The games industry has conditioned itself to believe it is unique in software development, and that as a special snowflake, it is able to define whatever is reasonable for itself. Whatever is reasonable is what's come before, and what's come before has been a terrible mess. Google can launch products with a much better work/life balance than most games studios, and their engineers make a lot more money for it too.
The only people that stay are the people who can survive it. Those that survive are those that don't know any better (fresh-faced grads), grizzled and bitter vets that perpetuate the cycle of violence, or those people who really can't imagine anything more awesome than making games, personal life be damned.
Pachter is being blunt here, but he's right. The industry won't change, and in my interactions with it, it doesn't seem to want to.
The gaming industry ended up being invaded by the media industry, which is notorious for chewing up people and spitting them out. Luckily digital distribution is putting all the bargaining chips back in to the hands of the content creators instead of the content distributors, and hopefully a lot of the absurd conditions will die away.
God yes. I have friends who work in TV. For them, there is no such thing as "crunch time" - just 14+ hour days 7 days a week. And they get paid and treated like shit.
I don't quite understand the glamour of the business. When I hear stories from my friends it just makes me angry that million dollar salaries are subsidized by such shitty working conditions.
The game industry was always like this. My best friend from high school worked at a game company circa 1990. One year as deadlines approached the company actually rented hotel rooms for the developers for a few weeks so they could code all their waking hours without distractions. Distractions, you know, like family, friends, hobbies, exercise, healthy food...
> Google can launch products with a much better work/life balance than most games studios, and their engineers make a lot more money for it too.
I wonder: if Google decided to get into the video game business, would it fall into the game studio trap?
I'm not really sure what the answer is myself. For what it's worth, when I was at Microsoft, I heard no horror stories about overwork at MGS. However, any such stories would be second-hand at best because I never interacted with any MGS people.
Of course not. Johnny's productivity is going to be severely affected by a few months of 80 hrs/wk. If you don't have enough staff to do what you want in however long, you have to take longer, or hire more people.
But I wasn't referring to that situation. For a given project, there's an optimal team size. Adding people to that team can often reduce the productivity of the team as a whole. There's a limit at which you just can't get the project done any sooner. In that case you need to set a realistic schedule given these limitations.
They said they didn't want to be contacted. It isn't up to others to decide that they are a special case. Any marketer would find the wiggle room to make their email a special case.
Heads up this is a 'pivot' - the initial site was a social network for gay men called Fabulis. They then rebranded to artsy/design discounts. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
