Ah ok. Although it sounds like rockstar is the common denominator in these situations letting the studio heads get away with it.
Infact after reading this and hearing about rdr if it wasn't for the fact that at some point if in the future I might need to apply to rockstar for a job and they could google my name I'd put a post up saying that I myself would never work for them!
oh....
Yeah it's funny, I convinced myself I'd never do crunch again and then recently ended up doing 6 months of it without really making a fuss, then afterwards they made 50% of the people redundant. What a waste of time
Scary Stuff For someone that is hopefully going to get into the game industry one day, does anyone have any tips for seeking out decent companies or at least avoiding studios that treat their employees like crap?
If you don't have any direct contacts in a company, you're probably looking at your best source of candid industry information. Ask around here. If no one works in the specific studio then someone will know someone who does. Go through private messaging if you want really honest opinions.
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!
wow thats hardcore esp the argument thing ...:(
what happen next? i hope u doing good now
Scary Stuff For someone that is hopefully going to get into the game industry one day, does anyone have any tips for seeking out decent companies or at least avoiding studios that treat their employees like crap?
You can always ask questions about workload during the interview.
Things like:
So what is the typical day or week like for the environment team?
Generally, how many hours can I expect in a week?
What's crunch like at your studio?
Is there any mandatory overtime?
I think answers like "You get to work on a triple A (name of company) game" can tell you their attitude regarding crunch. Versus a studio that will say something like "It's generally 40hrs a week, but we crunch near milestones"
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?
Really? I hear all sorts of scuttlebutt. You just gotta network, devs love to bitch about the industry over a few beers.
You can always ask questions about workload during the interview.
Things like:
So what is the typical day or week like for the environment team?
Generally, how many hours can I expect in a week?
What's crunch like at your studio?
Is there any mandatory overtime?
I think answers like "You get to work on a triple A (name of company) game" can tell you their attitude regarding crunch. Versus a studio that will say something like "It's generally 40hrs a week, but we crunch near milestones"
You don't always get the truth in interviews if the employer is shifty. You're much more likely to get a clear idea of what conditions are like from the underlings than from those who have interests in making the studio look good.
Haha, well you do whatever you want. I have a friend who's working at Rockstar north right now and I've only heard good things about it from him.
from what I have heard from various 1st hand accounts from buddies who worked at R*, its horrible across the board, except for R* north, which everyone always says is alright.
I know 6 different people who worked various rockstar studios and have heard literally around 100+ ridiculous stories of abusive shit and just general asshatery that went on there, made my draw drop how they can think its even remotely possible to run the place in such an atrocious manner.
I won't discuss work on a public forum. I will call on generalised bullshit though, when the thread moves to talk of blacklists. As others have said, personal enquiries is all that counts.
"If you wanted to do a nine-to-five job, you'd be in another business,"
"One major complaint centers around McNamara's management style, with developers complaining that if he wanted something changed, he would bypass section leads and go straight to the team members implementing the content. Even if the request was "unreasonable," a developer said, their bosses would be "ultimately powerless" to challenge the decision.
"It's my game," McNamara told IGN in response. "I can go to anyone I want in the team and say, 'I want it changed.'"
"I've been doing it for a long time, and it seems to have worked out so far for me," he continued, saying that Rockstar's Sam Houser has a similar management style."
pretty sad that management takes this stance that they are in control and power, and what they say go. Creating a video game is a team effort, where ALL OF THE TEAM collaborates to make it fun, exciting and awesome looking. This game belong as much to the artists, coders and designers and is it does to Director McNamara. Which makes it hard on the people that didn't get credited for putting in the effort and time.
across the board could be taken a couple ways which I suppose I should explain. In one aspect I was reffering to the vancouver, toronto and san diego studios from which I have heard 1st hand accounts, not just isolated to the vancouver studio near me.
It also was reffering to the generally horrible shit that goes on, managers yelling/screaming at the staff, accounts of people actually getting in fist fights in the halls, insane mandatory overtime for year+ time lines, like 70-80 hour weeks minimum non stop.
Im glad to hear its not like that at leeds or north but there is no way any of that stuff listed above should be remotely acceptable at any job. Maybe you euro folk are just a bit more civillized
sucks to hear. but honestly if your job is that bad why would you stay there? I would have quit. i dont mind a month or two of serious crunch but beyond that something is totally wrong with your management/team/vision of the project.
you shouldnt suffer at your job and be unhappy just because its a job. thats fucking lame.
sucks to hear. but honestly if your job is that bad why would you stay there? I would have quit. i dont mind a month or two of serious crunch but beyond that something is totally wrong with your management/team/vision of the project.
you shouldnt suffer at your job and be unhappy just because its a job. thats fucking lame.
I feel the same way. I just wouldn't wanna deal with it, and either quit or let them lay me off cause I wasn't willing to work 100 hour weeks. If people want to let companies take advantage of them, go ahead.
The real question is, why do people work there when they know what the working conditions are gonna be like? Maybe they're desperate to find a job, maybe they're trying to break into the industry, or maybe they just really like the game that they're gonna be working on. I guess the same question could be proposed towards people in Nike sweatshops making 5 cents an hour: Why do they do it? The company definitely holds the keys towards treating their employees better, and maybe if they felt like they needed to, they would. But they don't, and until it's in their best interest to, they won't.
it's things like this that make me glad to live/work in the UK. i know i'm not in the industry proper as of right now, but there are laws here that make:
1. unpaid overtime voluntary - if they aren't paying you for it, you don't have to do it. and they absolutely can not, ever, full stop, period, take disciplinary action on you for choosing not to do unpaid overtime.
2. you cannot legally work for more than 15 hours straight without recieving a minimum of 12 hours off work immediately following.
3. you may volunteer to work as long as you like without pay, however rule 2 still applies, and it is your employers responsability to ensure you stick to it as it affects your health.
that said... it seems the games industry in the UK isn't doing too well, not sure why though. tax breaks or something i'd imagine.
^^ this. Why would you work for a company that treats that badly? That being said if conditions were that bad surely that is a reflection of the management at that studio and not games studios in general and should not be taken as an indication of the management of other R* studios as some post have mentioned.
^^ this. Why would you work for a company that treats that badly? That being said if conditions were that bad surely that is a reflection of the management at that studio and not games studios in general and should not be taken as an indication of the management of other R* studios as some post have mentioned.
well, from what I've heard around the boards, the Australian game industry has been drying up. So the choice is to stay in an industry you love at a crummy studio, drop out or move to the other side of the world for work.
The regulations are a small part of it. The much larger issue at the moment is that the Australian Dollar is currenlty higher than the US one, so there's little reason to come to us for work-for-hire projects which typically make up about 90% of the work done here.
We recently got some kind of tax incentive to match what our rather sickly film industry gets, but it does seem a little bit of too little, too late.
If you yanks could kindly improve your financial situation, we'd be grateful. We'll continue to try to make ours worse in the mean time.
Ah ok. Although it sounds like rockstar is the common denominator in these situations letting the studio heads get away with it.
Infact after reading this and hearing about rdr if it wasn't for the fact that at some point if in the future I might need to apply to rockstar for a job and they could google my name I'd put a post up saying that I myself would never work for them!
oh....
Yeah it's funny, I convinced myself I'd never do crunch again and then recently ended up doing 6 months of it without really making a fuss, then afterwards they made 50% of the people redundant. What a waste of time
Sounds like an "interesting" place to work Frankie
it's things like this that make me glad to live/work in the UK. i know i'm not in the industry proper as of right now, but there are laws here that make:
1. unpaid overtime voluntary - if they aren't paying you for it, you don't have to do it. and they absolutely can not, ever, full stop, period, take disciplinary action on you for choosing not to do unpaid overtime.
2. you cannot legally work for more than 15 hours straight without recieving a minimum of 12 hours off work immediately following.
3. you may volunteer to work as long as you like without pay, however rule 2 still applies, and it is your employers responsability to ensure you stick to it as it affects your health.
that said... it seems the games industry in the UK isn't doing too well, not sure why though. tax breaks or something i'd imagine.
Yeah, and while I share you opinion I strongly get the feeling thats a real reason that we have so little big studios here. Infact, aside from Rocksteady who are the hot thing right now I can't think of a single game studio in the UK whos hit that triple-A game buzz in recent years.
The internet censorship thing doesn't exist yet, and I'd speculate that it won't ever happen. Even our Luddite government isn't capable of ignoring that much bad press.
It seems fairly unlikely that the slightly sluggish internet has much of a negative effect on business, really.
It would be interesting to talk to some publishing types over whether the lack of R-Rating has any real impact on the types of projects that get developed here. Again, it seems kind of unlikely as those types of games aren't what we're typically hired for anyway, and I'd speculate that that wouldn't change if we suddenly found ourselves with a more sensible classification system.
Quote:
An artist with 12 years professional experience recalls, "They created a below-junior position; 'graduate junior', I think, so they could pay less and push people around." Team Bondi was the first and last game development company that he worked for. "I don't want another job in the game industry because of my experience [at Bondi]. Most of the [artists] I know who worked there, never want to work in games again."
Man...That's brutal.
Wow this comes out AFTER i purchased the game. I typically like to vote with my wallet. . i wonder if it was really that bad. i dunno. Sucks to hear this anyways.
AU Gamedev has left a mark on me personally, ive had my fair share but to add my own little tidbit to all this:
I lived with and worked together with a senior engineer who worked on LANoire for nearly 2 years up until launch. And for the most part he enjoyed his time there.
I know the guy well enough to know hes not one to get involved in politics or all that usual demoralising bullshit like creating little gangs inside the workplace that like to talk on skype all day about how fucked up it all is, which only angers the people in the chat more and more by the second.
Hes the kind of guy that goes in gets his work done and leaves. Crunches if he needs to, and doesnt when its not needed.
I think because of that he had very little drama - And subsequently is telling me its not as bad as what this is made it out to be, though he can see how it is / was / can be extremely frustrating for some people.
It happens, passionate people get into shit, bad calls are made, people are hired to clean up the mess and typically end up working their butts off to fix stuff up. This is kind of the nature of the beast for young / new studios attempting to make a game and shooting for the 85 - 95 metacritic range.
That shit is not easy, repeat NOT EASY.
Even for veteran studios to pull off, for many people at Team Bondi i bet its the first time they have ever worked together as a team and shit can get extremely heated because they havent worked together long enough to quite know how to get the most out of each other or press each others buttons the right way in order to get shit done..
Unfortunately that means people are going to bleed for that kind of 85 - 95 rating, and like every war its typically the grunts that bleed the most.
I'm by far and away not condoning these kinds of practices, or that this kind of gamedev is acceptable - but if your that guy who works all night for 7 months in a row sleeping under your desk at work and complaining all day long about how fucked up the system is, or letting it simmer until you launch the game and then pulling the trigger on some massive scandal story trying to get all humanitarian after the fact, then hey guy.. its probably healthier for you, the rest of the team, and the game itself if you thought about finding a new job where your happier bro ?
To end on a happier note, my friend got laid off the LANoire team, he was and would have stayed on, but it was no big deal, is now happily employed overseas working on his next endeavor!
what's unacceptable to me ain't so much the crunch, because that can happen everywhere, but the environment in which this took place. You can crunch as a team and still have a healthy relationship where everyone pulls at the same rope because everyone wants to do this and realizes it is necessary.
Yes shit can get heated, but it's the management who should step in to resolve this issue, not heat it up by fear mongering and adding additional pressure. That's just the wrong way to go about this and extremely unprofessional.
I don't think there's an ideal solution to this - leave such a place if you can? Or if you're an ongoing artist, do your research before the interview! avoid crappy workplaces so people wake up and realize that if they want top talent they can't treat them like this (although with the recession still in swing they may still find enough desperate artists who need to put some food on their table).
Reports like these are necessary for us as an industry to raise awareness that working in games ain't just all joy and fun and that there is a share of abusive studios around. And that newcomers should not be naive enough to believe everything a company or college tells them about the industry.
hey, there are no download caps here in China! Ain't everything bad here
If it weren't censored I could download the entire internet on my crappy 2mbit connection, if I wanted to...
...production and game censorship ain't related in China. Most stuff is still being made for export to western studios (our clients are from 8 of the top 10 US publishers - chance pretty good that either your studio or your studio's publisher outsourced to us at some time). Only MMOs in Chinese really suffer from censorship. Everything else is either pirated or people play on US/EU servers. Sorry for the OT.
So is it true that Rockstar is no longer going to work with Team Bondi?
Serves that guy right... if he didn't want this kind of things happening to him and treating his employees like shit he should've picked another job somewhere else. Karma comes back around. I am glad to hear that this was investigated and something is being done.
Replies
Infact after reading this and hearing about rdr if it wasn't for the fact that at some point if in the future I might need to apply to rockstar for a job and they could google my name I'd put a post up saying that I myself would never work for them!
oh....
wow thats hardcore
what happen next? i hope u doing good now
You can always ask questions about workload during the interview.
Things like:
So what is the typical day or week like for the environment team?
Generally, how many hours can I expect in a week?
What's crunch like at your studio?
Is there any mandatory overtime?
I think answers like "You get to work on a triple A (name of company) game" can tell you their attitude regarding crunch. Versus a studio that will say something like "It's generally 40hrs a week, but we crunch near milestones"
Really? I hear all sorts of scuttlebutt. You just gotta network, devs love to bitch about the industry over a few beers.
yeah that was 10 years ago, lots of "It's a privilege to work here" going on too.
Now I run my own small studio and I'm a complete and utter asshole.
がんばれ、ホーケンさん！
I know 6 different people who worked various rockstar studios and have heard literally around 100+ ridiculous stories of abusive shit and just general asshatery that went on there, made my draw drop how they can think its even remotely possible to run the place in such an atrocious manner.
reading as Danr works as a lead at rockstar Leeds and likes it :poly142: ?
Whats it like there Dan? Is this and the other rockstar rumours way off the mark?
got any jobs for me Danr?
"If you wanted to do a nine-to-five job, you'd be in another business,"
"One major complaint centers around McNamara's management style, with developers complaining that if he wanted something changed, he would bypass section leads and go straight to the team members implementing the content. Even if the request was "unreasonable," a developer said, their bosses would be "ultimately powerless" to challenge the decision.
"It's my game," McNamara told IGN in response. "I can go to anyone I want in the team and say, 'I want it changed.'"
"I've been doing it for a long time, and it seems to have worked out so far for me," he continued, saying that Rockstar's Sam Houser has a similar management style."
pretty sad that management takes this stance that they are in control and power, and what they say go. Creating a video game is a team effort, where ALL OF THE TEAM collaborates to make it fun, exciting and awesome looking. This game belong as much to the artists, coders and designers and is it does to Director McNamara. Which makes it hard on the people that didn't get credited for putting in the effort and time.
It also was reffering to the generally horrible shit that goes on, managers yelling/screaming at the staff, accounts of people actually getting in fist fights in the halls, insane mandatory overtime for year+ time lines, like 70-80 hour weeks minimum non stop.
Im glad to hear its not like that at leeds or north but there is no way any of that stuff listed above should be remotely acceptable at any job. Maybe you euro folk are just a bit more civillized
http://www.develop-online.net/news/38125/Industry-outrage-at-brutal-Team-Bondi-crunch
you shouldnt suffer at your job and be unhappy just because its a job. thats fucking lame.
I feel the same way. I just wouldn't wanna deal with it, and either quit or let them lay me off cause I wasn't willing to work 100 hour weeks. If people want to let companies take advantage of them, go ahead.
The real question is, why do people work there when they know what the working conditions are gonna be like? Maybe they're desperate to find a job, maybe they're trying to break into the industry, or maybe they just really like the game that they're gonna be working on. I guess the same question could be proposed towards people in Nike sweatshops making 5 cents an hour: Why do they do it? The company definitely holds the keys towards treating their employees better, and maybe if they felt like they needed to, they would. But they don't, and until it's in their best interest to, they won't.
1. unpaid overtime voluntary - if they aren't paying you for it, you don't have to do it. and they absolutely can not, ever, full stop, period, take disciplinary action on you for choosing not to do unpaid overtime.
2. you cannot legally work for more than 15 hours straight without recieving a minimum of 12 hours off work immediately following.
3. you may volunteer to work as long as you like without pay, however rule 2 still applies, and it is your employers responsability to ensure you stick to it as it affects your health.
that said... it seems the games industry in the UK isn't doing too well, not sure why though. tax breaks or something i'd imagine.
None of the related bad news about R* comes from the UK branches. But the US ones are well out of order.
^^ this. Why would you work for a company that treats that badly? That being said if conditions were that bad surely that is a reflection of the management at that studio and not games studios in general and should not be taken as an indication of the management of other R* studios as some post have mentioned.
well, from what I've heard around the boards, the Australian game industry has been drying up. So the choice is to stay in an industry you love at a crummy studio, drop out or move to the other side of the world for work.
For the Australian games market drying up?
I'd say from what I have heard, that yes, the Australian regulations are definitely killing the industry over there.
We recently got some kind of tax incentive to match what our rather sickly film industry gets, but it does seem a little bit of too little, too late.
If you yanks could kindly improve your financial situation, we'd be grateful. We'll continue to try to make ours worse in the mean time.
My reply: Was refeering to these;
Sounds like an "interesting" place to work Frankie
Yeah, and while I share you opinion I strongly get the feeling thats a real reason that we have so little big studios here. Infact, aside from Rocksteady who are the hot thing right now I can't think of a single game studio in the UK whos hit that triple-A game buzz in recent years.
how? which regulations?
I would suggest that it's probably the skyrocketing exchange rate which is a bigger problem.
Regulations on internet bandwidth, internet censorship, and video game censorship which is often taken too far.
It seems fairly unlikely that the slightly sluggish internet has much of a negative effect on business, really.
It would be interesting to talk to some publishing types over whether the lack of R-Rating has any real impact on the types of projects that get developed here. Again, it seems kind of unlikely as those types of games aren't what we're typically hired for anyway, and I'd speculate that that wouldn't change if we suddenly found ourselves with a more sensible classification system.
Quote:
An artist with 12 years professional experience recalls, "They created a below-junior position; 'graduate junior', I think, so they could pay less and push people around." Team Bondi was the first and last game development company that he worked for. "I don't want another job in the game industry because of my experience [at Bondi]. Most of the [artists] I know who worked there, never want to work in games again."
Man...That's brutal.
Wow this comes out AFTER i purchased the game. I typically like to vote with my wallet.
I lived with and worked together with a senior engineer who worked on LANoire for nearly 2 years up until launch. And for the most part he enjoyed his time there.
I know the guy well enough to know hes not one to get involved in politics or all that usual demoralising bullshit like creating little gangs inside the workplace that like to talk on skype all day about how fucked up it all is, which only angers the people in the chat more and more by the second.
Hes the kind of guy that goes in gets his work done and leaves. Crunches if he needs to, and doesnt when its not needed.
I think because of that he had very little drama - And subsequently is telling me its not as bad as what this is made it out to be, though he can see how it is / was / can be extremely frustrating for some people.
It happens, passionate people get into shit, bad calls are made, people are hired to clean up the mess and typically end up working their butts off to fix stuff up. This is kind of the nature of the beast for young / new studios attempting to make a game and shooting for the 85 - 95 metacritic range.
That shit is not easy, repeat NOT EASY.
Even for veteran studios to pull off, for many people at Team Bondi i bet its the first time they have ever worked together as a team and shit can get extremely heated because they havent worked together long enough to quite know how to get the most out of each other or press each others buttons the right way in order to get shit done..
Unfortunately that means people are going to bleed for that kind of 85 - 95 rating, and like every war its typically the grunts that bleed the most.
I'm by far and away not condoning these kinds of practices, or that this kind of gamedev is acceptable - but if your that guy who works all night for 7 months in a row sleeping under your desk at work and complaining all day long about how fucked up the system is, or letting it simmer until you launch the game and then pulling the trigger on some massive scandal story trying to get all humanitarian after the fact, then hey guy.. its probably healthier for you, the rest of the team, and the game itself if you thought about finding a new job where your happier bro ?
To end on a happier note, my friend got laid off the LANoire team, he was
Yes shit can get heated, but it's the management who should step in to resolve this issue, not heat it up by fear mongering and adding additional pressure. That's just the wrong way to go about this and extremely unprofessional.
I don't think there's an ideal solution to this - leave such a place if you can? Or if you're an ongoing artist, do your research before the interview! avoid crappy workplaces so people wake up and realize that if they want top talent they can't treat them like this (although with the recession still in swing they may still find enough desperate artists who need to put some food on their table).
Reports like these are necessary for us as an industry to raise awareness that working in games ain't just all joy and fun and that there is a share of abusive studios around. And that newcomers should not be naive enough to believe everything a company or college tells them about the industry.
China has all that and more. Yet their game industry is expanding rapidly.
Singapore also has those kinds of restrictions. (they banned mass effect) Yet singapores game industry is also expanding.
If it weren't censored I could download the entire internet on my crappy 2mbit connection, if I wanted to...
...production and game censorship ain't related in China. Most stuff is still being made for export to western studios (our clients are from 8 of the top 10 US publishers - chance pretty good that either your studio or your studio's publisher outsourced to us at some time). Only MMOs in Chinese really suffer from censorship. Everything else is either pirated or people play on US/EU servers. Sorry for the OT.
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/report-rockstar-washes-hands-team-bondi
Hot damn, that was a long read. Very interesting though, good to see this whole thing isn't just settling in the dust just yet.
Serves that guy right... if he didn't want this kind of things happening to him and treating his employees like shit he should've picked another job somewhere else. Karma comes back around. I am glad to hear that this was investigated and something is being done.
Just another scar on the landscape.