This relates only to a particular type of games - the ones that are shipped and forgot, or the ones that need minimum upkeep costs. So, perfectly understandable, and this is (almost) analogous to complaining why some hotel staffs 30 during winter instead of 100 people during the summer season.<p>As a game company owner myself, I've found a way to do efficient damage control (with regards to morale) on this - announce the "cuts" as early as project pitch! It's not incomprehensible that you know how many people you'll need for the game's upkeep and how many for development stage. Throw an "if game is successful" and "if game is !successful" clause in there, and that way everyone knows what's the playing ground for your game.<p>I've noticed that these policies of mine have attracted fast-moving employees, the ones that will find it perfectly understandable if I, right now, scrapped every project and said goodbye to everyone. Which, in game industry, is a frequent occurence.
I've worked in the AAA game industry and there are many factors. When you break down the interests of companies this seems like just a product of economic self-interest, financial risk, volatility, and publisher/studio relationships.<p>But the truth is that the practices of industries are often based on what the employees are willing to take. Employees in the game industry will come back after being fired ... and fired again. They won't quit their job even though they work 80+ hours a week for months on end. In other industries, this would never fly, and practices that assume you can do this to employees would have never caught on, because the employees in (many) other industries won't as consistently take that abuse.<p>The practices of the gaming industry have, over the years, formed around this fact of nature about the employees. None of it would be this way if employees weren't willing to take the abuse in the first place.
Wouldn't one solution to this problem be telecommuting combined with contract based model. You put a team together for a project, work the project, and let every one know up front that this is a temporary gig, not a permanent job. Like in the movie industry. But the twist is, you embrace a telecommuting model, allowing developers to move from project to project without having to move from house to house.<p>This would also make it much easier to rehire people who worked for you before, providing continuity to the games, and increasing level of code reuse. I know it's not a steady job, but perhaps it's a fair compromise. Also, this would allow the video game industry to keep older talent, as developers would be able to have a more flexible schedule and live in more family friendly suburban neighborhoods.<p>Just an idea....
Layoffs aren't a problem. There will be a new generation of young freshman whom greatest desire is to be a video game developer. The non unionized guys will work 140 hours a week. Have a great salary for someone so young. And get their layoff when they get older and can't stand more this.
<i>It's weirdly common to hear about people getting laid off from the same company more than once—i.e., they get laid off, rehired, and laid off again in a span of two or three years</i><p>It's not too weird. This was how factories used to work on a regular basis. Guys would work for 8 months, get laid off, get unemployment for 2 months and lay around the house bugging their wives, then get called back again. Repeat until retirement. The supply chain techniques have improved so that doesn't happen very much now.
Game developers keep getting laid off for the same reason game developers generally earn lower salaries and have worse working conditions than other people in this industry: a robust oversupply of potential labor.<p>These companies can replace their entire development staff regularly. That is, of course, the successful ones can. Developers at smaller places are laid off when their studios are bought by the sharks or fail to achieve any success in the market.
This sounds like like <i>one of the few</i> problems that can really be solved by unionizing workers and moving to long term work contracts... but good luck selling this "socialist" mentality to game developers :)
>>The average yearly salary for game developers, according to a Gamasutra study, was $84,000 in 2013.<p>I just got hired as a junior programmer at a large studio(one of the largest in the world in fact) and I make ~$30k a year - wonder where they get their numbers from, or if maybe the market in the US is better(I am in the UK).
Couldn't this problem be solved by a shift to a video game consulting industry ?<p>In tech companies it's quite common to have a period of 'inter contract' between two missions where you can do trainings or even self training. Is the video game market hostile to this kind of organisation or has it just not been tested yet ?
The Curt Schilling story has always fascinated me (the video game part, not the baseball one).<p>I live in Ontario and like a lot of other place, Ontario gives pretty large tax incentives to video game companies. I've interacted a bit with some small video game companies here who basically seem to only exist because of the various tax incentives (both federal and provincial). I've pretty much decided these aren't a good idea, but politicians think video games are cool.
A good friend of mine has worked in the games industry for over a decade now. He worked on the Spore project at EA. It was insane how many hours he put in while on-project. He'd have to answer his phone at <i>any</i> time, and sometimes drop whatever he was doing to trudge back into work. At the end of a three month crunch, he said he'd spend about two weeks just dicking around at work, sort of an informal comp-time system. I remember the "EA spouse" incident, and by the sound of it, my friend was on one of the 'good' teams.<p>I once asked him why game developers don't get any royalties, since there was a time when that was at least not unheard of. He insisted that it would just cause people to game the system, with lazy people trying to get on the money-making teams. Personally, I fail to see how that's not always the case, everywhere, anyway. I think he's simply drunk the Kool-Aid and bought the line that upper management fed him in order to maximize their profits.
>Several of the developers who contacted me for this story said they were fed up with layoff cycles and had left the video game industry entirely. Some told tales of endless relocations and unreasonable hours, and bragged that in their new fields, they were paid more to work less.<p>Yeah... this isn't exactly news. You work in the gaming industry because you love video games. It's not a career. It's a job you do when you have youth and health and minimum entanglements. When you get married or get older or get just plain sick of working around the clock for not much money then it's time to look around for something more stable and remunerative.<p>It's ridiculous to compare video game industry jobs with Big Grey Financial Company. If you want comparisons, look at the movie industry, where people get together to work on a project and then all get laid off when it's done.
Isn't the bigger issue here that game developers have been underpaid for many years? They are usually exceptional programmers who would be getting much higher salaries (and much better working conditions) elsewhere, so getting laid off would not be such a dramatic experience due to savings etc..
<i>> But inertia is hard to fight. How do you convince a multi-billion-dollar industry to change practices that prioritize short-term profit over long-term morale</i><p>How does it compare to smaller studios, for example those which use crowdfunding (inXile, Larian etc.), or even bigger ones but self sustained, not relying on external publishers such as CD Projekt Red for example? Are their practices better than those of the big and nasty companies like EA and Co.?
If they drive off the hardcore gaming community by adding more and more casual elements like <i>pay for win</i>, double-DRM and dumped down gameplay, the franchise will go downhill.<p>For example open world games usually center around vehicles to move around vast amount of map-terrain. You can make the driving physics (the central gameplay element) arcady and fun (like GTA San Andreas) or realistic and still fun (like GTA 4 or Mafia 1+2). Or you don't care and get the driving mechanics mediocre like most such games (GTA V, Watch Dogs, Sleeping Dogs, Need for Speed, etc.)
I think developers/designers or any type of creative work that involves using the computer need a union of some sort. Artists have it, Writers have it, why not the tech crowd?