. Poor managers would immediately stick out if their OT numbers were above average. Project managers would have to think twice about their budgets before flogging workers into long hours.
As such, we need many more workers to be non-exempt (even the wording assumes your are exempt from overtime until proven otherwise). If all companies had to pay overtime it would not put the moral ones at a disadvantage.
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TLOU2 was made in California.
Overtime after eight hours, double after 12. More overtime after 40 hours in a week. A six day week of twelve hour days ends up paying more than double the base pay. They don't get that time for "free."
The only people at that studio who weren't making serious overtime were the management folks - and they get much, much better pay, bonuses when the game ships,along with lots of perks and extra time off after the game ships.
So no, "hours past 40" are NOT free. If a company tries t
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I'm not familiar with California employment law, but US federal law permits "Exempt" employees above a certain salary [dol.gov] and classification like "professionals" (used to be doctors and lawyers but now most engineers are included) , most at-will states have similar regulations. So no, you dont get overtime pay after 40 hours if you are classified as a professional.
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Hourly and contract workers aren't exempt.
So no, they don't get to dodge that by pretending their exempt workers, and no, they didn't.
California's laws about exempt workers are even more stringent than the rest of the country, so no, those programmers, graphics artists, animators, et cetera are NOT exempt from overtime.
It was just bad reporting from places like Kotaku that led people to think those "crunch workers" weren't getting paid overtime.
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Is this just a hunch or do you have a citation for this?
Agreed,
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Mod parent down: CA salaried employees ARE exempt from OT (as long as certain conditions are met, which basically boils down "Is this 'white collar' work?", which development is classed as.
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I took a (theoretical) pay cut at my current employer to move to a non-exempt role. Best move I ever made. I now get overtime, double overtime, and need explicit permission to work said overtime. Otherwise, it's tools down at 16:00, tidy up the work area and timesheets, and out the door by 16:30.
That said, when we actually travel to the job site, we'll work our asses off; putting in 130+ hours in 10 days straight. But that sweet, sweet overtime makes it worthwhile. Despite the pandemic, I've made up most of
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I've heard so many times about devs at game companies crunching, burning out, etc..., but I don't recall an instance where any other type of development had the same level of, shall we say, "abuse", of its developers (expecting constant overtime, etc.)
I've heard of some people putting in 80 hour weeks to finish up (non-game) products, but more often than not, those working that hard were doing it more out of passion for their work, rather than feeling forced to do it...
I worked for a startup that expected 80+ hours every week and 100 at crunch time. They had a turnover rate of over 30% but you can always hire kids right out of college with no life to put in that work. I believe they expected developers not to have wives/husbands and if they did then they had better not have kids and if they did have kids the spouse should take care of them.
Re: Is this a game-industry only thing? (Score:2)
Yes, Next Question (Score:2)
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Technically sure. It's also easy to distribute a feature length film (upload it to YouTube) or distribute a newspaper (get a URL and an OSS CRM). Those aren't the issues. Getting noticed in a crowded field is a real problem that requires marketing dollars and luck (and often, marketing dollars means the ability to try several things to increase the luck component)
Not the problem (Score:2)
Start by not giving "best direction" to a direction-less game.
Who cares about game awards? (Score:2)
The profit is all the companies care about and if all their devs quit they'd be able to rehire in a week.
These "Best Direction" awards only go to games which basically are just third-rate novels dressed up with some 30-year-old game play and state-of-the-art blood splatters.
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third-rate novels are just 500+ year old stories retold with characters in different clothing.
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These "Best Direction" awards only go to games which basically are just third-rate novels dressed up with some 30-year-old game play and state-of-the-art blood splatters.
Nicely put. I agree, it's frustrating when large chunks of the industry talk about pushing boundaries, being brave and heaping praise on a story based game that is frankly just shit to play, and would be better made as a movie.
Except that nobody would make the movie, because the story isn't good enough and it'd bomb.
Somehow gamers are expected to accept this. Bollocks to that. If you want to interest me in the story, go Witcher III level story telling, or To The Moon. Do not write some schlocky bollocks tha
easy solution: (Score:2)
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First came across this at Psygnosis in the 90s (Score:4, Interesting)
My friend was living with his girlfriend. Most of the devs were single at that time. When they asked for the effort it was collective rewards, collective punishment. So if the single devs put in insane hours but the game still failed to be out on time because he wanted to have a life and see his girlfriend...tough, everyone involved got no bonus. So of course this goes to peer pressure and it just carries on and on.
Sad to hear it in the same state, 30 years later.
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It's not just video games too.
The Romans built award-winning architecture too (Score:2)
And it was produced with similar methods.
The award is best direction, not best Proj. Mangmt (Score:3)
I agree with the comdemnation of the Crunch culture in general, and game studios in particular. I had my share of crunch management in a different are (telco), so I can empathize.
But the award is for best direction, as in film direction, since many games nowadays are interactive movies of sorts. So, why deprive an artistic visionaire of an award because a crappy PM did not do the PERT/CPM study in a correct fashion, and some lame ass manager did never read "The mythical man-month"?
In any case, include in the game awards some Razzies style prizes/categories like: "worst project management", "modern slavery studio award", "Vaporuware of the year", and such. They will not dare not go, lest they miss the big prize, but at the risk of being called out to pick up the razzies too.
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Because a director is the final authority, and is responsible for everything that happens. It's "the buck stops here" logic.
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Bollocks are they.
A games company is a business, and the people running that business have an obligation to their staff. If they neglect that duty it's on them, not the creative director.
Yes, that may mean sacking the creative director. Comically all of the feedback on the game from outside the industry suggests that would've led to a better game too.
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Yes, and a movie studio head outranks a director too. But on set, they are the boss. Similarly, the director of the game studio has people outside that studio they answer to.
No one clarified director with "the creative director"
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What fucking director? The award is for 'best game direction', that could be an entire team of creatives.
The 'director' could be the game's sole fucking developer.
It's a nonsense classification and pretending that the creative people in charge of the game's look and feel must also be accountable for its schedule and budget is fucking ridiculous.
Direction is not Project Management (Score:2)
The programmers and devs need to say, en masse, "Tell me where your lack of planning is my responsibility". Will they all get fired? Maybe, but word gets around and they won't be able to hire anyone else.
Crunch is an absurd notion; how can you expect quality output from exhausted people? Have these studios quantified how much this really costs them in employee turnover, productivity, re-training, etc.? The answer is no, and
Wrong question. (Score:2)
Who gives a shit what you think? What are the criteria for "Best Direction?" That's all that matters. AFAIK, the prize is for the game as provided, not anything which happened behind the scenes. Don't try to pull politics or other externalities into it. If you think that matters, work to change the criteria.
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I'm just curious. Are you unable to recognize that the argument presented is "the criteria for Best Direction should include lack of crunch". Do you really think the article is saying the already stated criteria are being misapplied? Do you also think that statements like "people who smoke weed shouldn't go to jail" are expressing a desire for lack of enforcement of the law as opposed to changing the law?
Unions (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Film unions already dealth with these problems (Score:2)
stop buying them (Score:2)
There's one simple way for it all to change: game purchasers have to give a damn about the people who construct the games, and simply refuse to buy them until there are verifiable reports of humane working conditions at the game factories.
Buy indie games, or get a life away from the platform for a while.
Of course, I've never met a gamer who gave a damn about anything but bragging rights, so it's not going to change.
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"Sorry, you sweated blood to get this game out of the door, you sacrificed family and social life to finish it on time, and although the game is excellent and something of which you should be proud I'm not going to buy it, because I don't like that you worked hard on it."
Yeah, that's going to help them with their bonus.
"Best" doesn't mean it's not shit. (Score:2)
I thought of a comparison to the paralympics, like that one joke... but didn't want to insult disabled people. They may be disabled, but they sure aren't games industry games retarded.
Annd now you know why they are shit.
Turns our the end goals of good art xreation and of profit making are mutually exclusive opposites. Be it superhero movies, Call of Duty games, Jistin Bieber music or Twighlight books.
Clearly not just the game industry (Score:2)
I spent many years working at design agencies - both print and digital.
Many of them operated under exactly the same pressures.
There were multiple reasons for this, not only bad management.
One of the main reasons was the level of competition these companies work under.
Some of them may only be relatively small agencies, but in order to survive, they have to fish in the same waters as the larger agencies.
They have half the staff and half the resources, yet are striving to achieve the same result or better - in
Superior techniques (Score:2)
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This is the same as the Apple slavery story. (Score:2)
No one actually cares as long as they get what they want/paid for.
Apple does the PR dance so do these companies, all is forgotten in less than a day thanks to the news cycle being constant now.
Game Advertisement show NOT Awards show (Score:2)
This cringefest continued this year showing trailing after trailer with almost no gameplay.
Everyone is calling it The Game Advertisement Show [youtube.com] due to the constant obnoxious trailers.
Also, Ghost of Tsushima only winning ONE award was complete bullshit -- it was WAY better received then the clusterfuck of The Last of Us Part II.
The eSports categories was also a complete joke / circlejerk.
Games Industry Crunch. (Score:2)
So many people with this idea that Crunch is some kind of Indentured Servitude or the virtual enslavement of Post Industrial Workers circa 1890s.
Unlike building a road, which as a pretty standard formula, a game has occasions where a perfectly valid solution does not meet the ever changing requirements. Often, you don't know that there is an issue until the work has completed and you have to make the decision to take another go at it.
Games are less like roads and are more like a work of fine art. Its only d
Re:Please keep things separate (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's hard work, long hours, and you get paid more because you're working more (something that's often left out of the fainting spells over "crunch time").
A lot of people DO like doing that sort of thing. They like the challenge, they love the work, and they really adore the big extra piles of money for overtime.
And here's the important part: If you don't like the job, quit. Take that last big check and walk away. You're not a slave. If you DO think you're a slave, you've got other issues to deal with first.
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Games are not an essential item. Sacrifices are not justified
Just for grins and giggles lets make the reductio-ad-absurdum argument - "movies are not an essential item" - "sculptures are not an essential item" - "books are not an essential item" - "paintings are not an essential item" - "broadway shows are not an essential item"...
All of the above have some sacrifice in them for the 'great' works - Kubrick, Rodin, Hemingway, Van Gough, Lin Manel Miranda, all of these creators would beg to differ about the necessity of sacrifice for works of art.
Perhaps a better argum
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Games, maybe not, but quarterly bonuses to a C-level executive? That's communion. They'd (rather) die without their sacrament (or work you to death for that fractional stock percent gain, more appropriately).
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They do. And minimum wage at the professional level is well over half-a-million a year. They have off seasons. They can retire early - it's well known that the human body cannot sustain that for decades.
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If the Last of Us appears to be the best directed game/quote.
Ah, about that..