Comment by 0x500x79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x500x79 | Hacker News Reader

I see that "Vote with your feet" got downvoted in the thread, but it's true. I worked for another one of the large game studios in the US for a long time. The practices employed at the game studio were built around keeping people attached to their jobs because they love video games and loved the games we built. It was weaponized excessively.

Almost every town-hall, all-hands, etc was framed around the product and keeping players happy (we need to deliver this by this date so you have to crunch). The hiring pool was primarily people that played the games we developed and there was some psychological warefare going on that attempted to prevent attrition based on building what you loved.

The quote from the article is: > No one works in the game industry unless they love what they do.

This is pretty true and can be very toxic in your "job". My advice: Don't love what you do for work THAT much. Keep a bit of a disconnect and live your life still. In the modern tech industry you can leave, you can find a job that treats you well, don't make your identity a "video game developer on X game" because that is a recipe for burnout.

The issues that stemmed from this are impossible to outline. People made subpar decisions, dealt with inhumane conditions and harassment, took lower pay, and at the end of the day has caused REAL harm in the industry (suicides, trauma, etc). We need to be better and hold these companies accountable from every aspect of not buying games, not working there, and attempt to make the industry better.

I left my stint at video games and went to a different company. The pay is better, the working conditions are better, my thoughts are not stifled because of internal politics.

The industry has changed quite a bit since 2004. During that time publishers were key and many times deadlines were set by the next "drop" for the publisher, but many of the problems with the industry have stayed around and video games are not worth it.

I also spent time in the industry, and would agree. There are much better industries to work in to make a paycheck, and games can be sustainable if you approach them with an eye towards hobby-scale production. But 20-year-old me would probably still disagree because he lacked for ideas of how to approach a career. It is hard to see your options properly when you're starting out and most "helpful advice" from elders amounts to "I did this and it worked for me(in a completely different economy 30 years ago)" or "the good jobs are in X".

Really, though. The people who do best in games tend to come in with a specific specialty skill that they enjoy and is transferrable, deploy it for a brief tour, then exit. Everyone tasked with arbitrary production-as-a-whole functions gets wrecked at some point. And it doesn't get better at indie scale, because accountability is even lower in a tiny studio, and the producers will tend to achieve results by repeatedly finding new people to do free work, gaslighting them and then tossing them aside when they stop delivering. And if it's a true go-it-alone, then you can end up self-imposing crunch when you sense the game isn't shaping up like it should, and it's easy to stay there indefinitely until you break because game scoping can get out of control so easily.

Like, you can make indie stuff work. I know folks who have. But they have a very tight grasp on the kind of thing they are aiming to achieve, and categorically aren't doing "game productions" in the sense of spending most of the cycle fumbling around figuring out how to make the game and worrying about how to make characters successfully interact with doors. It's basically always a narrow genre entry like "Sokoban puzzle", and the dev specialized into doing only that genre so that more of their work and skillset transfers between projects. And you can do great work this way and truly achieve mastery over the subject matter because with such a narrow scope, the code and assets can be iterated over a ton, without much deadline stress. But "the industry" as a whole is blatantly against respecting that process since it's normalized stealing as much as possible from last year's trends and then pushing all remaining effort into a wider marketing funnel, and in doing so, creating a raft of challenging technical problems. So for as much sheer effort the industry puts in, most of it is wasted.

put another way, video games are addictive and people in the industry are not immune to addiction life paths

I disagree with your interpretation of OP's comment. Sure you can argue that playing a video game can be addictive to some people. But game developers are not getting addicted to playing the games they make.

Creating a video game is probably as close as you can get in the software space to art. It's the culmination of hundreds of different skills into a single package that has the off chance to shift and affect culture across the globe. Its exciting, and has the potential to fill someone who works on it with an intense amount of pride. That, in my opinion is not addiction.

Unless you consider artists, musicians, designers, actors and hundreds of others who work in purely creative mediums, addicts.

There is a lot to be proud of by shipping something that is used by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and especially more so if it makes people happy. It's that intangible feeling of creating and seeing it successful that keeps people working in the video game industry despite the very obvious downsides.

For a lot of people, it's attempting to create something for players that fills them with as much emotion as they once experienced playing another game.

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