Developer Stress Crippling Game Innovation?

hapwned writes "Jason Della Rocca, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), looks at the big picture of the grim, dead-end careers of game developers. From the article: 'More fundamental is the notion that immature practices and extreme working conditions are bankrupting the industry's passion - the love for creating games that drives developers to be developers. When the average career length of the game development workforce is just over five years and over 50% of developers admit they don't plan to hang around for more than 10, we have a problem. How can an industry truly grow, and an art form evolve, if everyone is gone by the time they hit 30?'"

Sad but true...

[joeygb]

I grew up wanting to be a game developer. I spent a lot of my free time as a kid in front of a computer writing code, designing my own games. But as I get older and am actually out in the workforce the thought of working 80 hour weeks making a salary on the lower range of what programmers in general make has turned me away from the industry. The next step, once the majority of CS majors have been scared away from game programming, is the farm the work out to programming "sweat shops" in other countries to make rehashes of the same games that have been coming out for years. Unless there are some major changes in the game industry the only real innovations are going to end up coming from indie game developers who work some other job to make a living and develop games in their spare time.

sturgeons law and dedication

[Speare]

It appears there's a correlation between the "famous names in game development" and the "career-minded senior developers in game development." Correlation isn't causation, but which end is wagging which? Is it because they're a rare breed to stick around so long, or because they're a rare breed who have excellent gaming ideas? Maybe they're just rare because of the career stress. The likelihood of making a name for oneself in the industry is pretty slim. The industry is incestuous and churn after November (after Retail Christmas) is a big problem. If you have to start your career over every year or two, who wants to keep up that grind forever? But maybe it's just a matter of a group of people who like instant gratification in their games, who also want instant gratification in their career path, and they usually don't find it. Ninety percent of everything is crap, and that goes for the workforce in any industry too. There may only be room for a few bright spots to float to the top, while the rest continue to wallow below.

creative management

[192939495969798999]

Suppose I hire the kind of people who are creative enough to create a good game, and then I hire people that are able to code that creativity into a functioning product. Isn't this a much better model than hiring 50 super-coders to bust out YAJMF? (Yet Another John Madden Football) Game development is expensive to get right, but if you have a team that can make lots of good and different games, games good enough to develop franchises from (i.e. Zelda and Mario), then you will win. If you take one painfully stale idea and re-release it over and over, it will cost you more each time in order to generate the same sales, because PEOPLE GET BORED. It should be real obvious how to manage creativity, but apparently few want to take charge and do it. There's such a ready supply of young kids looking to "code games" that they can be duped into thinking that "some company" is cool when in fact it's a slave ship. Any gaming company that leverages creativity over slave hours and slave pay will be the champion in the long run, bar none.

Re:Uh... yeah....

[Surt]

Creative spark plays a relatively minor role in AAA game development. Most of the 'overworked' crowd is doing 2 things: generating code and generating art. But even the artists typically need more skill than creativity, and in my experience the older artists tend to produce both more and better stuff (thanks to experience, particularly with the tools). For example, if the artist is going to generate an elf character ... that might typically involve one day of inspiration, and two weeks of pixel pushing. Even if he's twice as slow during that 1 day of inspiration, he'll more than make up for that extra day thanks to his familiarity with tools. On the code development side, I think we all understand how experience renders advantage.

same old stuff...

[NetMunkee]

This is so two years ago. More and more game companies are adopting sane schedules and better production schedules. There is still a ways to go of course, but it's getting better by leaps and bounds. My last project I only crunched a combined 2 months. Much better than the 14 months of crunch I did two projects ago. The REAL problem with innovation in "big" titles is that the development teams are getting too large. On a 60 person team only a select few actually get to give design input on what the game is. There just isn't enough time to get input from every team member that wants to share their ideas. You can't afford to prototype enough to get to everyone's ideas, so to be fair no one's ideas are prototyped. Back when a game could be made with 10-20 people, every one could go crazy with ideas and everyone could contribute. That just isn't possible now. Except of course with the small teams making the flash games and things like that.

Re:Should be the opposite, no?

[Wesley Everest]

Actually, fast turnover means less innovation. All the fresh kids just out of school making the same mistakes as their predecessors. Then they burn out before they learn from the mistakes and come up with better ways of doing things.

Re:Uh... yeah....

[Andrzej Sawicki]

And speaking of games, take Will Wright and his Spore project...

Wow, I'm SHOCKED!!!

[Duncan3]

You mean game developmers are humans? That by the time they are 30 wise up and aren't willing to slave away 12 hours a day for someone else?

Wow.

And you mean companies get rid of people once they aren't willing to work 12 hours a day because they have a life and don't like being treated like slaves anymore?

Amazing, really, it is.

Welcome to reality for the rest of the world. At least here in America you get to wise up and have a life at 30. 90% of the world will slave away until they drop dead.

It's a no-brainer

[moochfish]

I don't understand people who go after this career because they "love games." It always concerned me when someone told me they want to become a programmer because they like games. HELLO! Everybody loves games! You're joining the profession for all the wrong reasons! Sometimes I'd ask the person if they've ever even programmed. Answer? "Nope!" I admire the willingness to fight for a dream, but I frown on the lack of research before committing a lifetime to it. Why programmer instead of another facet of game production? Oh, the money, you say... Notice how programming itself is not mentioned as an interest in any way here? Yes, it concerns me too.

The games people love are nothing like the process of coding them. Anything that is remotely fun and exciting in programming has nothing to do with what makes Madden fun and exciting. The average consumer can love Final Fantasy -- no, I'd even say there are many, many hardcore fans. But the vast majority of those that love that franchise are not meant to ever, ever become game developers. It's apples and oranges.

Playing games is exactly that -- PLAYING. But coding a game is no child's play. It's work -- and hard, hard work. If producing a graphical manifestation is the only joy you see in coding, I'd seriously reconsider the profession. There are other ways to contribute to creating a game without being the code monkey. There's marketing, story writing, graphics, concept designing, testing, and even managing.

If those don't appeal to you any more than coding does, then why choose coding? What? For money? That's a whole different can of worms that I'm sure you can already see is a repeat of what I just finished saying.

In my humblest opinion, programming is fun on its own, and it really doesn't matter what it is you're coding so long as it is challenging and stimulating. Sure, coding games can fit that, but to start on this path without actually loving the path itself seems risky at best and a terrible, life-long mistake at worst. In short, don't choose a path that makes you walk through shit and garbage. That path just so happens to be the rest of your life. You better damn well choose a route you'll enjoy every minute of.

Stress?

[Mad Ogre]

I thought it was a lack of imagination that was killing the game industry.

Re:Education

[Jonboy X]

Speaking of which, it could be that people over 30 are being forced out because the game companies are only willing to hire [exploitable] recent college grads. It's not that 30-year-old programmers want to stop making games, it's just that no game companies will give them fair compensation and healthy working conditions, and they're no longer naive enough to get screwed over!

So, put another way, few coders over 30 is stupid enough to work for a game development outfit. That's like saying McDonald's discriminates against people who want to make more than minimum wage or don't like getting burned by hot oil.

Re:Open Job Security

[mrchaotica]

As time goes on, less and less developers are needed, until finally none are needed and we end up with programmers out of jobs...

Boo-frickin'-hoo. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, except for you personally if you're a programmer and don't want to retrain. Otherwise, you should be glad that it would allow the former programmers to move on to new and interesting things.

Your argument is a variation of the broken window fallacy [wikipedia.org], because you're saying that making things less efficient is good because it creates work. It's incorrect because if things were more efficient there would still be plenty of work, but it would go towards making progress rather than maintaining what we already have.

[W]e end up with ... large variety[sic] of the same game.

If that's a problem, then someone would hire programmers again to make new kinds of games.

Re:Education

[Karl Cocknozzle]

It's not that 30-year-old programmers want to stop making games, it's just that no game companies will give them fair compensation and healthy working conditions, and they're no longer naive enough to get screwed over!

I think THIS might be a little closer to the explanation than any "loss of creative spark." A 30-year old developer likely has a wife/husband and is approaching the age where they either have kids or don't. That urge to reproduce has moved more than a few high-stress-job professionals to seek jobs with less stress/hours required because they decided a pile of money doesn't balance out "No family life whatsoever."

Funny how that "no family life" thing isn't in the ads/job descriptions for these positions...

Re:Why not unionize?

[Chilltowner]

I agree. When people in any industry in the past have run up against shitty working conditions, unreasonable management, and crappy pay (for the hours they put in), they've unionized. It's an entirely reasonable thing to do, especially considering how close to Hollywood games are getting and how many trade unions are in effect in the film industry.

And don't start with the "Oh, developers are too independent, too maverick, too high tech to be unionized." That's the exact same way you could've described auto workers 70 years ago, and they formed the UAW. Say what you will about it lately, the UAW did a LOT to improve conditions and pay for the "high-tech" workers of their time.

More coders need to be involved with business

[xtal]

You're being exploited because you let yourselves be. That's the harsh truth.

If you want a life, you need to control the business aspect where money is generated. Otherwise the machine is going to use you up and spit you out, if there's one thing conclomerates like EA have shown, is you can beat programmers stupid and (new) ones keep coming back, begging for more.

Get involved with the business, own the IP, sit on equal footing.

Yes, business sucks sometimes. Coding sucks sometimes too. If you're able to distingush people with the clue from those without, use that to outbid people. Yes, there's big budgets involved - but there's also people with big pockets who will fund things that look like they'll make money.

Entrepreneurs: See the above? Find some really good programmers and PARTNER with them.

Otherwise? Well.. I'm sure there's a fresh crop of programmers to burn out next year.

Re:Education

[cliffski]

amen. thats exactly the problem. But the solution is simple. If you want to actually make fun games rather than licenced pap or sequels, you quit your job and go do it yourself. Bedroom coding is now easier and more viable than ever. The myth that you need a team of 50 people to make a video games has always been nonsense, and is perpetuated now only by 'industry figures' who are scared of their talented developers leaving to go it alone.

If by "stress" you mean "producers"...

[SloppyElvis]

Technical innovation has been raging in games, screenshots are ever more beautiful year after year, sound is terrific, and physics are improved. It's the content and themes that are stalled in a never-ending regurgitation of last year's offerings, and this is a result of producers wanting a "safe-bet" for the stakeholders money.

Being a Game artist...SUCKS....

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Its hard to really care when you're an artist working on games. All you hear is, "the game industry makes more than hollywood" and all you see is very low wages incomparison to hollywood fx artists, insane deadlines, tons of tedious work, little control over idea because it came down from the suits, no room for advancement, and it sucks the life out of you.

The industry supposedly makes so much money and yet the salaries are like 40k to 60k, while the work days are 12 hours.

Its not a fun job.

The days of garage games are pretty much over due to the amount of time it takes to make a good 3d game.

The game industry was great for artists and programmers, but then the suits came in. Yup those vultures from the entertainment buisness, such as the movie and music industry decided to get their hands on the gaming cash.

No longer are the days of the garage game developers who make millions making a hit game. Now you go and work for the suits if you want to make a game. You get shit pay and thats the way it is.

How much money did Halo make? How much do you think the guy who animated Master Cheif made?

Peanuts.

It's a shitty buisness thats been raped by the buisness majors.

which is why i've decided to leave it and go into film and advertising.

Re:Education

[lgw]

When was the last time McDonald's had "crunch time" ?

You've never worked in fast food, have you? The job get *very* stressful when demand exceeds the fixed ability of the kitchen to produce. It's just a different time-scale.

Replacability

[Skraut]

The problem with the industry (or at least as I experienced) is that most of the stress comes from the looming spectre of "Do what we say or you will be replaced." You make the games you're told to make, and if you don't there's 10,000 other pimple faced kids with a copy of "Making Games for Dummies" ready to take your place for half your salary. Want to be creative? want to be innovative? Tough. As the story a couple days ago about Wal-Mart pointed out, The stores are looking for publishers who do what they are told.The publishers are looking for studios who do what they are told. Studios are looking for designers who design what they are told, and designers are looking for programming teams that do what they are told. Everyone who "dreams" of being in the business is just so happy when they get an opportunity that they just get taken advantage of, and become another cog in the corporate machine.

Re:Terrible article

[JF]

This is just a clueless blogger with a good layout program.

Jason Della Rocca, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), is a clueless blogger?

This is actually modded +5 Interesting?!

Please...

(I will however agree that this is not *news* at all... Or even /. worthy.)

Re:Why not unionize?

[Senjutsu]

And look at all the innovative new products that are coming out of Hollywood these days.

Last I checked, the focus group and clueless executive professions weren't unionized.

Re:Prescription

[Savantissimo]

Agreed. (Except the part about Lisp and fractals. Nice in theory, but not usually a practical solution.)

Anybody who signs up for a C++ job and then complains that it is a soul-killing grind is just too clueless for me to even bother mocking.

sorry, but game-dev shops are worse

[SEAL]

I worked as a game developer for several years. I loved the work, but I was underpaid and it definitely hurt my personal life (i.e. I had none).

During my last project, we were actually told by management that a 60 hour week was now mandatory (with all of us being salaried). That's when I gave them my 2 week notice.

Note that I often put in more than 60 hours in a week before that. But it was my choice, sort of. I needed to do it to get the work done but no one was saying I had to punch a clock.

This sort of jackass management behavior went on through every game project I worked on. Not only are the devs on a 5 year burnout cycle, but the game industry seems to attract some of the most juvenille and inexperienced managers I've ever seen. These are the wannabe corporate ladder climbers who couldn't get jobs at real companies. They promise deadlines to publishers that they can't possibly hit and then work their devs to death in an attempt to meet them.

The only other time I've seen such incompetence was with some of the dot-bombs of the late 90s. But in the game industry this goes on more often than not.

Contrast that with where I am now. I'm a senior dev working on a lot of technically interesting code. It's not games anymore but guess what? I work 9 - 6 and I make 2x what I was paid as a game developer.

Sure game dev was my passion but mismanagement has a way of changing your priorities. Would I professionally work on games again? Sure. But only if I owned the company.

Hate dreary predictions come true

[leadingZero665]

Ten years ago I fled my passion of game development to the much dryer realm of chip design because I thought the game industry wasn't going to be kind to the middle aged, married with children crowd.

My friends that stayed confirm. It really sucks, because the best programming I did and saw done was coding games.

The scale of today's games makes it much more difficult for a small, private company to make much of an impact-- which is about the only place I'd want to work.

Re:As an independent game developer...

[brainstyle]

Sorry if I come across as a know-it-all outsider here. I'm really not trying to start any kind of a flame war, but as someone who's well-qualified to work in the games biz, and until recently very much wanted to do so, I'm not a fan of the "we're so different" attitude in the industry.

It's because of that kind of talk I've stopped looking at jobs in the game industry. I just can't see how every time a game is made, especially when so many of them are so similar, each problem is something new that hasn't been done before, and the whole thing is some huge creative endeavour. I'm sure that's part of it, and hopefully each game has something new and cool, but still - most of the code is, or at least should be, well-maintained, well-written, mature, and stable.

It should be engineered in such a way that adding new functionality doesn't mean starting from scratch or digging deep into the code and changing things at the lowest level, but rather it should mean working with a well-designed interface. There should be good test coverage, and you should be able to drop features from the product if you have to make a deadline, since that's better than half-implemented features that don't work or aren't tested.

I recently had a job interview with a game company, and had a list of questions about their engineering practices. After getting the pitch from the president, who talked about the hours they worked for the last title they shipped, and how they really really didn't want that to happen again - but he still said there'd be long hours - I knew that it would indeed happen again, and there was no point asking my questions since it was clear that the answer to a significant number would be "no."

I understand that there are things that make games different from other types of software, but good engineering is good engineering, and it should be adopted by the industry. That almost every algorithm is mostly R&D rings false to me, since most games sure don't feel like there's much new in them.

If there's something that the game completely depends on, and no-one knows how to do it, then don't greenlight the game. Figure out how to do that critical thing first, get it working, and then invest in the game. That's how things are done in the rest of the software industry, and it's a very good thing: it means as cool as an idea sounds, if it can't be done, you don't want to waste a lot of money on it. Lots of new features in lots of software is almost all R&D, but it doesn't mean the product can't be scheduled or that gobs of money should be wasted on something that might not go anywhere no matter how cool it would be if it worked. How much better would Oblivion be, to take a random example, if they realised early on that the AI sucked and they needed to take a different approach, and designed around that? Instead you can burn someone's house down as they happily tell you plot points in the story (or so I've heard - haven't played it myself).

I don't doubt that there are elements of game design which are very difficult to schedule. But to say the whole game is like that sounds like a cop-out.

Re:Open Job Security

[Thangodin]

No, open source game engines would mean that instead of paying a huge load of cash for an engine, that huge load of cash would be available to pay programmers to modify the engine. Instead of slave driving coders to build yet another throw away engine, they could concentrate on working on gameplay. And instead of needing a million dollars up front just to think about making a game, smaller developing houses might be able to compete, rather than see the industry whittled down to a handful of giant corporations who run sweatshops.

If we're having trouble making a living, it's because we always have to go out and reinvent the wheel. Eventually people get sick of paying again and again for the same damn thing.

Re:Education

[IamTheRealMike]

How do you know that you two produce the same level of work? Even if you compare raw code, how do you know that the guys extra experience is worthless? Can the guy spot a race in 5 seconds of looking at the code? If so, can you? Java is a very, very limited language (designed to be ...) and it's hard to tell coders apart just by looking at Java code. But that's OK - being a "good coder" is a whole lot more than knowing Java.

Supply and Demand

[deuterium]

If game companies get away with overworking or underpaying their employees, it's only because there is apparently an oversupply of coders eager to work in games. This is a lot like professional acting or singing. Everybody wants to do it, and those who aren't the best at it won't get any great reward, but may still be happy to be involved on some level. Sooner or later, the invisible hand will set a steady scale rate for developers with the requisite experience. What is probably most needed are HR people who are able too weed out the enthusiastic but mediocre from the pool of qualified candidates. Working a clueless hack to death isn't going to do anything to help your quality or release date, and as the industry matures, I think compensation levels will as well. Too much money is at stake to play Monty Burns with the workforce.

I lasted 4 years

[rAiNsT0rm]

Four. I don't even personally know anyone who has been in the game for 10. 2-3 is the norm, and I eeked out one last year.

It is a fast-paced, high-stress, thankless, low-paying, non-creative field. It didn;t used to be this way, bottom lines and the almighty dollar used to still play a big part in things but now it is just insanity.

I have personally witnessed more innovative and fun titles get axed to move the talented folks on the team to work on some budget title or licensed product to meet a deadline than anything else. It is disheartening for everyone involved, and crushing to many. Who wants to work like that? Not creative talented individuals, but code pushers who just work in the confines of some pre-built engine and collect a meager check.

I really want to see the Revolution make good on their claims of open/indie development for the system. Online distribution and a free/low cost accessible dev system would produce so many great and unique games. Xbox 360 is still too expensive and has too many barriers to really take off in this area and will just be a haven for ports and such, the Revolution has a rela chance to break into new territory and if they do I think a real revolution will begin.

The industry needs to collapse and come down off of this Hollywood emulation they so desperately cling to, it has become derivitive, immature, inaccessible, expensive... and for what?

Re:Prescription

[gknoy]

Lisp is only useful if you're a geek or a mathemetician? Even though I'm not a lisp hacker, my first reaction is, "Awww, someone never learned how to wrap their brain around Lisp...". ;) But, flames aside, let's talk about that.

Lisp is able to represent some solutions in ways that are radically different from many other languages; being able to re-write the language itself via macros sounds like it would really make describing the problem (and solving it) easier to understand and maintain.

Sure, Lisp isn't the perfect tool for everything. But, I'll assert that it's good for more than simply mathematics or pure AI research. People have build web-based applications with it, even.

I even use a lisp-derived language at work for engineering analysis, and it seems to work pretty well.

Re:As an independent game developer...

[91degrees]

Building games is completely different that any other kind of software development. It needs to managed that way... special needs in mind.

No. It's not. It's similar in many respects, at least on the software side. And as such it can take many of the principles from other forms of software devlopment. We still have some code to develop. We're still going to have to experiment and try different ideas.

It is true that many concepts have to be prototyped and tested before they're incorporated, since a formal test on the specification isn't going to be able to determine whether a game is fun, and a lot of the time we're developing completely new algorithms which is a bit of an unknown quantity, but the games industry is not unique in this respect.