As a 30-year old childless white man who left the games industry after a short 8 months in order to get married and spend time with my spouse, I can tell you that the assessment is fairly spot on. If you weren't putting in 12 hours daily, something was wrong with you and it was 'bad for team morale'. I was also pretty horribly underpaid, as evidenced by raising my salary over 200% by leaving.<p>Seems to me the 'white' part is being called out unfairly considering the rest of tech isn't a whole lot different, demographically speaking.
Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this. A lot of suckers want to get into the field, and the employers know this.<p>I know people who work in haute-couture shops. They typically clock in 14+ hours per day, and regularly work insane hours on the weekend. The weeks leading up to a fashion show / collection are brutal. These people have years of experience and managerial responsibilities, yet their salaries are absolutely laughable (I'd say a waiter often earns more than them).
The games industry is populated by young, inexperienced people and that has two effects:<p>1. A belief that any obstacle can be overcome, any deadline met<p>2. One tool in the toolbox: I can personally make this happen by writing enough clever code<p>There is very little:<p>a. Has this been done before?<p>And even when that is present, a total absence of<p>b. How long did it take them?<p>As is said in the article, management selects people from the first group, and actively punishes anyone who asks questions.<p>Now, this latter may be true in any large industry where there's more money than sense, but so far my experience is that only in the games industry is this coupled with insane hours and a hit-driven industry that makes failure a guarantee of layoffs.
As someone with 5 years experience in the industry, this article is spot on the money for everything I experienced.<p>It's a huge problem, both by discriminating against people unwilling or unable to put in ridiculous hours, and by driving away those talented women and men who are finally becoming experienced experts when they become so burned out they have to leave the industry.<p>I worked in games for 5 years. I no longer do. I had a lot of good times but I'll never work for a mainstream games company again.
I really, truly, honestly believe that above 9 hours a day for an extended period of time actually ends up hurting your development efforts.<p>You want developers who come into work and WORK. Not work a little, check a little HN, work a little, eat, check a little Reddit. Living at work forces coping mechanisms like this on you because you really only have a finite amount of creative attention.
I was a game programmer at EA for eight years.<p>> The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,<p>This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me.<p>I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices.<p>> Many companies want to own your work even when you’re off the clock. “Here at Nine Dots, we aren't using any non-concurrence agreements, so these personal projects can actually benefit them financially if they make something that is commercially viable,” Boucher-Vidal said.<p>This was also another major reason I left EA. I couldn't work on games in my free time. Meanwhile, the stuff I did at work didn't actually scratch that itch: it was either huge franchise games I couldn't care less about or technology stack stuff that wasn't an actual game. I spent more time feeling like I was "making games" when I <i>didn't</i> work at EA.<p>> Until there is evidence that other models will work, and that's going to take a hit game or two, very little with change, and the revolving door of young, white, childless men will continue to make our games.<p>I honestly don't believe this will significantly change. I compare the game industry to the music industry. In both, you have:<p>1. A product that people don't <i>need</i> to consume.<p>2. A product where consumers increasingly expect prices to be tiny or zero.<p>3. Hordes of young people who want to do it.<p>4. Work that is intrinsically satisfying for its own sake.<p>Push aside all of the bullshit and making games is crazy fun. Lots of people want to make them. Lots of people want to play them too, but they don't really want to shell out much cash to do so. I think the end result of this is that it's just a domain where it will be a young person's game and it's very hard to make a lot of money.<p>Yes, <i>some</i> companies will be able to make real money at it, but for every Rolling Stones, there's a thousand local independent bands playing dive bars that you've never heard of.<p>And <i>that's OK</i>. I was in one of those bands you've never heard of once. It was <i>awesome</i>. When I had kids, I gave it up, but I certainly don't regret it. Maybe we should think of making games the same way: a fun thing to spend a few years doing when you're young and have the time.
I've been making games for nearly 15 years now. I am an early 30s white man. I am good at what I do, and can work anywhere I want, at this point in my career. I'm happily married, though we don't have (nor want) kids.<p>I think the article is somewhat accurate, but I think it also pays short shrift to the improvements that are happening in games.<p>One of the big things I've noticed in recent years is the amount of people who enter games who are aware of the quality of life issues, and practice work to rule more often than not. It puts pressure on managers to learn to schedule properly, and it puts pressure on directors to learn when to cut.<p>On top of that, there are a lot of studios that lean older in terms of age. Ubisoft Montreal is a good example of this; I couldn't tell you what the average age is, but I know that it's just as likely someone has a kid at home as not, and that also puts a lot of pressure to run things right.<p>Also a lot of the managers these days have kids at home that they want to see, so if nothing else, they are improving their methods for selfish reasons.<p>There's still a long way to go in games, but the game industry today isn't anything like what it was in 2000. It has been nearly a decade since I was expected to pull an all-nighter, for one. It's been nearly that since I was expected to work both a saturday AND a sunday.<p>These days it's not impossible to find developers who believe in quality of life. But what is very very possible is to find a place to work where it won't be held against you that you have a family at home, and I think that's largely what this article is missing.<p>That recent photo eulogy of Lucas Arts talked about things that I literally have not seen since before 2005; it's not shocking that a studio which would expect people to miss funerals and prioritize work over relationships would fail to put out games of quality.<p>The game industry still has far to go, there's no doubt about it. But if you want to have a family, there are large swaths of the game industry these days who are perfectly willing to accommodate you without complaint.
It's all the things that are wrong with software development in silicon valley with the extra seasoning of a huge backlog of people who will do anything to break into the industry. There's no shortage of 20 somethings with coding chops willing to work 60, 80, or 100 hours a week at 2/3 or 1/2 the pay they'd make outside the game industry. And the same goes for artists too. So game companies hoover up that talent and crank out games, although it comes at a cost because it's not exactly the best model for quality or sustainability.<p>Edit: And the major downside of working this way is that you don't have the slack needed to truly innovate (technically or artistically).<p>Some companies do a better job (Valve comes to mind), and those companies tend to focus on quality and unique IP over schedule pressure. Also, indie game development is becoming a bigger part of the industry. The bad-old-ways are still hugely profitable for many game studios though so I imagine it will take a good long while for things to change.<p>Edit2: Also, the working conditions part is just one way that game dev is maybe 20-ish years behind software dev (on average) in terms of best practices. You can see this in lots of other aspects as well such as development patterns, QA, tooling, release management, etc.
I as well quit the industry because of this. While I never had it that bad (I knew I couldn't be productive after 8-9 hours so I just left at the time) nor was I ever 'attacked' for it, I can imagine I may have been overlooked on raises/promotions for it.<p>But there is one good thing I would say about the industry. You LEARN ALOT. C/C++/AI/Shaders/Animation and the intrinsics of low-level hardware, all in a days work. Compared to most folks I know that didn't spend time in the industry, their only experience with those topics was a semester in University.<p>Just yesterday there was a topic here in HN about python/ruby being slow, and while going down to C was suggested, I find appalling that most of the replies to those were 'it is hard to find a decent C programmer' or 'most of the ruby/python devs don't know C'. I can honestly say I this isn't an issue for me and for most I know that I worked in the industry. Heck my previous job had me writing nginx C modules and C++ cross platform (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows/Linux) download/caching/audio code.
This comes down to supply and demand - people want to work on games, and don't see a way to get a experience and/or a paycheck out of it outside the large companies.<p>This isn't weird, because people aren't rational - I know plenty of people who took degrees in fields where the supply of labor outnumbers the jobs available, and thus work less than ideal hours, for less pay and more abuse than they should.<p>I'd love for everyone to be able to do what they love, but frankly this is frequently the result.<p>Also, there's an unfortunate truncation on that URL...
So, here's my honest-to-god question.<p>When I was last interviewing for programming jobs in New York, only <i>one</i> of the places I interviewed at (and I looked at a <i>lot</i> of companies) wanted people working more than 40 hours a week, on a regular basis (they were a startup with a fixed runway). All the other places (a mix of established companies and startups) made it very clear that work-life balance is important to them, and that normal workweeks and generous vacation time was to be expected.<p>So I read these stories about people being asked to work 80+ hours a week, and I can't for the life of me figure out <i>why</i> anybody does this, when there are so many companies which <i>don't</i> ask for it. And it's not like the 80+ hour jobs pay any better, as far as I can tell.<p>What's going on here? Is it geographical? Industry-based? Do some programmers just not know any better?
Counter example here. 42 and still happy and thriving in the games industry and married with children. I'm happy to say I have read my kids stories every night of their lives (out of town trips excluded), and make it home for a family meal 95% of the time. You can't do this at every game company, but there are enough out there that you can find them.
Using "white" as a casual negative adjective is weak. I can respect non-whites using it as a term of anger or hatred. We're all big boys. But seeing it used as a term of self-hatred leaves me feeling more than a little disgusted.
This is a major reason why I gave up on my childhood dream of being a game developer. The industry is screwed, and it'll continue to be as long as it's profitable to create games like that.<p>In fact, it's only going to get worse as people keep expecting more and more out of next-gen games. AAA game budgets can't keep skyrocketing like they did over the past decade, and that means squeezing the workforce to produce more with less.
This applies to start ups also. The mentality is that it's nothing but coding 12-14 hours a day and anything less is, well, less. I try to fight this type of thinking by showing how others have done it rationally and how it truly is just another engineering challenge that can be solved with proper techniques.<p>But what doesn't help is the hordes of people that seem to be invading the industry, yet again, in search of riches and just want to learn the bare minimum. Get in and get paid so they can get out. The analogy I often use is poker. For some it's just a way to strike it rich and the lure of those riches draws a lot of people in. But for some of us it's a way of life. We wake up in the middle of the night yearning for the game. And no matter how much we make we'll never walk away because we love the game so much. How can you explain that to someone who just wants to hit aces, scoop a pot, and then leave a "winner"?<p>Put simply - how can we bring rational thinking back to startups? How can we convince others that experience is important, engineering and architecture are important, tools are important, and it's not just some quest for riches?
I'm also a 29 year old childless white man working in the games industry and yes, the numbers and discussion surrounding the demographics of games workers are accurate. The problem is, it doesn't prove the premise made in the article.<p>The argument being made is that game are bland and homogenous because they're made by childless white men. The childless white men the article is talking about aren't actually making the decisions about anything that goes into the game. They are assembly line workers, not management. You could replace them all with an outsourced team from India or hire an all female team and the only thing that would change is the bug count and level of productivity.<p>The end product would remain the same because it's being driven by executives.
The reason I left the games industry after 10 years (aged 31) was because there was a serious lack of professionalism with project delivery, which leads to ridiculous hours, and the pay really isn't worth it after a while.<p>As the consoles got more and more powerful, the pressure to deliver next-gen experiences just overwhelms the team. Quite often at the expense of delivering good gameplay.<p>I worked at a number of medium sized development houses, and the failure rate was probably 75%+. Some games wouldn't make it to market after 2 years+ development, some would make it to market but the publisher buried it (no real marketing). The most successful title I worked on was one for Nintendo, where the focus was on the gameplay (our producer was Shigeru Miyamoto). Even that title was massively late.<p>I was an engine and tools programmer and I believe the level of complexity of the systems being developed (to fit into consoles with very little power, slow memory etc.) was pretty high compared to development in most other fields. So the rewards should be there too.<p>However, I think the constant struggle that development houses have to keep their heads above water - due to the high failure rate of games - means that the rewards aren't competitive. So naturally you start looking elsewhere, especially if you have new found responsibilities in your life.<p>It's a shame really, because it's actually one of the most fun and creative fields to develop for (in my experience) - however it's just set up for burnout and disillusionment.<p>I left 7 years ago to form a healthcare software startup here in the UK and haven't looked back since.
I don't see the gaming industry changing anytime soon.<p>Just like actors and actresses go to Hollywood to be in show business. Many programmers enter the gaming industry so they can work on games.<p>While I love video games, I can't see myself in the gaming industry.
This article is true to a T.<p>An avid gamer all my life, I joined a game company to work on a gamer centric non-gaming project. Without saying much about my time there, it culminated upon completion with the entire team being laid off, with only the lowest paid hardest working "white childless males" being kept on because they fit the founder's expectations of ideal workers.
I worked in game development for 5 years and left when I was about 28 years old. This article is pretty much spot on.<p>I like to work a lot. I like to work 60 to 80 hours a week. The things is that reward has to be somewhat commensurate with effort. And as a developer you are expected to take a discount compared to adjacent markets. That just doesn't make sense when you have a car, a mortgage, and like to take two vacations a year.
This has nothing to do with gaming in particular. But experience has taught me something. Working more hours != producing more. Daily productivity is a finite resource. You have a choice, you can spread it out over the whole day, or you can try to cram it in 8 hours. Its a lot easier to do all day long. Cramming it in 8 hours is harder. So when I go to work, and look at these family guys who come in at 9 and leave at 5. They get my respect and my jealously, not because i want to work less hours. But rather because I'm not capable of starting productivity at 9am. Its a completely counter intuitive concept, the idea of diminishing returns is hard to grasp as a kid.
Another great piece on the same topic: <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/lucasarts-eulogy-reminds-us-of-the-inhuman-cost-of-game-development" rel="nofollow">http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/lucasarts-eulogy-...</a><p>Key quote? "If the cost of a fun game is a failed marriage, then it may be time to admit that the cost is too high." - agreed.
Statistically, the odds are that for any random thing being done in the US of A, the majority doing it will be white and male. Age and childlessness are probably relatively well co-related, so we only have to account for one of those.<p>What is comes down to is that the steady supply of labor entering a field causes it to be a buyers market.
This helps explain why I'm starting to feel the games industry isn't catering to people like me as far as storylines go.<p>I find that AAA games are often very disappointing in as far as they're full of one-dimensional characters, terrible cliches and limited understanding of anyone who isn't young and male. (I'm relatively young and male, but enjoy stories that aren't entirely filled with people like me.)<p>There's a market for video games with a storyline written by someone with some maturity. It might even pay for sane office hours...
The article's title claims it's going to show <i>why</i> the people making the games are white, but the article makes no attempt to actually do so. (And, no pointing out statistics is not the same as explaining why).
It seems like some sort of natural law that any industry with a lot of revenue and teens/young adults dream of working in ends up with similar issues. Poor work environment, poor or deceptive compensation, tons of time or travel, psychopathic management and some sort of age bracket.<p>That best describes the game industry, but it fits the major label side of the music industry, the bottom 95% of pro snowboarding, military combat, resort work and i'm sure there's more.<p>And if include a set that misses just one of the traits you arguably could ad tv and film, the junior level investment banking scene, pro sports maybe.<p>Hell, startup employee is a fairly close fit as well.<p>I think it's just human nature - young people have a lot of passion, energy and without a stretch of office employment may lack some of the context necessary to decide how exploitative or appropriate various demands are.<p>Given some of the common psychological traits often associated with officers and directors at many firms, it's not surprising that a certain number of them would see no problem in or perhaps even their responsibility to structure their business or process to take advantage of (exploit) this pool of people that dream of being part of it.<p>At some point, whether or not the constant crunch turnover and burnout is worth it versus a more sustainable style that increased retention and experience level seems like an unsolvable riddle for any firm thats culture has been built on crunching.<p>Anybody who has made it to senior management in these places has done so by being successful at executing the model and getting their underlings to work under those conditions. If you can't stomach it you won't stick around. So essentially upper management is full of people who have shown they're cool with it and have seen it work. Some probably flat out enjoy it.<p>With this kind of environment it's hard to believe you could even finish pitching the idea, let alone get enough traction to investigate or even come up with a plan to implement something that would take so long to have any measurable results.<p>Unless great results came quickly, I'd be surprised if they had more than two years before everybody got sacked and they reversed coarse
Why do games require so many developers to work 20 hour days? Aren't most of games built on commercial engines that do most of the heavy lifting?<p>I've been following the Doublefine guys and a lot of their development was put into making developer tools. I suppose I understand that, but when I hear of these 400 person teams building a game that takes 4 years to make, I'm honestly a little bewildered.
Perhaps it's a bit offtopic, but as I have not found myself a good pet language that I'd truly make my favourite yet, being a 21-year old university student, is there any other reasons of studying, learning C++ as an all-around language, than being in the game industry? The dream of working for a company like Valve has pushed me into learning C++, but I am not so sure anymore whether that is a good choice due to both the horror stories and simple statistics. I want to make the best possible investment in my future and so these kind of articles are strong manipulators.<p>I do love programming, even more than games, so it wouldn't be a problem for me to work at something less gamey. But should I nonetheless continue with cherishing C++ and making it the best language for me? Your replies are highly valued. Also, I do understand, that in reality, it's unlikely ever about just one language.
As a game developer I work on average 38 hours a week, and have never done more than 70 in a week. I come in for weekends once or twice near the end of a project and I've never pulled an all-nighter. From what I've seen this is also the case for most other programmers where I've worked, as most have families or actual lives.<p>I've seen high-employee turnover before, and it's generally down to the company demanding too much overtime or being disgustingly underpaid. There's plenty of companies about now that understand overtime doesn't = productivity.<p>>Your average industry professional is a 31 year old white man with one to three years of experience<p>I've got no idea how true this is, but in my experience it's around 3-6 years average, though I've never worked for an indie or mega-studio, and I'm based in the UK.
>Your average industry professional is a 31 year old white man with one to three years of experience<p>I wonder, where was that 31 year old professional all his first 28 years? And how could you call <i>professional</i> a man with <i>three</i> years of experience, let's leave a <i>one</i> year?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Crunch time, or working more than 40 hours a week, is Producer Failure. Either they didn't make the schedule correctly, or they let feature creep in.<p>More than once I've walked around the dev people and told them to go home after 8 hours.
It is possible to work in the games industry and have a family and not crunch all of the time. It should be possible to determine which companies have or do not have this problem without actually working for them. Look for a company with a large population of experienced developers with families and you'll be much less likely to encounter a culture like the one described in this article. I've been in the games industry a long time and my working conditions are great. It seems like it would be more useful for people working in the industry to publish information about bad cultural issues at specific companies than to generalize about the entire industry.
Sounds about right.<p>The friends I've had spend time in games industry have either left or transitioned to design consulting for all the same reasons cited.<p>However, I tend to think this problem is in the process of solving itself through the continued rise of "indie" game development and slow collapse of studio tiles [1].<p>There are all sorts of great outlets for people who are so inclined make and publish games that didn't exist even 5 years ago.<p>Developers/designers don't have to buy into the established industry culture to make and consumers don't have to pay into it to play.<p>1: <a href="http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/1/3439738/the-state-of-games-state-of-aaa" rel="nofollow">http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/1/3439738/the-state-of-games-...</a>
Making games is probably one of the most time intensive things in the world, and people only see the final product. Times have definitely changed, technology has advanced, but game making is still extremely labor intensive for humans.
The fact that they are childless indicates that they don't have time to have children, but how the hell is the fact that they're white relevant to the point they're trying to make in the article?
I stopped reading at: "Ironically, in starting a video game studio to fight these issues and prove that games can be made with sane schedules, Boucher-Vidal has had to put off getting married and starting a family. “Luckily, my girlfriend is incredibly supportive,” he said."<p>Your actions show your real priorities. How can he really mean what he's trying to do if he doesn't live it himself?<p>I imagine this article gives me a very limited caricature of what's happening, but I'm busy and will go read something else now.
I'm curious where those of you who "left the gaming industry" ended up.<p>Are you guys now belting out CRUD apps using the latest web framework like the rest of us? Or did some of you walk away from programming all together?<p>I'm just curious what a "post gaming" career looks like. Feel free to share any numbers on how your pay/lifestyle changed as a result.
My sons thank you 31 year old childless white man. I don't believe they will also become 31 year old childless white man because 1, they are asian, and 2, they won't even take the trash out to the can, even if the can was where it was supposed to be...
Is the small percentage of veteran developer really due to low retention rate? I am guessing it is more due to the industry not being as big 10 years ago. 20% of respondents with 10+ years could means the gaming industry gotten 5 times bigger 10 years ago.
you also have to consider the amount of talent that this industry will never see simply because developers have done their due diligence ahead of time, have identified these quality of life issues, and have redirected their careers.
Would be really interesting to see what kinds of games/benefits occur in a company that changes gears and embraces more flexible work weeks bringing in older and more experienced workers.
First of all, the US is not the entire world. Especially not when it comes to video game production. From my experiences, game development studios in Canada, the US, and Japan have all had employees with ethnic backgrounds that seem roughly similar to the overall ethnic backgrounds of their region. The US is ~70% white, the fact that game studios in the US are ~70% white should not be used as evidence of a problem.
And the studios will just flick a swtich and change that? they don't even care about better games. it's all about sales. and rightly so.<p>The issue is marketing and what the market become recently.<p>Games now work just like hollywood. It's just a matter of releasing something with the right name at the right time.