L.A. Noire's 7 year dev cycle: Bad Management?
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/117/1178844p2.html
I think this part from the second page sums it up... and definitely applies to the gaming industry in general. It's probably the main thing that needs addressed.
I think this part from the second page sums it up... and definitely applies to the gaming industry in general. It's probably the main thing that needs addressed.
The wider issue, one animator believes, is "game companies thinking that crunch can solve poor scheduling, or bad design decisions made early on in a project."
Replies
Man...That's brutal.
I can relate alot!
My 1st job in the industry was the same. A junior thrown into the deep end, working 9am-10pm for weeks at a time. I just thought thats how it was.
Then when i started to see recuring events - like design leads requesting changes to me or others 1 on 1, without consulting Leads or within the Heirachy. I became aware of the environment i was in.
The nail in the coffin was seeing half the environment team quit, and having HR beg us not to leave.
Hopefully the guys that left have taken this as a lesson learned:
1. Dont be a sucker.
2. If your gonna work your ass off something crazy like 80-100 hours week, do it for your own shit.
Too bad for Team Bondi...Rockstar gets to see all da monieez $.
Anyways, it's good to know all this, we can make bigger our blacklist.
It's very telling to read his quotes. I'm on the 3rd disc right now, but that guy has no reason to deserve an elitist rockstar attitude. Game is average.
Rockstar were in the news for this very same stuff last year, but that time with the RDR team.
Though really, there's one main point that is a golden rule for any situation: Don't work for assholes.
Its like these companys dont obey any employment laws(have no structure), or the employees are stupid, or maybe these countries dont have laws.
That's something i have been said recently, and the worse... from someone i considered a friend :S
This is not the first time I read horror stories from a Rockstar game too. Even though they made my favorite game of this generation (RDR), Rockstar is definitely a developer that I'd think twice before accepting a job offer from.
holy crap. that is so wrong on so many levels I can't even begin to think how that could be justified in a working evironment
here in vancouver, there is a nice little loop hole that entertainment industry workers are exempt from overtime pay, because back in the day EA threatened to move their main studio out of BC if the government was going to make them pay overtime. soooooooooo awesome.
I have pretty much come to the conclusion its not usually "bad management", its companies planning to have a crunch period so they can get 1.5-2x the normal amount of work out of people without having to pay them or even hire additional people they would have to pay. pure cuntishness.
as for the huge dev time, this seems standard for R*, have a bunch of different projects being all over the map for 3 years and then focus on 1 and pump on that like crazy. its currently happening here in Vancouver on Max Payne 3, and people have been working crazy overtime on that game for well over a year. like mandatory 12 hour days, 6 days a week. I will never, ever work for rockstar.
"Part of the thing is that we pay over the odds, and it says in their contract that if they need to do extra time. I've done 20 years of not getting paid for doing that kind of stuff. I don't begrudge it. I get the opportunity to make these things."" - quote from the article.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? oh wow....the opportunity to make some corporate fucks a big bonus cheque, no no, dont pay me anything extra for my trouble, or the fact I am working like a slave for you. but man, those $10 overtime meals are totally worth an extra 3-5 hours of my time!
Now they are basically fascists. I like how they guy basically admitted it.
This is why the industry is going stale.
The part that always gets me with crunch is starts off only being for a couple of weeks then it gets pushed to a month, then a couple of months then in this case 7 years!! This one sounds so bad it was like double crunch.
Not sure how it's acceptable in any way....
People shouldn't be thinking or being discouraged that this is normal for dev studios, this character has been infamous for some time, at least within the UK.
Anyway when starting out don't forget to bring your balls, it is OK to punch your boss if he gets out of hand.
If you have crunch time, fire producer... with real fire!
probably not much, provided your office attire covers them up to some extent.
Passion, disagreements, and arguments are to be expected. But that is no excuse for behaving like a goddamn child.
Another boss I had at the second studio I worked at gave me a really hard time. Unlike the other boss who just yelled at me in a moment of stress, this guy was actively disrespectful and I ended up concluding I couldn't reasonably expect him to start acting like an adult anytime soon. So I decided to leave and try my luck elsewhere.
Maybe a year or so after I left, I heard the studio had shut down, with tons of ridiculous drama happening along the way. So glad I missed out on that. I'm not saying people should skip town the moment things get tough, but have the self-respect to say "enough" and walk away when something is clearly an abusive relationship with no real hope of improvement.
But like Firestarter said, this is definitely not normal or standard for dev studios. In my opinion, it's something that insecure and arrogant higher-ups do because they don't trust their team to get things done with normal scheduling. Where I work, and I'm sure this is true of many other places, we typically work around 45 hours a week and only do any crunching in the few weeks leading up to a major milestone. And even then, it's never been mandatory.
There are times to suck it up and put your personal ego aside, and there are times to stand up for yourself. The important thing is to get a good balance.
edit: Some additional words of wisdom from Khang Le, leader of the Hawken dev team:
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Err, no offense to anyone, but that game wasn't exactly great...nothing to really get to your head...
Or is it always the case that situations like these never get better without outside intervention like the lawsuit against EA?
My impression is that these things never get better and if you find yourself in such a situation it's best to just get out as soon as possible.
That guy shouldn't be managing a fast food joint, much less an entire studio.
The quotes in that article suggest he knows nothing of how to actually manage people, or projects for that matter.
The quotations from him read like all the "how to be an ineffective manager" examples in a basic intro to management course.
the only thing great about that game was the top-notch environment work, everything else was fucking horrific
I'm no longer surprised sony pulled it off and didn't fund the ps3 sequel.
(I was sort of expecting it, after seeing the tech demo a few years ago)
As for the does It get better, I dropped an employer(freelance but lot of work) 1 year later he's come back, I didn't want to but I gave him a 2nd chance. It started out fine, then the load came, I work crazy hours but he's compensating me enough but if things get to heavy I gotta go (most wouldn't do what I am doing but I am in a situation that I can't really think of myself.) cause he's just like the description above, childish and trying to push for too much too fast, let's just say I almost quit today.
I am still optimistic and hope that he thinks twice cause he doesn't even have a clue how close I came to just dropping everything. Email loaded ready to go, I took a breather.
It's sad that a situation like this had to come about for any raised voices to be heard I've been waiting for a topic like this and seeing some of the actions that come about or what we might have to look out for in the future, but I am all for the idea of unionizing we would own... no question.
Just say when.
Sounds like they have a good thing going on there. We're doing a few titles here and don't push it crazy hard, TBH it's mostly me in the office till late but still go home for dinner.
Another one of those true stories (2001~02): I used to work in a game studio here in Japan, we were small fry doing stuff for Nintendo at the time, no-one could leave the office before the Boss. He stayed every day until midnight. At the time I thought it was outrageous, but after making a few friends in Japan and talking to other people, this turned out to be the norm! People work crazy hours here, overtime is unheard of, in nearly every industry.
One day we got into a massive argument, he threw a chair towards me. Big guy too. I just grabbed my books, my win95 split keyboard and left never to return.
The next day I found 3 months wages dumped in my bank account from the studio!
I have to admit, that reading these stories makes me think "Ooh I might avoid them, or those and that one", yet I can still see myself applying for every and any role available to me when I leave Uni as I don't feel that I will get anywhere by being picky.
It just seems too hard to get in to be able to.
Like it has been said a few times in this thread, most companies are not like this and actually value their employees. Those are the ones you should be trying to work for. There is nothing worse than just feeling like a number and knowing you are completely replaceable. It's not a matter of being picky, it is a matter of knowledge and knowing who you are going to work for.
Yeah.. Well I definitely have a couple that I would love to join out of uni but I wonder whether I'll be able to afford to picky at all as a graduate with next to no experience.
which is why i'm going to have to bump firestater's post
it surprises me that on a forum where people constantly geek out and throw a spack fit over the tiniest minutae of games and the games industry, they'll also happily broad-brush or fuck up over whacking great details like developer/publisher and make emotive statements like 'i will never work for X'
The important lesson here for you new kids is that you need to do your research before getting yourself caught up in a hell hole like this. Do some reading, send some emails, ask on Polycount or other forums. Whatever you need to do to get a sense of the conditions in a studio before commiting.
Shhhhhhh. Keep your voice down. People might hear you.
yeah, there's always a chance you could get screwed on your first job because you don't have the connections to know what studios to avoid.
Year to be honest I've work in games for almost 10 years and don't have a clue how to start vetting a studio as a good place to work, if I happened to know somewhere who worked there then great. But otherwise what should someone do? And actually this sounds a lot more common then some posts make it out to be and it's just full on exploitation, although this particular example is the worst of the worst.
I don't even know what danr was saying, sounded like STFU and quit your bitching?