Game Devs are overworked and underpaid?

This is slowly changing in California (where I work) mostly due to that whole "EA Spouse" debacle some time ago. Some lawsuits were filed, and now some of the local companies are switching to paid overtime schedules. We just switched to this very recently, now we are no longer allowed to work more than 8 hours in a day without permission. If we do get permission, then we get paid overtime for the extra hours.

Let me tell you, the difference in quality of work/life is astounding. I'm well rested *and* more productive at work now, and I have great quality of life outside of work. I've always argued that crunch hours don't lead to more productivity, and this recent change in my workplace has definitely proved it for me.

 

Employment law is very complex in the US, it varies by State. California being particularly convoluted when it involves the entertainment industry.

If your earning 70+k a year in a salaried position, there isn't a lot of protection afforded by the law. You're paid to do a job. Even the recent spate of lawsuit settlements, only paid out to artists and junior engineers because they were not considered exempt.

It's just not a great industry to get into for the money. And the fact that the majority of development is centered around California, doesn't make it any better.

 

Hmm, I'm guessing the 'exempt wage' amount varies from company to company. Our 'exempt wage' amount is significantly higher than the 70k you mention, so pretty much everyone here qualifies for overtime. Maybe we're just lucky though.

Yeah, but man I love the weather here

 

AFAIR CA State is $41/hour for engineers. Of course a company is free to pay overtime to people exempt from overtime laws.

 

Is there any variation with 1st party developers treatment? A company like EA is all money, money, money and if they feel crunches are good for money, they'll do it. But 1st party titles are often flagships, and quality is a big concern. Do first party (and 2nd party) get more leniency, or are they pushed just as hard? The delays seen on first party titles would suggest games are more likely to be put back than thrashed out in the dying weeks, but maybe that's a wrong impression.

 

Most places are similar, from small shops through big ones. Some places are different, but it generally has little to do with 1st or 3rd party, big or small, and more to do with management.

My experience is that the crunch is much worse when a product is delayed, since you usually go into crunch earlier when it becomes apparent your behind and before the delay in an attempt to get back on time and end up crunching all the way through it. I know of products where people have crunched for a year or more (although it certainly isn't common), largely because of repeated delays over product quality.

Again companies vary and even products within the same company vary, just depends on the personalities involved. Most people understand it's not productive, but some feel they need to be seen (by higher ups or external people) to be doing anything they can to ship a product before it ends up slipping, and there aren't a lot of knobs they have control over.

 

If they know its not productive then why dont they try to be seen by the quality of work they produce instead of the hours they work? Though the bosses probably have little eye for quality and more for ''hard workers''.

 

There are also ways around that by not classifying your coders legally as "engineers" and using things like the total cost when including benefits and such. Various states have other little things about their laws. Having worked in Texas before moving to the Bay Area, that's one area that has virtually no worker protection laws at all. Most all of what it does have are all retroactive.

Working for the creature, the main reason I had long nights was because those were the only hours I could ever get anything done (you can imagine that not much gets done when the creature is there). So it was mainly by choice that I had my 60-hour work weeks all the time and came in on many weekends. Granted, I also had time to do my own stuff, and since work was a 5-minute walk away from my apt., I had no qualms about leaving and coming back at will. Of course, I was on a far more extreme sort of position than this article suggests as my pay was $24k a year to start, and about $32k towards the end. Some artists were getting paid as low as $11k (just a hair above minimum wage). And as you might expect, no overtime, no benefits (up until the last 8 months, and even then it was flaky as the creature would do weird things like cancel your health insurance while you were on sick leave).

Later jobs I've had in Texas were pretty much long hours for months for about half that national median salary figure, and the only real differences were that I actually did have benefits at some of those other jobs and long hours were typically not by choice. That said, it was something of an artifact of being at these small studios which were very dependent on individual lower budget rushed projects to survive, so there end up being so many cases where everybody ends up being somebody who blocks somebody else's ability to do something.

Nowadays, I average around 50-ish hours a week, and I tend to put in that level of hours because that's what I feel comfortable at. And what I make is relatively close to that median, and I'm generally fine at that level for now. That's not a livable salary if you're trying to support a family out here on a single income, but that's not a concern for me right now. Yeah, I know it's easy to think otherwise, but it is a part of the country where a home that might cost $200,000 in the Midwest costs anywhere from $650,000 to $2,100,000 depending on where you look, and the housing communities charge fees on the order of $800 a month. This is about the only place in the US, where I've seen ads for 120-year interest only mortgages. It's a part of the country where a 300 sq. ft. studio has $1100 a month rent alone. It's just a fine example of capitalism having a brain fart.

You know, being paid for overtime is all well and good, but I think ultimately, what people get paid isn't really a result of companies trying to cheat people or treat them as cannon fodder (at least not all the time -- I can't speak for everybody's experiences). It's pretty much a balancing point between what a person's experience is worth outside the industry and how much they want to stay in the industry. I'm sure if all these same people at this studio were living and working in a cheaper part of the country where salaries are just generally lower to reflect that cost-of-living difference, they'd probably still be willing to work here for much less than $73k.

A lot of people like to take things to the extreme and talk about unionization and that's just really not a reasonable idea when you're talking about an industry that, for all its billions of dollars, doesn't exactly have a Gaussian distribution of wealth.

In many of the smaller studios I've worked at (creature-land aside), the crunches were usually explained away with that last bit. Everybody, including the managers would tend to say "Yeah, we'd prefer it if there was never a major crunch, but there's nothing we can do about it." In some cases, at least, I could very much believe that because they'd be cases where publishers strike deals with deliberately accelerated schedules in the hopes that you either achieve it, or that you can be lorded over with the threat of "breach of contract" suits. In other cases, it was just plain bad management and niggling bureaucracy. I was at one point put into a position where I alone had to crunch for 2 months straight putting in a good 120 hours a week occasionally going as long as 3 day stretches without food, and was never actually told why until it was right down to the last half hour and they said "we're thinking of licensing this out, and we're meeting with people about it today, so uh... you think you could clean yourself up? They'll be here in about a half hour."

In the end, it's not as though I had any intention of getting out of the industry... Getting out of certain companies, yeah, but I never saw it as unbearable, maybe because I've just been raised that way or maybe I'm just generally unfeeling.

 

It's true that the gaming industry pays lower salaries and demands longer hours than technical positions in other industries. However, I have plenty of friends putting in long hours in silly valley companies that have nothing to do with gaming. There are also other forms of compensation apart from salary, as at least some studios offer generous bonuses and profit sharing packages. How well these things pay out is contingent upon the success of a given product, but gaming is a hit-driven industry and who wants to make crappy games anyway (producing a string of failures is the surest path to bankruptcy)? There's also a lot of satisfaction to be had from working on an exciting project that will (hopefully) be enjoyed by millions of people. Long hours go by a lot faster when you're having fun!

 

Yep, that's slowly becoming the norm throughout software development, particularly when your work ends up affecting so many others. My brother and his wife both do IT support work, so they generally put in 12-hour work days, and then have to continue providing support once they get home, so in total, they end up working a good 18 hours a day.

Well producing a "crappy game" is not always a matter of choice. Small independent studios are not likely to get the support of big publishers and big budgets. But the usual goal is really to achieve small successes and prove their viability to larger publishers so that they can work on bigger and better things.

Either way, I can't say I've seen any sort of generalizable correlation between quality and success. Not to say that it isn't true, but that the reality is just so very sparse. It tends to be more about who you attract in the process, and what sort of image you project. If you try to be everything to everyone, that's a definitive recipe for failure.

Having lived in Chicago for 15 years, I can attest to that latter part. There's a reason California is full of skinny people. The food makes you want to give up eating. People putting wheatgrass juice on a tasteless dough and calling it a "white pizza" are all guilty of culinary high treason. People need to go to Chicago and learn what pizza was meant to be. Well, that's just an example, but there are a million others.

 

I would say most people in the industry can tell whether or not a game will be good or not, though they may not always be honest about it. Good games don't always equate to great sales, of course, but it's always easier to sell a great game than a stinker.

 

True. You can't be bad at many things that matter to your target group and expect to do well. You can get away with being average at everything as long as you're not bad at anything. You can be bad at a few less significant things as long as you are really good at a lot more things that are more significant. And then there are those that are just mysteries that just make you want to say "how did they get away with that and that in the same game and still sell?"

 

GTA3?