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| [Dec 21, 2010, 11:53 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments |
Eurogamer.net has details from a now-removed blog post ( still cached) written by Zero Dean, apparently a former Rockstar employee who allegedly served as Senior Environment Artist on Red Dead Redemption. The blog described how pressure on the developers from management amplified as the project progressed, with unpaid overtime steadily increasing, leading to him catching flack from above after commenting on the situation in email that turned out to have been monitored. He says he eventually left when a boss took credit for some of his work. "And thank you Rockstar," he wrote. "You taught me exactly how I don't want to run a business or treat employees (or human beings) ever." Thanks Joao.
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Re: Ex-Rockstar Dev Speaks Out? |
Dec 21, 2010, 16:24 |
ASeven |
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Beamer wrote on Dec 21, 2010, 16:10:
considering that many developers do tend to work like slaves and stay quiet about it maybe those overtime pays and bonuses are not as common as we may think they are.
In my experience you tend to get people at most video game companies that have two things true of them. First, they really love what they do. Many stay late hours because they enjoy it. Some developers actually lock the doors at a certain hour to make sure people leave. It's not that they have to much to do, it's that they're nerds that truly love this stuff, are insanely good at it, and love proving how good they are by getting a lot done. Developing is like that in the right environment. For me it was always exhilarating competition or it completely sucked - no in-between.
The other thing true of many of them is they work best with that deadline. I'd say this board is fairly representative of the type of people that would end up making games. Think back to college. When did you do your best work? Was it in the hours before the project was due? Did you end up blowing things like sleep and other classes to get something done? In other words, did you crunch yourself? I sure did. Granted it was the result of bad project management over myself, but even later in life when I got better at it I still did my best and most inspired work during crunch. That's when things would begin to shine.
You can't avoid that. Something done without that fire, by people coming in 9-5 like a routine, ends up without that passion.
But part of that means that crunch needs to be the exception, something that happens in the last 10-20% of a lifecycle, rather than the rule.
I'll use an anecdotal evidence and use myself to counterpoint your argument of working under pressure. I worked at university better when I was doing stuff alone and without pressure. I still do. I work well under pressure, and boy in my line of work we do have pressure, but me and many of my colleagues worked and work best in a relaxed environment, which is why I went freelancer to begin with.
Now that's an anecdotal evidence as it comes and you are right in that you work in the gaming industry, any crunch-heavy industry, because you tend to love what you do, a lot. However, having said that, different people react differently to pressure. Some work better with it, some crack. I don't believe for a single second the majority of developers actually work better under pressure, or enjoy working under the tremendous pressure of a deadline of delivering a finished game. That goes beyond loving what you do and gets into doing it because you fear the alternative. True, many do it because they truly love it. Reading On The Edge, the book about Commodore's history, that feeling is ever so present like when the C64 was created and the engineers made the Commodore HQs their literal home just to finish the project. However I think that there's working under pressure, and there's working under brutal pressure without rewards, without incentives and with a very fucked up corporate culture.
The reason so many indies are springing up is not only because the PC market can handle them due to the disregard of the publishers, I personally don't even think that's the main reason. I think there's so many indies because the veteran developers who got burnt by the industry are ever increasing and rather take their chances going alone by themselves, and the younger generation is reading, seeing and sometimes even living the working conditions of the industry and rather go alone for themselves than work under a publisher.
The gaming industry is fucked up, due to a variety of causes, but mainly due because they don't learn from mistakes and are unable to adapt to new markets or working conditions, like all the entertainment industry. The consequences are that right now amongst circles of financial analysts, they all agree that the gaming industry is right now the most brutal industry to work in. |
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