Amazon Can Make Just About Anything -- Except a Good Video Game (bloomberg.com) 97
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, which is "based on interviews with more than 30 current and former Amazon employees, most of whom spoke under the condition of anonymity citing fears of litigation or career repercussions." From the report: Mike Frazzini had never made a video game when he helped start Amazon Game Studios. Eight years later, he has released two duds, withdrew both from stores after a torrent of negative reactions and canceled many more. For a company that dominates countless areas of retail, consumer electronics and enterprise computing, the multiple failures in gaming show one realm that may be impervious toAmazon.com's distinctive business philosophy. It tried to make games the Amazon way, instead of simply making games people would want to play.
Frazzini is an Amazon lifer who came up in the books section of the website, where he endeared himself to Jeff Bezos as a manager there. Conventional wisdom inside the company is that if you can run one business, you can run any other. Amazon's deep financial resources certainly help. As head of the games division, Frazzini has acquired established development studios and pushed the company to spend nearly $1 billion for the live video streaming website Twitch. Frazzini recruited some of the top names in the video game industry, including creators of the critically acclaimed franchises EverQuest and Portal, as well as executives fromElectronic Arts Inc.and other big publishers.
Then, according to numerous current and former employees of Frazzini's game studios, he ignored much of their advice. He frequently told staff that every Amazon game needed to be a "billion-dollar franchise" and then understaffed the projects, they say. Instead of using industry-standard development tools, Frazzini insisted Amazon build its own, which might have saved the company money if the software ever worked properly. Executives under Frazzini initially rejected charges that New World, an Amazon game that would ask players to colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans, was racist. They relented after Amazon hired a tribal consultant who found that the portrayal was indeed offensive, say two people who worked on the project. The game, previously planned for release last year, is now scheduled for this spring.
Frazzini is an Amazon lifer who came up in the books section of the website, where he endeared himself to Jeff Bezos as a manager there. Conventional wisdom inside the company is that if you can run one business, you can run any other. Amazon's deep financial resources certainly help. As head of the games division, Frazzini has acquired established development studios and pushed the company to spend nearly $1 billion for the live video streaming website Twitch. Frazzini recruited some of the top names in the video game industry, including creators of the critically acclaimed franchises EverQuest and Portal, as well as executives fromElectronic Arts Inc.and other big publishers.
Then, according to numerous current and former employees of Frazzini's game studios, he ignored much of their advice. He frequently told staff that every Amazon game needed to be a "billion-dollar franchise" and then understaffed the projects, they say. Instead of using industry-standard development tools, Frazzini insisted Amazon build its own, which might have saved the company money if the software ever worked properly. Executives under Frazzini initially rejected charges that New World, an Amazon game that would ask players to colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans, was racist. They relented after Amazon hired a tribal consultant who found that the portrayal was indeed offensive, say two people who worked on the project. The game, previously planned for release last year, is now scheduled for this spring.
... or a successful phone (Score:3)
N/T
Amazon can maybe sell just about anything. (Score:3)
"Making just about anything" is a bit more challenging and pretty far from what Amazon does. Please put context on your statements, otherwise they are ridiculous and uninformative.
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They are good at sticking their logo on shit and underpaying their workers, yes.
Re: Amazon can maybe sell just about anything. (Score:2)
So... basically China
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Amazon will never be able to produce a game, because it's entire philosophy is backwards for it.
I'll name three games that Amazon, absolutely could have done, had it been paying attention:
1) Fortnite/PUBG - A Multiplayer battle royale. What sucks about the existing game? It's not a persistant world, they're buried in garbage microtransactions, and the business model is not significantly different from Gacha games.
2) Among Us - Now here's a game that is just asking for a "better" version, and Amazon has all
Re: Amazon can maybe sell just about anything. (Score:2)
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Indeed, it's worth pointing out that Amazon has made very little. About the only successful thing they make is datacenters, cloud software, and warehouses. Everything else is either bought from another company or resold from other sellers. By all accounts all the other things they've made have also been incredibly poor. They buy movies and TV series for their Prime service, but what they made, the app, is just utter trash to what even Disney managed to put out recently with no effort. While Netflix is linin
Kindle is decent (Score:2)
I'm unsure whether Amazon made the Kindle or just rebranded something, but I would add this to the list of Amazon's successes.
Re: Kindle is decent (Score:2)
You gotta be more specific because of branding
Kindle e-reader
Kindle Fire / Fire HD
Fire TV
See how they use part of one name to introduce the other?
The Kindle Fire is just andriod with the store app hijacked to amazon. The original kindle e-reader is a great product. Ive been using them for nearly 2 decades since gen-2. I have had the same Voyager since voyager first released. I have found nothing better for reading books while working out on fitness ellipticals and bikes. I dont know if they copied the Nook
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True, Amazon did make the original Kindle. Though every attempt to advance that from its original design has failed (Kindle Fire anyone?)
Re: Amazon can maybe sell just about anything. (Score:2)
The man in high castle was a decent show. I did not care for electric dreams as much. It was trying too hard to be Black Mirror instead of merely inserting itself in the world Decker lived in.
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The man in high castle was a decent show.
Only the first season and a half.
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It was trying too hard to be Black Mirror
And that's fundamentally the problem with modern day Amazon, they are a me-too company driven by a me-too CEO.
ebay sells stuff online - Amazon (book company at the time): me too!
Netflix streams shows - Amazon: me too!
Netflix starts becoming a movie studio - Amazon: me too!
Shops sell groceries - Amazon: me too!
Google introduces cloud gaming - Amazon: me too!
Android tablets start selling - Amazon: me too!
Dropbox introduces cloud storage - Amazon: me too!
James Cameron goes to the bottom of the ocean - Bezos: m
To be fair they don't make bad video games (Score:2)
I can't imagine Amazon's corporate culture fits well with video games. In the old days they'd just buy 3 or 4 AA studios until one of them worked out (and survived the takeover). But there's so few AA studios that's not really an option anymore.
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EA bought them one by one and snuffed them out, like a serial killing pimp.
Re: To be fair they don't make bad video games (Score:2)
No shortage of Electronic Arts developers that got bought up by EA and shit out later to make a spreadsheet look more profitable. The article said they were smart enough to gobble them up, they just did not listen. Typical corporate upper-middle management shit. Worse than teenagers that think they fucking know everything.
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It's their culture (Score:5, Interesting)
Their culture is not one where something artful can survive. They can achieve excellence only through their engineering, but anything art-related they will fail at.
One anecdote of the core of their culture (they've moved away from this lately, but it's still in their DNA):
There once was a time when a new batch of warehouse workers would be hired, their trainer would lead the group to the first place they were going to teach the group something. When they arrived, the trainer would fire the person that arrived last immediately and in front of the group.
Also Bezos is a human turd.
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I dunno, that sounds pretty awesome. At the end of the day you end up with a bunch of warehouse workers with the get-up-and-go of a Gurkha on PCP.
On second thought, that would explain the condition of a lot of books I've ordered.
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They can achieve excellence only through their engineering
That's not quite true either. They are excellent at process. Basically following orders and building orders to be followed.
Re: It's their culture (Score:2)
Polished human turd. As evident by his shiny chrome-dome.
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If you've ever been through Amazon's interview process, you'll know it kicks out all outliers. Originally, it was meant to make sure they were only hiring people who "raised the bar", but the risk-adverse way in which they have implemented their screening means that they won't consider ANYONE who's a little different. And creative people tend to be a little different.
Bezos is from an era when Jack Welch's management principals were considered gospel.
Amazon just copies. (Score:5, Insightful)
What Amazon does is find successful items that are being sold in their marketplace, copy them, and then sell them at a lower price until they run their competitor out of business. What they are finding out is that this model does not work with video games because what matters in video games is that the game is fun. A fun game can have bad graphics and still be fun but a boring game with great graphics is still going to be boring.
Maybe they will figure out how to identify how to make fun games but if the past is prologue then they are going to destroy what makes it fun by monetizing to death with micro-transactions. Alternatively, they may go the addictive gameplay route which isn't really fun but is useful for bleeding money out of people.
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Re: Amazon just copies. (Score:2)
So basically Amazon is out China-ing... China?
Re: Amazon just copies. (Score:3)
as it turns out Amazon has looked to China for inspiration a few times,. That comes from someone who worked in their fulfillment sector.
Sounds familiar (Score:1)
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Really? IIRC Mark came from managing game dev at a mobile phone company, and he didn't interfere excessively in the actual game design (with the obvious exception of Dungeon Assault, which was always going to get made because it was his idea and design).
Or was the FunOrb mention a red herring and you were referring to bringing in a CEO from PayPal so that Andrew could focus on engine improvements?
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Ah, my bad: I shouldn't have counted the bit before the blockquote as the first paragraph. I thought you were referring to "Conventional wisdom inside the company is that if you can run one business, you can run any other" rather than "He frequently told staff that every Amazon game needed to be a 'billion-dollar franchise' and then understaffed the projects, they say. Instead of using industry-standard development tools, Frazzini insisted Amazon build its own".
Yes, the target launch frequency of new FunOrb
They're successful with one title (Score:1)
Grand Wage Auto-Theft
Their Crytek fork was only part of the problem (Score:5, Informative)
I have kind of a unique view of Amazon Game Studios: I have good friends (former coworkers) who were working on Crucible for years, and I personally was involved with Intensity and another project (Sculpin) as an art outsource contracting manager (I ran the art team tasks day-to-day and was the US point of contact for the Amazon team). We all lived the stupidity that was Lumberyard, in various ways.
We'll start with Sculpin.
It was a beautiful pack of concept art that, after one meeting talking with the project lead, was clearly doomed to never be more than concept art. They were going to build concept art until the sun burned out because I think they were scared to move to production. It was a fish-or-cut-bait paralysis that literally stopped a project that would have been freaking gorgeous and a blast to play, from what I could see. That's a management failure.
Then there was Intensity.
Intensity was, frankly, a terrible ripoff of both PUBG and Rainbow 6: Siege. They literally sent us screenshots from those games as reference to make props and environment art. When they handed us a batch of environment asset reference to start working on, I pointed out that there weren't any technical specs included. Apparently that was deliberate: they didn't have any. Why? They hadn't been able to nail down a quality bar sample or technical proof-of-concept reference asset that they liked. They were literally spending tens of thousands of dollars when they weren't even sure what they were ordering from the outsource house. There were also... expectation issues, on the technical side, with what certain pipelines could do. My favorite example: "we want this tree done in about 4000 triangles and a single texture. See this reference? We really love how you can see the individual leaves." I had to point out to them that their reference picture was a tree from Ghost Recon: Wildlands, they were showing a superLOD (very up close / high fidelity), and that GR:W used an exceptionally complex and well tuned parametric system for its trees and foliage. They'd busted out Houdini to make it work - as one of my buddies put it, "when you get Houdini out, you're done screwing around." I was stunned at the Dom Perignon dreams on a beer budget that they were casually asking other people to make happen for them.
I can't speak to Crucible in great detail other than... I heard, repeatedly from my friends on the team, that everybody saw it coming.
Can we talk about Lumberyard for a minute?
If you're going to fork an engine, fork a good one. Don't fork the one that was good a few times for a while, years back, and then went bankrupt because it was a pain in the ass to use. Especially don't fork it and then burn all your dev budget and schedule bolting stuff to it that is actually meant to sell your parent corps' cloud services, instead of making a game.
Lumberyard is junk. It's an old Cryengine build that's missing basic features, like artists assembling materials without breaking open HLSL, but hey - it can live stream on Twitch, and scale microtransactions, and pipe your studio gobs of data about your players with everything down to their shoe size! None of it actually helps a team make a better game; lots of it actually gets in the way. It's literally a Steve Buscemi "how do you do fellow game developers" meme in the form of a CryEngine fork. The sample content is embarassingly bad, the documentation is terrible, the tools are broken, and when we HAD to finally raise some of those issues to Amazon - and we used other engines that work that start with "U" in comparison - they actually cut us off mid sentence and said "we're not allowed to mention those at all here. We can't even reference them internally or install them to compare stuff. The lawyers get involved." It was almost Kafka-esque.
So yeah, there's my "AGS can't make games" stories. I'd tell you not to buy their products, but nobody actually does, so... um, don't bother with Lumberyard even though it's free, it su
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Re:Their Crytek fork was only part of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I forgot the part where the events I described about Intensity were taking place less than 5 months before it was supposed to ship, and it had already been postponed at least once.
Like... I've shipped games on PC and Xbox with first and third party development teams. I shipped an XBone launch title - I've seen some shit. If you're still in haphazard preproduction to the point where you don't have basic tech spec for art assets down to where you're underhandedly trying to get outsource houses to make your quality bar on their dime, and you're still using screenshots of other games to build placeholder assets in a mad scramble to have something you can play, and you're supposed to ship in 5 months? My advice to my fellow artists on your team is to start looking for work then, not in 5 months.
I still want to see Sculpin. It was a little bit No Man's Sky, a little bit Avatar, a little bit Destiny, and a lot of golden age scifi art. Lots of Chris Foss, Peter Elson, Roger Dean, and other greats were all showing their DNA in the art style. Even if it bombed as a gameplay experience it would have been eye candy.
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Do you think they were out to rip you guys off, or were just so incompetent that that they didn't realized how ridiculous the request was?
Re: Their Crytek fork was only part of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I think their environment and the Amazon culture actively destroyed good judgement and perspective in the context of making games.
These were not people who came out of the cloud services or warehouse dept, they had shipped games before in the industry. But the biz culture and studio pressure forces they were under were kind of like Newspeak in 1984: they actively removed the ability to do things outside a narrow band of accepted thoughts and actions. Unfortunately for Amazon, there's no overlap between what they could do, and how you make a game well.
With the tree example, they just kind of plowed ahead even though there was an insurmountable gulf between what they asked for and what they could get with the resources they were willing to devote.
I ended up bailing on the project at that point, I had health issues come up... I got chronically sick of dealing with their shit.
(I also had pneumonia.)
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re New World : I have been in the Alpha test for about six months now and it is actually a pretty good game. Sure there are issues to address and more content to add, but it is really shaping up with the crafting release two weeks ago. If they keep on the current path, it will be a very successful game. Was there ever a MMO that released on time?
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Kinda interesting that Lumberyard's Wikipedia Page [wikipedia.org] can only list 8 games associated with it, of which two are "Cancelled" and three have released dates "TBA"...
Literally the only title of note there is "Star Citizen"... but I'm not sure if that counts as a game or the world's longest-running confidence trick. I honestly don't think SC is ever going to fully release; it's just going to be perpetually in development.
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Eh... Star Citizen is like the Winchester House, the team will probably die of old age before it's finished.
My understanding is that they migrated to Lumberyard from CryEngine 3 simply because Lumberyard was forked from a newer codebase of CryTek and was owned by a company that could actually afford to have somebody return emails. Crytek was going through a very rough patch financially - it's part of how Amazon even got Lumberyard as a fully-owned fork of Cryengine in the first place.
I also suspect that Cl
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And I appreciate that I am not comparing like-for-like here... but I remember when Frontier Development turned to Kickstarter for funds to develop Elite Dangerous [and I am still generally very cynical when profitable companies turn to Kickstarter for funding like this].
Frontier pulled in something like £1.5 million [they're a UK company, so their campaign was in Pounds, not Dollars] for Elite... at a time when Cloud Imperium were at around the $100 million mark [Star Citizen has now rais
Re:Their Crytek fork was only part of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Game dev here. I had a friend who worked at Amazon Game Studios and sadly everything you said about Lumberyard is 100% correct.
Amazon failed the FIRST rule of game development:
PROTOTYPE it!
If your game with placeholder art and sound isn't fun then what makes you think the full game with high res textures will make a difference??
Function THEN Form for game play.
Re:Their Crytek fork was only part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Their obsession with their own culture and process basically prevents them from effectively iterating on something emtional, aesthetic, or intangible. If I have to write a six page pitch on why we should tweak a bunch of colors, distances, and values to make something a little more fun, and I'm still not sure what the final values need to be... guess what isn't probably happening?
But I think it goes deeper than that with Lumberyard. Lumberyard is a fundamental mistake as a venture and as a product, and it has basically smothered their internal studios because of it. The problem with Lumberyard is Amazon took something that was already only borderline useful (an old Crytek fork), and added a bunch of stuff to it that was meant to help sell AWS. They committed the single biggest mistake of sales: they tried to sell what THEY wanted customers (users) to buy, not what the CUSTOMERS wanted. And when you're mandating your own engine, your own devs and artists are also customers.
Even Microsoft figured that out - when I was there for a couple projects on Xbox games using in-house engines, we had tools teams that served the art teams directly so we could actually get stuff done and work smoothly. They were basically at our beck and call to work on the pipeline interface between artists and the engine so we were using the engine, not fighting it. A couple tech artists with a month of work under the control of a few art leads (char, env, anim) could potentially make Lumberyard usable. Maybe.
Part of me sometimes wants to call Amazon and tell them "leave a message for Bezos that when he's ready to stop losing money on AGS and actually get results, call me and I'll fix the org for him." But then I'd be working at Amazon, y'know?
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100% agreed. Fantastic analysis and summary!
You've probably seen this story about iPod engineer Tony Fadell [slashdot.org] commenting about the differences in how Apple vs Philips approach products. That is, how Apple products are designed to ship from day zero. Looks like Amazon failed to learn the lesson from Philips and pay attention to what Apple was doing. Here are some interesting quotes:
Let me guess (Score:3)
It tried to make games the Amazon way,
Oh, I played that game. I spent a long time in a maze of UI, configuring a ton of different options trying to get them to all connect to each other for the right flow through power levels to gameplay. It was all configuration, configuration, and more configuration. There are tools available to help with the configuration, but you have to configure them to get them to work. In fact, they have people whose entire job is to get the configuration right. But in the end, everything can connect to each other and it is truly a baroque work of art. I felt satisfied playing this AWS game.
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A maze of twisty little passages? Are you suggesting that they copied Adventure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
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Oh yes. I wonder whether AWS is a complicated hellbeast because nothing gets deprecated (which is nice), a lot of edge cases I don't understand, or they don't care about complexity because they expect everyone using AWS to get AWS certified in 20 things and be an AWS-only engineer.
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I wonder whether AWS is a complicated hellbeast because nothing gets deprecated (which is nice),
It's not because of that, the older stuff tends to be more natural and usable than the newer stuff.
The AWS complication is entirely driven by PMs. They have product managers who want to make a list of things they helped build in the quarter, and project managers who only care that the requirements are filled. The end result is that even if it takes a user 30 clicks in the UI to get something done, then it counts as a feature that has been built, and the PMs get full credit. The engineers feel like they've h
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I would add that I don't think the engineers at Amazon really believe a lot of the features they make are useful. They are driven by sales and marketing teams, not by engineering. The engineering team recommends using a specific set of AWS technologies [youtube.com], and if you stay within those lines then AWS is really great and usable.
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Thanks, that's interesting. They recommend Cognito, which scares me. Data and APIs can be migrated. AWS owning your user authentication seems to be 100% lockin. Any thoughts?
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I agree with you (although I think there are ways to migrate away from Cognito). I was presenting the core set that the Amazon engineers see as useful, not the set I would recommend using. I would recommend using a subset of those tools. For example, unless you really don't have the skillset on your team, I would administer your own DB.
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Hmm.. interesting that you chose administer our own DB. For me, anything not hosted on a box locally (which some intranet DBs are) is a cloud-hosted DB. So there doesn't seem much value to me in administering it myself. I'm the one who administers it, so I don't think I'm a huge value add, but does AWS charge an insane amount for the privilege? I was literally considering migrating a database to their SQL as a way to avoid having to worry about scaling for a while. We're having some growing pains (in u
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I was literally considering migrating a database to their SQL as a way to avoid having to worry about scaling for a while.
You can try it, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. It basically doesn't give you as much flexibility in options, for example, RDS only runs in one region so if the region goes down you're in trouble. (That might not be true any more, double-check because things keep changing). I've heard people complain that the data output flow from RDS is limited, but double-check that. But if you don't have backups or even a single replica, then RDS will definitely be a huge improvement because hardware failure is
Another example... (Score:1)
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Is it? If you don't try then you don't win. Amazon can hardly be called a failure.
What gets me is that such a huge company can have such an utterly shit product search, there have been times in the past when I've left the site in disgust as it offered endless products which weren't what I searched for and weren't what I wanted to the point that I couldn't find the actual product I wanted.
Re:Another example... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Another example... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a failure of government to limit the excesses of capitalism. I'm all in favour of good minimum wage, free health system, free education and safe working conditions. And strong union rights.
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Expecting corporations not to exploit people is like expecting crocodiles not to eat meat. Society judges companies success by how big they get and how much money they make, I didn't make it that way.
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Would appear that Frazinni (Score:2)
TLDR (Score:5, Insightful)
''colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans, was racist''
Someone please tell me what type of mythical inhabitants are acceptable kill foder. Just wondering..
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Someone please tell me what type of mythical inhabitants are acceptable kill foder. Just wondering..
Orcs and Balrogs.
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> Someone please tell me what type of mythical inhabitants are acceptable kill foder
I mean a lot of their enemies are just straight undead. I have no idea what enemies were supposed to look like Indians- I suspect that whatever these were, they were probably monsters with some Indian clothing or style, but that's just a guess as no one seems to have seen anything until the game had been under development quite awhile and presumably after this alleged incident. The current enemy factions seem hardpresse
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Someone please tell me what type of mythical inhabitants are acceptable kill foder. Just wondering..
Have you never played a computer game before? The answer there is typically non-inhabitants, be they mythical or just someone with a skin colour or accent which you can label a terrorist organisation.
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*non-Americans. Wow Autocorrect butchered that one. And by that I mean the autocorrect of the brain where I read the word "inhabitants" while touchtyping.
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Depends whether you ask gamers or games journalists.
Gamers: Whatever the fuck you like, but make it fun.
Games Journalists: White people.
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Without necessarily agreeing with this sentiment, I’d posit that we as a culture generally tolerate xenophobia when we’re dealing with literal extraterrestrials (or really, with any fictional(ish) species, whether that be orcs, goblins, demons, aliens, or something else). Racism, on the other hand, is rarely tolerated. As such, so long as the rightful people of an alien planet don’t resemble a race of humans to such a degree that we cross the line from extraterrestrial xenophobia to racism
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Reminder of the Ford Motor's Edsel automobile (Score:1)
This effort to create a blockbuster game by Amazon reminds me of the Ford Edsel automobile in the late 1950's.
Ford Motor Company did market research, product development, consumer trends, even asked a famous writer for unique names for the new product.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
Of course the rest is history all the research, planning, noting consumer preferences, etc. to create a new car line/division flopped at a cost of $250-million in 1960.
Only time will tell if this new game is a blockbuster and t
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This effort to create a blockbuster game by Amazon reminds me of the Ford Edsel automobile in the late 1950's.
Ford Motor Company did market research, product development, consumer trends, even asked a famous writer for unique names for the new product.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
Of course the rest is history all the research, planning, noting consumer preferences, etc. to create a new car line/division flopped at a cost of $250-million in 1960.
A lot went wrong with Edsel. Ford introduced a car line as the economy weakened, priced it near or above the tier above it, Mercury, and while it performed well needed premium fuel when most cars it was to compete against ran on regular. The target market also shifted to smaller economy cars, with some company with the off name of People's Car introduced the equally odd looking and named Beetle, as well as a minivan in the known as the Bus and the camper version the Westfalia. So the new Edsel was going u
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I disagree, the Edsel did have shoddy workmanship. A recession in the late 1950's, building up the hype that disappointed the public, etc. were also factors.
https://www.liveabout.com/the-... [liveabout.com]
But my point is that Ford spent $250-million to create a new brand, and it fizzled. Amazon is doing all the effort of a great new video game. But like the Ford with the Edsel building up the hype, and having all the experts involved to create a great game, might like the Edsel fail. Some of the great video games like Doo
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I disagree, the Edsel did have shoddy workmanship. A recession in the late 1950's, building up the hype that disappointed the public, etc. were also factors.
https://www.liveabout.com/the-... [liveabout.com]
I don't know if it was any more shoddy than other Ford products of the time; although as any new model might it had some teething problems, including the troublesome early transmissions. We had one for a while, though since my dad was amechanic a lot pf cars rotated through our household and I don't recall any real problems with to versus the other Ameriican cars we had. Most US made cars of that era were pretty poorly made, with rare exceptions. I remember going to the Ford plant and watching them build c
No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep, that's why I won't work there.A hHigh pressure environment with backstabbing as a standard item in the toolkit. Every day is a death march no matter what division you're in.
Fuck that.
When the Amazon recruiters ask if I'd be comfortable working in a "fast-paced, dynamic, ever-changing environment", I say "FUCK NO."
Give me some sleepy little shop where I can fuck off in peace and still get shit done.
No surprise here.... (Score:1)
..Or decent videos (Score:1)
60 hours an week all the time + 80 crush + 100 big (Score:2)
60 hours an week all the time + 80 crush + 100 big crush makes for very bad games.
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I've always wondered what the "crush" shit was all about....will people die if the thing isn't launched on time? Will planes fall from the sky?
It seems like an artificially-unrealistic deadline is set just so they can beat everyone to death with forced OT later.
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This was their mistake: (Score:2)