Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industry

by snake117 • 8 years ago

321 149 8 years ago

ashleyn• 8 years ago

I dunno what it is about the gaming industry relative to other software-related industries, but they have a horrid reputation for effectively treating employees as disposable.

Not coincidentally, a lot of games end up having technical problems from the constant rush.

georgeecollins2• 8 years ago

A lot of people want to work in games, so your junior people are easily replaced. Projects are episodic, and often do or die for small companies or even studios in larger companies. So the choice is perceived as maybe burning out a team or probably shutting down.

Games are also one of those things where there is a big reward for being first and best, and little or no reward for being competent. Even though, as an audience you may not see it that way.

Retric8• 8 years ago

Games need a wide range of things some but not all of them get stuck in a crunch. You can have smaller well managed teams working reasonable schedules to get the core game play worked out then bolt on the AAA stuff once you have a winner.

Crunch does have some advantages to the company, but it's also high risk.

portofcall• 8 years ago

People are willing to buy broken, exploitative games filled with monetization strategies, built by a committee of the damned. As long as it’s profitable to behave this way, and unregulated, companies making games will keep on being bad actors.

RobLach• 8 years ago

People romanticize working in games and are exploited for it. Once you realize the string allocator you’re coding isn’t much different than the one that other person working on enterprise software is making, but you’re getting paid 1/2 what they are and on deadlines dictated by a calendar based on $200 million worth of marketing decisions, you jump ship only to have your void filled by someone exactly like you a couple years more novice.

matte_black• 8 years ago

I know someone whose entire reason for going into computer science was to become a game programmer and eventually hoping to be a game designer. Years after when he realized his career wasn’t what he thought it was he quit, and now he’s working as a security guard somewhere.

vvanders14• 8 years ago

Yup, the pay thing is a double edged sword too because most studios are usually in high CoL locations.

When I left the industry it was an instant 2x income increase. I went from paycheck to paycheck to being able to actually afford living in the Seattle area.

I remember running the numbers on the hours I was working at my salary rate and realized that I would have been better off flipping burgers instead. It wasn't the breaking point but it definitely was a contributing factor.

e40• 8 years ago

People romanticize working in games and are exploited for it.

Ain't that the truth. Lots of young men (teenagers) aspire to be gamer programmers. When my son uttered those words, I immediately schooled him that it was one of the worst places on earth for a programmer to work. He got it.

JabavuAdams• 8 years ago

It's a terrible business model. It attracts creatives and addicts who can't help but work on games. Proceed from there...

kabdib• 8 years ago

Games are perceived to be date-driven hits. So there is a "magic date" you need to meet -- a major holiday, for instance, or a big industry event like E3 -- or your project is "toast". So you wind up with crunch time, and a lot of quality problems, and ship a bad, buggy product that gets bad reviews (but hey, you shipped by the magic date, so that made it all better, right?)

Crunch time generally happens with consumer products; I've worked on these products practically my whole career, and it will burn you out unless you can find projects with enlightened management. I've also found that getting your own piece done solid, ahead of schedule, only means that you get dragged into the swamps and help out other teams with their issues -- you get to work on the really nasty bugs, the integrations with APIs designed by people too clever for their own damned good, you get to see the real sausage being made.

I argue that shipping a good product late, with a smaller team [the tendency is to add a bunch of staffing to meet deadlines, and we all know how that story ends] will result in better reviews and sales, a team that has better ownership of the product, and much better retention. But try telling that to a Suit whose only skill is to order people around.

[When I wrote my first game cartridge, I gave a detailed schedule of 150 days. It was October and marketing wanted the project to ship by Christmas, which left about two weeks for development. Even a clueless management stack knows that you can't compress work by that much, but it did take some effort to convince the marketroids that they couldn't just have 20 or 30 engineers sit down for a week and write the code. I did burnout hours for several months and finished up within a week of what I'd planned].

I regularly counsel "kids" not to get into the game industry early, and to concentrate on getting wide experience to a bunch of technologies, because game studios need more than just graphics and pretty lights. You can be a hero for doing a provisioning system, or a secure real-time networking layer, or a great storage system, and this stuff is just as necessary and as valuable as those flashy effects on the screen, just not as sexy or visible.

corysama2• 8 years ago

It’s not just holidays and E3 (and dodging releasing at th same time as the largest flagship titles). The main schedule constraint is that marketing spend must be paid months in advance for the purpose of reserving specific time windows. That spend is often equal or greater than the development budget. And, if you miss your time window, too fucking bad. You will have no marketing, no more money to buy in again and your game is now a flaming money hole.

I once worked on a sequel to a semi-popular Xbox game that was tremendously better than the original in every way -except that it lacked marketing. It sold 10% of what the original did because no one noticed that it shipped.

Shipping late is often not an option. Either ship on time or cancel the project near the end of development after 90% of the budget is spent. Layoffs and possible studio closure will certainly follow.

jdlyga• 8 years ago

The trick is working for companies doing 3D application development that's not related to games. I've never had a job where management treated us like this in almost a decade so far.

ethbro3• 8 years ago

This is one thing I've never understood. For almost any skill set, there are multiple industries you could work in.

And furthermore, the industry with the worst treatment of employees is likely not the best paying (given that bad treatment tends to stem from popularity / availability of naive new employees).

So, if you don't like your work life... find a related industry!

jamesrcole• 8 years ago

Money and working conditions are factors in job satisfaction, but so is what you are doing. Some people really want to make games.

s73v3r_8• 8 years ago

But that's a pretty terrible suggestion. It should not be required to change industries to be treated with basic human dignity.

mfoy_2• 8 years ago

I played a lot of computer games when I was younger, and I always had an interest / knack for programming... everyone always instantly asked "Oh, so are you going to make video games when you're older?"... they always seem perplexed when I said "No."

So I can see how there might be an overabundance of bright-eyed bushy-tailed young folk who want to go make video games...

Enterprise software isn't sexy but there's lots of demand, it pays well, and you can quickly earn a lot of respect by demonstrating that you have a head on your shoulders.

nailer2• 8 years ago

Or: make your own company. Campo Santo did!

mediaman• 8 years ago

I know people who are 3D artists getting into the game industry. They don't even necessarily care about the games that much, but love the art. They'd be thrilled to work in some other industry that provides the same type of work but wasn't games, but it doesn't seem like there's much demand outside of the gaming industry. Are there other industries that heavily exercise 3d modeling/art?

electricslpnsld• 8 years ago

Are there other industries that heavily exercise 3d modeling/art?

Industrial design and architecture come to mind.

Film, too, but that is still somewhat crunchy.

Virtual and augmented reality, as well.

stevenwoo2• 8 years ago

Animation though this is often outsourced to studios in Korea like The Simpsons/Futurama from the start, Visual FX (VFX) might be a larger employer than animation, studios are spread around the world.

itamarst• 8 years ago

The extra terrible thing is that this is completely counter-productive. E.g. see this takedown of crunch time by someone who works in the game industry: http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons

But this is a problem outside the game industry too, though it sounds like they're even worse than usual. If you're a software engineer stuck in one of these jobs, you need to realize working fewer hours is good for you and your employer. More here: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/18/productive-programme...

vvanders14• 8 years ago

Yup, it's an endemic problem that has no sign of going away due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it on the nose to get into the industry.

Ironically if you look at Gamasutra's yearly survey you see a huge cliff of experience right at the ~3 year mark as those people get burned out and the cycle repeats.

ryandrake2• 8 years ago

I think for a lot of these people, they have never worked in any other company and maybe dont even realize work can be done another way. I’d love to ask an actual employee at one of these places: Do you realize crunch time is rare or nonexistent for most other companies? If so, do you stay where you are purely “because games?”

I remember joining a particularly toxic company and mentoring one of the junior guys there. It was his first and only job out of school, and he thought work was simply supposed to be toxic—like this was normal.

thex10• 8 years ago

has no sign of going away due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it

Why is the onus to change the industry on the inexperienced folk (who likely don't know any better) rather than the bosses/leadership who theoretically get paid the big bucks to figure out how to properly run their organizations?

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

Wow. That's exactly how long I lasted in the video game industry. 3 years.

knuththetruth2• 8 years ago

I think the answer is obviously some kind of labor organization, akin to the various creative "guilds" that already dominate the entertainment industry. Everyone else who works in entertainment already figured out that the execs will run you into the ground without this protection.

scruple3• 8 years ago

due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it on the nose to get into the industry.

I mean, I guess. I'm in my late 30s and I just got sucked in to a project that was behind schedule by miles to try to meet an impossible deadline. The expectation seems to be that the 90 hour week I had last week is going to be repeated again this week and, most likely, also next week, come hell or high water, and any sort of common sense or evidence about how short-sighed this effort is be damned. I like my job, for the most part, but this has me considering my options.

My point is, I see this as an upper management issue. I can't fault people, including myself, for doing what we have to do to keep the paychecks rolling in, and especially when the power dynamics are as uneven as they are. You are right that younger people (and, also, let's not forget our friends in this industry on work visas) are less capable of dealing with the issue than veterans. But, from my point of view, it's not us who are wrong. Instead, it's the management chain who is unaccountable to their bad planning, poor decision making, etc... who create this situation.

watwut• 8 years ago

Young people are looking forward to overwork themselves, because older people heroize overworking yourself. Often by bragging how much they worked and exaggerating or leaving out down times or that late night coding was actually 70% beer drinking, often claiming that crunch is necessary or price for good product.

And oftentimes by using crunch as argument for why the person who works 90 hours a week should have more say in things.

When discussing crunch itself, crunch is talked about as bad. In any other context, it is praised and heroized.

stevenwoo2• 8 years ago

I've worked in crunch mode for an extended period in the games industry and at a startup, and the startup was much worse to me but to be fair at the startup I was the only programmer, and during the gaming crunch period (I forget, but think it was somewhere between 6-12 months) I was on a core team of about a half dozen programmers and a dozen artists and I was almost never the choke point for progress.

mrits• 8 years ago

That was a hell of a sentence.

commandlinefan• 8 years ago

You're assuming, incorrectly, that management (especially upper management) is worried about producing quality products. They sort of are, but for any of the people who mange to survive in those positions, that's a secondary (or even tertiary) concern - their primary concern is survival. The only way to survive has little to do with creating a great product and everything to do with making sure the blame never falls on you.

bcrescimanno• 8 years ago

Well said! I'm immediately reminded of the paradox of the 4th down punt in American Football. Put simply, head coaches choose to punt far more often than they statistically should; but, they do so anyway because it ensures they won't take the blame for the "unorthodox" decision.

In this case, it's management giving the impression that they are "doing something." We see the same thing with, "can we add more developers to speed this up?" The answer is almost universally "no" and, presumably, any manager in the modern era should have read (or at least be familiar with) the over 40 year-old book, "The Mythical Man Month." But, from a senior management position, there aren't many levers to pull--and when the heat is on, they have to be seen to "do something."

One interesting source on the topic (there are many others):

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/upshot/4th-down-when-to-g...

Asooka• 8 years ago

Note that it isn't the case that anybody who goes into management is automatically survival-oriented as opposed to doing-good-work-oriented. It's just that the ones who prioritise their own survival tend to survive longer than those who do not. It's sort of a combination of the anthropic principle and tragedy of the commons - management is the way it is, because if it weren't, it wouldn't be where it is. Meanwhile, if your company was structured in a way that rewarded striving to produce quality product using humane practises, you will (paradoxically) make less money over the long term than sweatshops. Sadly I'm not smart enough to come up with a system that fixes this, except perhaps to run companies like democracies and do away with monarch-style CEOs. But then my employee-focused democracy would be outperformed by the money-focused kingdom next door.

taeric2• 8 years ago

The flip side, though, is that intrinsic measures of software quality are terrible. Most boil the ocean looking to define what makes something good in the small, and completely fail to generalize into the large.

Worse, too many are interested in building a general solution when they haven't even done a single concrete solution. I have yet to find a proud developer that said, "I used the boring choices for this problem and got a solid solution."

This is akin to expecting an artisan to give better results for a standard kitchen than a builder would get from buying Ikea.

And don't take that as some sort of value judgement either way. Builders are there own to of Craftsman. Different doesn't need a hierarchy.

My gut for why this is? In a fiercely competitive field, leverage from success is the primary driver. And you get more leverage and success by being different. The upside is huge. Naturally, so is the downside. Survivor bias kicks in and people think they succeed from wiser choices, so they are incapable of reflecting and making less risky choices as they age as an org. Which requires an influx of young risk takers that have not hit a downside yet.

headsoup• 8 years ago

There's also probably a portion of managers that cause the crunch by being incompetent up front. Not managing scope, escalations, resourcing, decisions etc leads to tight deadlines and 'sudden' urgency to meet earlier expectations that were never managed or adjusted along the way.

exelius• 8 years ago

Agree 100%; but there are a lot of self-deluded workaholics who don’t understand why everyone else can’t (or won’t) work like them — and these people tend to set the culture.

You have no idea how difficult it is to bring these ideas to executives on the business side. They wrote this idea of “40 hour weeks are more productive” off decades ago because it didn’t suit their needs (people in executive positions tend to get there by working longer hours than others, so this becomes the metric they push as critical for success.) “The Mythical Man Month” is something everyone reads simply so they can ignore it because “well, that applies to normal people...”

Hoasi• 8 years ago

But this is a problem outside the game industry too

There is definitely a parallel in film and animation as well. Underpaid, worn out talented people are legion in production and post-production.

“You’d get a lot of people coming right out of school, going, ‘Oh I really want to prove myself, and I really want to make sure that they see that I’m contributing,’(...) They either worked themselves out and would get sick or would become bitter.”

Part of this happens because management does its job well in the first place, that is stretching resources to the max. But let's not forget it happens with the tacit consent of the burned out crew. Unrealistic optimism, the excitement of being part of something big, the belief that this "crunch" is only temporary are also to blame. All that is understandable and unfortunately, these seem to be a part of the creative process.

“[People who] take a lot of pride in this product are the people who are going to kill themselves. And those are the people you really don’t want killing themselves because they have the most value in the company.”

Perhaps more transparency is needed on the part of the crew or communication/education with their peers—especially with freshly graduated ones. One of the issues is that everybody knows this is toxic yet tends to accept the situation assuming this must be how production works.

dfsegoat• 8 years ago

I just wanted to say how comprehensive and enlightening your first reference was: It gives clear empirical / historical evidence of why working too many hours will ultimately kill your progress.

http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons

ksec• 8 years ago

I think management people needs to know, lots of problem solving work, like programming, can happens in "Background Thread". i.e You are thinking / solving the problem without realising it.

Making them sitting in front of their desk for 20 hours a day doesn't really help.

That is assuming all programming work are 95% Thinking / Reading / Finding out answers then writing. I am not sure if the same applies to Game programming though.

horsecaptin2• 8 years ago

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. I'm starting to think that game developers enjoy their toxic work environment until they finally realize that it is taking a toll. By then, they find that they're often stuck / lack the confidence to move on.

sp3322• 8 years ago

They definitely move on, or at least drop out. But there are always more to replace them, so the company doesn't feel a lot of pressure to change.

nailer2• 8 years ago

Fashion industry is similar: so many inexperienced twenty year olds would do the job for free. So conditions are poor and people get paid a pittance. Why have one experienced person when you could get 10 x 22 year olds?

horsecaptin2• 8 years ago

Whoops, I meant: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I pulled a Dubya!

rglovejoy• 8 years ago

"Won't get fooled again."

dotsh• 8 years ago

This is what I call a full of shit company. People will stab you in a back to work for those but when they are there they start to realise how rotten it is. Then it's too late for them as they are getting into the Stockholm syndrome. Afraid to go, being pushed around because they do not believe they can do something better somewhere else and such CEOs take advantage of the situation to use them as much as possible and throw them away like a used condom.

I hate this and it is not worth wasting life working for such companies or such people even for one day.

lkrubner• 8 years ago

We need more of this kind of honest writing. In the tech world, we tend to use euphemisms to talk about this kind of destructive behavior. Go to a Meetup full of VCs and they say stuff like "Oh, that startup died because of team dysfunction."

Well, okay, but what does team dysfunction actually look like? How ugly does it get? Why does it happen?

Self-sabotage is remarkably common. We all know the failure rate of startups is very high. The estimates I've read vary, but they are all in the range of 80% to 90%. And clearly, much of the failure comes from suicide, not homicide. That is, the startup isn't out maneuvered by a giant like Google, but rather, it fails because of its own internal flaws.

The essay "Why do entrepreneurs engage in self-sabotage" is on this theme:

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-do-entrepreneurs-en...

personjerry• 8 years ago

Isn't this what happened to Kerbal Space Program too?

bg42• 8 years ago

Toxic management costs all shops its best developers. Why are they not considered a direct threat to ROI?

s73v3r_8• 8 years ago

Cause most management still considers developers to be interchangeable.

humanrebar2• 8 years ago

The toxic managers know how to negotiate politics and bureaucracy.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...

bg42• 8 years ago

Thanks for this article.

cryptonector• 8 years ago

Toxicity also loses gamers.

gtirloni• 8 years ago

For others, the inevitable outcome of what sources familiar with the company describe as years of a culture that promoted constant overwork, toxic management, and ~creative stagnation~

Having never worked in the game industry, I have a very naive view of what is the day-to-day of game developers. Being inherently creative work, what would creative stagnation look like in this case?

WorldMaker3• 8 years ago

It's somewhat described in the article.

Sleep deprived/overworked people have less creative energy (all sorts of productivity studies prove this over and over again). Poorly managed people watching their flanks for toxic attacks at their ideas allow themselves less creative freedom.

meheleventyone• 8 years ago

Also stuff like having someone else habitually take credit is less than inspiring to bring forward your best work.

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

The inability or unwillingness to come up with new ideas. You wind up recycling old ideas and avoid trying anything new. An old criticism of telltale games is that if you've played one of their games you've played them all.

diego_moita• 8 years ago

Sorry but the way this article describes this Kevin Bruner and its' "toxic management" sounds very close to how people describe Steve Jobs: egocentric, abusive and a micro-manager.

What distinguishes a toxic manager from a leader, then?

Edit: a phrase from the article: "This was one of the biggest issues with him as a CEO: he was pretty convinced that his taste was everyone’s taste."

knuththetruth2• 8 years ago

For whatever reason, he was able to inspire and retain talented people. He probably was just as awful, but something else offset that, which Bruner demonstrably lacked.

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

Charisma.

mcguire• 8 years ago

Success.

jarsin• 8 years ago

fsloth2• 8 years ago

Steve Jobs the manager went through several iterations. The terminal model was an opinionated manager who listened, respected and promoted those who could argue against him.

Yes, was probably horrible in many ways. It's sad his asshole image clouds everything that was good in his management side and people thinj they need to act like assholes to emulate him. The asshole part was a pathology, not a feature, but perhaps an inseparable part of him as a person.

14113• 8 years ago

and promoted those who could argue against him.

I've worked with managers like this, and although it might work for some, it was hell for me. Having to constantly argue to defend your ideas is draining, soul destroying, depressing, and lead to me burning out multiple times. Discussing and critiquing ideas should not involve force from either the idea's champion, nor who they are pitching it to. If, at the end of the day, you're evaluating ideas based on the force by which they're presented all you end up with is ideas that support being presented and defended forcefully - not deftly, nor intelligently.

milankragujevic• 8 years ago

Hmm, I expected this to be about Squad, the makers of Kerbal Space Program...

Cyberdog• 8 years ago

Between reading the link title and the page loading, I had a little fun guessing which studio it was going to be about. EA? Konami? Ubisoft? Nope, I was wrong. But there are just so many possibilities…

Thank goodness we're in something of a golden age of indie gaming. If you want to vote with your wallet against all these toxic AAA charnel houses, you have plenty of other quality choices to waste your time with.

By the way, no gamers take game awards shows seriously.

dandersh• 8 years ago

In my experience demands for working > 40 hours, nights, weekends, etc. almost always comes from management and planning failures.

What makes this scenario occur so often is that the business side wields too much power when it comes to culture, estimates, technical decision making, etc. For them you solve a problem by throwing more time at it and passing responsibility when possible (along with a few extra meetings, for good measure). Not only does this approach work poorly for development, but they are often the "final stop" in the product lifecycle, thus making it impossible to avoid taking responsibility, even for others work (like, say, for incomplete or nonexistent requirements).

Perhaps worst of all is that surviving these crunches makes things worse as the wrong lessons are learned and the process continues to repeat itself as those who push for change become disgruntled and leave.

Personally I've noticed a correlation between the pushing of "team culture" and toxic environments like this. The most egregious example of this was when it was suggested that I work unpaid on the weekend to "complete the sprint work as a TEAM."

sdrothrock• 8 years ago

Personally I've noticed a correlation between the pushing of "team culture" and toxic environments like this. The most egregious example of this was when it was suggested that I work unpaid on the weekend to "complete the sprint work as a TEAM."

The military has known for a very long time that [group] loyalty is absolutely necessary to get people to do things that they wouldn't normally do (for better or for worse), whether it's working extra hard, putting in more hours than usual, treating other groups as enemies, or even, yes, killing other people. The Stanford Prison experiment was a pretty good example of this in a bad way.

This quote from Australian Defense Corps training also shows an understanding of this principle: "Willingness to apply lethal force requires . . . sufficient bonding within the team to override each individual’s natural human resistance to kill. The toughness and bonding required increases the closer the contact with the enemy." [1]

So I wouldn't be surprised if team building exercises etc. were encouraged not only because of the actual productive results, but also because it's at least implicitly known to raise the boundaries of what individuals are willing to do.

[1] McGurk; et al. (2006). 'Joining the ranks: The role of indoctrination in transforming civilians to service members', (in 'Military life: The psychology of serving in peace and combat [vol. 2]'). Westport: Praeger Security International. -- snagged from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/853218/in_bo...

Edit: Even being aware of these kinds of tactics doesn't do much to help as the tactics (and stress and lack of sleep) themselves wear down your resistance to them and affect your ability to make decent decisions.

LifeLiverTransp2• 8 years ago

Nothing is going to change, there are to many stars in to many programers eyes, when they here games-industry. They literally can afford to burn the best talent, knowing it grows on tree for cheap for them.

Its the same thing why model agents can harass or molest young woman, while they literally allmost starve to death to be in a industry they can only work in for 15 years and will never earn more then the basics to live.

These actors are irrational, and there is a cornucopia providing new ones.

Best idea to dry this swamp is for other industries who lack talent- to provide a dual path- meaning- if you come to work for us, we will teach you also the tools of the game-design trade- and provide you with a chance to parallel realize the game of your dream in a sabatical.

kakarot• 8 years ago

Creating a modern full-fledged "game of your dreams", even if not AAA, can take years if not decades when you're going alone. People join development studios so that they actually have the chance of finishing a project in a reasonable timeframe and so that they can focus on one or two disciplines.

LifeLiverTransp2• 8 years ago

You are totally right- it takes decades.

But lets face it - in a company- there are two or three people doing the game-design, the others usually get not even a chance to contribute.

They are put into a silo, connected to a part of the pipeline and start crunching until the ilusion wears off. Even if you get a chance to realize a idea- in a modern title, the fear of risk, sees to any new concept that it is marginalized.

So even if it takes years, i think by now, its far more realistic to produce a title as a indy dev or open source dev by now.

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light;

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

GFischer• 8 years ago

Insecure managers are a plague and I'm very glad I'm no longer working under one.

"A real leader is thrilled when team members achieve great things. A mere manager is threatened."

k__• 8 years ago

Isn't this normal and the reason for the rise of indie games?

People want do make games, but they don't want to be crunched into oblivion, so they leave theae studios, go indie and do their own stuff...

ePierre• 8 years ago

French newspapers Mediapart and Canard PC have teamed up and released a bunch of articles about the video game industry and its toxic practices.

The articles are available online [1] but they're in French and some of them are behind a paywall.

The situation got to the point where a labor union for video games creators, « Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo » (STJV) [2], was created in France last year. There are currently around 70 members (out of 5000+ video game related employees in France). A strike is currently on-going in Eugen Systems [3], a French studio author of RTS games like Steel Division.

[1] https://www.canardpc.com/online/crunch-investigation (French)

[2] https://www.stjv.fr/en/ (English)

[3] https://www.stjv.fr/en/2018/03/already-more-than-3-weeks-on-... (English)

e3b0c• 8 years ago

I think this has something to do with the so-called Parkinson's law, where an organization tends to "corrupt" when it is growing its headcount if its top leader is not aware of it.

I used to work for a startup which has a 'flexible' working time culture too. It was not that bad until the company grew its size to an extent that the middle management layer was established. Then all the shit exactly like what a typical Parkinson's law story happened.

Edit: https://www.economist.com/node/14116121

mmjaa• 8 years ago

I've floated around the Game industry as a developer, and I have to say its one of the most toxic management industries I've seen. Too many times I've seen folks who just don't qualify, running developer teams like its some sort of feudal village .. the inclination towards prejudice and bigotry is just too damned high.

I wonder why it is that this industry in particular has such a problem with toxic management? My personal theory is that its because games are fundamentally a total decadence, and decadence just brings out the worst in humans ..

theshrike79• 8 years ago

I work 37.5 hours a week, maybe a bit more if I want to bank some hours for a vacation.

Of that, maybe 30 hours is actual productive work. Dunno who thought that a software designer can actually produce useful stuff for 90 hours a week.

Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers

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