1. Focus on producing novel content to keep the game interesting, mixing things up enough over weeks/months, but without killing the core mechanics.
2. Hire lots of new employees, all while knowing that the popularity bubble may burst and they may need to be laid off in the near future.
3. Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry.
4. Acknowledge that this lucky streak is unrepeatable, and that if the game falls out of popularity, there is likely no one to blame. But when it happens, the demoralization will hit hard and the layoffs are inevitable.
5. All this, while the company reaps huge profits.
Hah.
I've know a few people on break-away titles(on the level of fortnight for an era) in my time in that industry. In most of those cases the employer or publisher had slipped in some sort of cap in royalties on a per-employee basis. So while their % cut of royalties was in the 7-figures they never saw anything above 6-figures.
Kudos on you for thinking this way but I'd be surprised if most of the people working on Fortnight are seeing more than mid FAANG compensation.
Do FAANG do remote? If so... what's that compensation like?
At least Nintendo and Pixar create new content.
While bonuses can help, expecting them to prevent resentment is, in my opinion, misguided.
2) The actual employees are paid very well via a profit share arrangement. To my understanding, the issue is when contractors are worked like this. I don't believe contractors receive overtime or bonuses.
edit: some below have pointed out contractors do receive overtime.
Note, though, that it received corrective upvotes and is no longer downvoted. That's common, and is one reason why we ask users not to post like you did here. Such posts are not just off-topic distractions, they stick around as uncollected garbage once the thing they're mentioning no longer exists. This is in the guidelines too, so could you please review them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Most of us won't!
Sorry but I'm going to call out bad work practices that run counter to building a better product when I see it regardless of the success.
Crunch destroys lives(remember easpouse?) and has no place in that industry.
I've done it (in games, in 2 other startups, and in finance). I still do it now sometimes when waves of unrelated work all happen to peak near the same time.
Game companies can become successful without abusing programmers who are passionate about making games.
I find that assertion far more remarkable.
you make it sound like this article is nitpicking uncomfortable chairs in the office. they're calling out deplorable working conditions.
So everyone who has to work long hours is just incompetent or new, or new and incompetent, and should just do the same amount of work in less time, duh? That's not how these high-pressure workplaces function. Even if you are a significant contributor and you are technically allowed to opt out of overtime, that doesn't mean everyone won't resent you for it, and that management won't interpret as a 'lack of commitment' when promotion or reviews come around. As a corollary, the recent rise 'unlimited time off' policies have been widely criticized because they often inadvertently contribute to implicit pressures to take less time off than before, because of the resentment, hostility and jealously. I've seen some companies rolling out unlimited time off with mandatory minimums which seems healthier, but I'm unsure how successful it has been.
> they expect you to know what to do with little guidance
Even good engineers need guidance, and guidance and training are especially important when you're doubling and tripling your workforce.
> so it’s something they expect employees to take care of because it’s a unique place, maybe similar to how museum staff look after art work.
This is a super weird analogy and makes no sense to me.
> and you will get fired if you’re not competent and pulling your weight
Where does the article say that Epic shouldn't fire incompetent employees? No one is saying that.
> but that’s the industry they’re in, you can’t have a few people putting everyone else’s livelihood at risk
Your response to a toxic work culture is just 'It is what it is, deal with it'? Don't you think we should have discussions about the human impact and damage caused by these intractable competing interests? And there's almost certainly a financial and business cost, it's just not as obvious to measure.
> So it’s not like some sweat shop, it’s more complex than the article makes it sound.
The article covers both sides pretty thoroughly, there's a litany of quotes from Epic PR addressing the claims and recounting their efforts to resolve them. I understand WHY these pressures exist, and it's clear the Epic want to do everything they can to leverage their transient popularity. But that's not to say they shouldn't be criticized or they shouldn't do better.
The people murdered by warlord funded by blood diamonds didn't really have a choice. Exploited coffee farmers in the third world who barely make enough to survive also don't really have a choice if they want to feed themselves and their families. They can't exactly say "well screw this farm, I'm going to go write code for Morgan Stanley instead".
The 20-something freshly graduated CS engineers who sent their resume to get hired by those big name devs did so willingly and were probably very happy when they got hired. They most likely could've easily gotten a well paying job elsewhere and if their working conditions really become unbearable they'll probably do just that.
Should we still support this bad industry? Probably not and I think you're right to boycott these games, but it's nowhere near comparable to those other things you talked about.
suffering is suffering, you must acknowledge it wherever it happens. people in jobs don't have choices a lot of times either.
(I don't play big companies' (modern) games, because almost always I'm not in target audience and find such games completely unplayable)
A lot of indies directly come from "game jam culture" which celebrates over-taxing developers with crunch "for fun".
Sustainable business practices in the games industry are unlikely to be possible until the industry is much more strongly unionized. At which point it would be more likely for the AAA games to be union shops and/or able to afford unionized workers to work on games.
https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/9/11/4614458/antichamb...
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/267563/The_4_years_of_se...
This might seem ok with outlier games that make the creator super rich, but this thing also happens with smaller titles that have no chance in the market.
At the risk of sounding a bit jaded I don't feel too bad about overworked videogame developers. The vast majority of them can quit at any point and probably land a job in some other sector of the industry, probably with better work conditions and a better salary.
Developers chose to work for these videogame studios. They chose the glamour of being able to say "I wrote some code for GTA V" rather than the comfort and quality of life of being able to say "I write backend code for a flower shop".
But that's not what this is. This is investors and executives who found a money pump and are pumping as hard as they possibly can without any regards for the health and wellbeing of the human machine they're putting pressure on. At some point, you have to give people the time to live their lives outside of work or the world is going to become a worse place. They become stressed and depressed, and it affects their families and friends, and and then has a ripple effect on society.
I did similar after a long drawn out crunch. Decided I was going home at 10pm rather than 11-12(after being in at 8am each day for the last 6 months).
I was branded as 'not a team player' the whole team basically resented me for 'not pulling my weight'.
In summary, fuck that industry.
The real solution is unionization or fresh blood but I don't think it'll happen in the next 5-10 years. Both titles I worked on previously I'm almost dead certain the constant crunch lead to a sub-par game and subsequent poor releases. Until that industry learns that crunch isn't the solution nothing is going to change.
Social pressure, and the lack of interest (or even contempt) the developers have when it comes to unions mostly explains why such abuse is still seen as normal in the industry.
Working hard isn't an issue, but expectations like those in the gaming industry or some startups (like the one I encountered) are unreasonable and it would help if more people voted with their feet. That said, I know a lot of people in gaming have a passion for such.
Manage adequately, hire more people if necessary. There are other solutions that going "welp, we're successful, better work even more hours now".
There's literally no reason for this other than exploiting developers for more money.
I realize that I'm playing the "blame the victim" game and I'm not entirely comfortable with that but in this case it reminds me of that guy who knowingly got in touch with a cannibal to get eaten. If you know what's going to happen and you still on your own free will and without external pressure decide to continue on that path can you really complain that things are exactly how you knew they were going to be?
Are these people coerced in any way to work for these game studios? Were they lied to? Didn't they know that AAA game development is a thankless, soul-crushing task with very tight deadlines and terrible work ethics? Because I remember having almost exactly this conversation with a friend at school more than 15 years ago when he told me he wanted to become a game developer.
Software can be made without forcing people to work insane hours. Other sectors of the programming field accomplish this, yet games companies are somehow incapable? No, they clearly use and abuse people who have a passion for making games.
So now all we have to do is make working "crunch hours" for months illegal, since you don't have the ability to determine what's ethical or not for "successful" companies unless the law literally tells you, apparently.
You are also making the assumption that their continued success is dependent on their toxic work culture, but I don't think that's a given. I'd wager that most people who work the kind of hours that we're discussing are:
a) either no more productive than someone working 40-50 hours, or only marginally more productive b) More likely to make simple/avoidable mistakes, which take time to track down, resolve and waste QA resources c) More likely to quit or have to go medical leave, which increases turnover, which is an enormous cost in development.
Furthermore, the stories of how bad the work place is will discourage potentially skilled applicants, and the longer they let it go on, the more trouble they'll have changing the way they are perceived in the industry.
I'd also wager that if you are constantly in crunch mode like this, it would stifle creativity and possible innovations. No one has the time to play around with new ideas, or try things and fail.
Is that in line with your compensation?
If I worked for a FAANG company, I'd make $300k?
Why doesn't everybody want to work for FAANG companies then?