Why Game Developers Keep Getting Laid Off

http://kotaku.com/why-game-developers-keep-getting-laid-off-1583192249

by footpath • 12 years ago

74 107 12 years ago

shmerl3• 12 years ago

But inertia is hard to fight. How do you convince a multi-billion-dollar industry to change practices that prioritize short-term profit over long-term morale

How does it compare to smaller studios, for example those which use crowdfunding (inXile, Larian etc.), or even bigger ones but self sustained, not relying on external publishers such as CD Projekt Red for example? Are their practices better than those of the big and nasty companies like EA and Co.?

Paul_S3• 12 years ago

Obviously, I don't know all of them but CD Projekt is not any different than any other publisher funded (owned or funded on a per project basis) developer I worked for in the decade I spent in gamedev.

There's little incentive in keeping your staff - there is never a shortage of younger people who will work for next to nothing and stay at the office till midnight, doing 80 hour weeks. You'd think that the owners would realise that more senior devs doing 40 hours would be a better ROI but we are talking about people who plan for crunch - it's not done in an emergency, it's planned for, literally, like in a spreadsheet.

shmerl3• 12 years ago

Are you familiar with CD Projekt Red or you just assume it? From what I've heard about the company they value their developers and in general they are quite different from your typical EA and Co. type of company and have more common sense. For instance they are strongly against any DRM.

neves• 12 years ago

Layoffs aren't a problem. There will be a new generation of young freshman whom greatest desire is to be a video game developer. The non unionized guys will work 140 hours a week. Have a great salary for someone so young. And get their layoff when they get older and can't stand more this.

EdwardDiego• 12 years ago

Are there unions in game dev? In my country, IT professionals are very hostile to unions, but then our labour laws are less imbalanced between employer and employee (IMO) than America's.

bittermang9• 12 years ago

I have not encountered any.

With all of the Hollywood Accounting that goes on at the publisher level to ensure a development team gets fucked out of as many royalties as possible, there is a lot the games industry could learn from the Unionization of Hollywood.

ekianjo8• 12 years ago

There are certainly unions in France at least and this is a place where many video games are developed (well, less now than before). Unions are mandatory in France when your company has more than 50 employees, so companies like Ubi Soft most certainly have unions at least in France, but my guess is they expanded in the US, Canada and Asia precisely for that reason: to lower the risk of having unions in a single development center.

watwut4• 12 years ago

Game developers does not have great salary for someone young, they still could get more elsewhere. You take pay cut to develop games.

bittermang9• 12 years ago

This cannot be overstated. You really do get the shaft to live out your dream.

The only people making the real money are the ones deciding who gets laid off.

chc2• 12 years ago

A lot of people at that age are working in a call center for like $300/week. Game development pays really poorly by tech standards and is grueling work, but it can sound like a lot of money when you're 21.

bittermang9• 12 years ago

Spoken like a person who has never so much as sniffed what the world is like in "AAA Game Development".

Imagine what a product like Facebook or Mac OS would look like, if after every major release, 2/3rds or the entire team were laid off, and a fresh batch of bright eager young talent was put in the chairs at a cheaper wage than the last crop, unaware of the doom riding on the horizon.

Do you know why every EA franchise seems to tank over time, until it's eventually killed? Because the people who made it originally are gone, replaced by a bunch of guys who are told "Make it work like the last one, but the market says it needs to be more action-y, so do that too." The people on the new team weren't there the first time around, and so they wind up making a faded copy of a game trying to imitate the predecessor. Eventually the game loses all of the heart, passion, and competency that made it a great game in the first place.

In the software world, we know the benefit of building a strong team. People learn to work with each other, and people learn to work with the product, knowing it inside and out. They're able to make the product the best it can be. That doesn't seem to matter in the world of games to publishers. They see the people who build the games as disposable fodder, because as you say there will always be a new generation whose greatest desire is to be a game developer.

Sure. Publishers don't see layoffs as a problem. It's become part of their business model by now. But from where I sit, you can only disenfranchise so many people, until you've killed your golden goose who makes building the product for you possible in the first place.

And this is directly why we've seen the rise of indie games. Every time they piss one of us off, we slowly start to realize we don't need them anymore.

-- A laid of game developer, with a foreclosed home.

chc2• 12 years ago

I think you might have misunderstood neves' post. You seem to largely agree with it.

ralphc• 12 years ago

I'm a rare consumer of video games. If I read this correctly, I should always try to get the first in a series and ignore the sequels?

drpgq• 12 years ago

The Curt Schilling story has always fascinated me (the video game part, not the baseball one).

I live in Ontario and like a lot of other place, Ontario gives pretty large tax incentives to video game companies. I've interacted a bit with some small video game companies here who basically seem to only exist because of the various tax incentives (both federal and provincial). I've pretty much decided these aren't a good idea, but politicians think video games are cool.

shard972• 12 years ago

I remember when I first herd about him and his company. As an Australian I didn't know who Curt Schilling was so in my mind it was a guy who got a lot of tax benefits and money to build an MMO.

nnq4• 12 years ago

This sounds like like one of the few problems that can really be solved by unionizing workers and moving to long term work contracts... but good luck selling this "socialist" mentality to game developers :)

forrestthewoods• 12 years ago

lol. Game studios shut down left and right. Almost every game studio in existence lives project to project. Most live paycheck to paycheck. You can unionize all you want but when there's no money there's no money.

This isn't a tale of fat cats getting rich at the expense of the little man. It's a brutal industry where most games don't ship and most games that do ship still lose money. All of us who work in the industry are mildly insane to do so.

nnq4• 12 years ago

so then the problem is more in a pathological game-dev-studio to publisher relationships? or are most studios too small to have a bunch of running projects at the same time?

...because the industry as a whole, on average, surely makes enough money to actually keep people employed even for the short periods when they aren't needed. What the OP describes is simply exploitation.

The only alternative conclusion to draw would be that the game dev industry attracts more talented programmers than it can support, but this sounds like a dubious claim. I doubt talented programmers are so attracted to game dev to actually saturate the sector with cheap and high quality labor...

iwwr• 12 years ago

That's more likely to just drive away publishers to friendlier jurisdictions. There's also the issue of voluntary vs. mandatory unions.

nnq4• 12 years ago

Do voluntary unions ever work? "Forcing people help themselves" sounds bad, but considering human nature, I don't think anything else works...

Furzel• 12 years ago

Couldn't this problem be solved by a shift to a video game consulting industry ?

In tech companies it's quite common to have a period of 'inter contract' between two missions where you can do trainings or even self training. Is the video game market hostile to this kind of organisation or has it just not been tested yet ?

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

I considered that option too - consultants or freelancers or the like with less rigid contracts - however, the cost for those would be exponentially that of the young easy to hire developers; hourly rates at least twice as high, which doubles if you make them work double hours during crunch hours.

In-house developers work for a flat annual salary, and IIRC most game development companies don't pay overtime whilst demanding devs work overtime during crunch time.

But game dev extortion is a known problem, and the other problem is that people take it. Working in the video game industry is a dream for a lot of people, and they're willing to take a lot of shit for the perceived privilege to work on the things they love.

And the weirdest part? The actual development of a video game is often only a small part of the total cost package; iirc, games like the Call of Duty series cost more in marketing than the actual development.

dsirijus5• 12 years ago

This relates only to a particular type of games - the ones that are shipped and forgot, or the ones that need minimum upkeep costs. So, perfectly understandable, and this is (almost) analogous to complaining why some hotel staffs 30 during winter instead of 100 people during the summer season.

As a game company owner myself, I've found a way to do efficient damage control (with regards to morale) on this - announce the "cuts" as early as project pitch! It's not incomprehensible that you know how many people you'll need for the game's upkeep and how many for development stage. Throw an "if game is successful" and "if game is !successful" clause in there, and that way everyone knows what's the playing ground for your game.

I've noticed that these policies of mine have attracted fast-moving employees, the ones that will find it perfectly understandable if I, right now, scrapped every project and said goodbye to everyone. Which, in game industry, is a frequent occurence.

Sniffnoy• 12 years ago

Isn't this more or less how movies get made in Hollywood? You're always hired just for a particular project? (Going by memory here, may be way off.)

dsirijus5• 12 years ago

Of course. There's a bit of delusional idea that games are somehow sustainable business model (admiteddly, they _are_ for some genres).

But, yes, that's the nature of business. This, to me, is a bit like complaining how war-time journalists don't get to spend enough time with their families and are at life risk. It's the biz, and, I'm sorry to be slightly verbally violent, get tougher skin or gtfo. Plenty of sustainable software/design/management roles in various spheres for you if you can't take it.

watwut4• 12 years ago

The difference is that Hollywood is up front about it and you sign temporary contract etc. Game companies tend to sign normal employment contracts, promiss long term employment and heaven, exploit you during development and fire you later on (occasionally just before you would collect benefits).

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that game developers did not used to be hired for one project in the past. It is a thing of last years. They used to be hired by company and worked on multiple games there. Bad development practices used to be norm all the time through.

Which does not apply to parent who is up front about the whole thing.

hudibras• 12 years ago

How many employees do you estimate that you've laid off?

(Genuinely curious, by the way.)

dsirijus5• 12 years ago

None in 3 years running. I'm doing my financial projections well. There could be some drastic cuts during the rest of this year, but absolutely everyone in the company is aware of that. We have 3 games due release pretty soon, and if only one is even moderately successful, I'll keep everyone running by me.

I came close to firing one, but we've managed to find a consensus and we drastically reassesed him and reassigned his responsibilities within the projects/company. It was a good decision - he's probably the most productive person on the team now.

frik• 12 years ago

If they drive off the hardcore gaming community by adding more and more casual elements like pay for win, double-DRM and dumped down gameplay, the franchise will go downhill.

For example open world games usually center around vehicles to move around vast amount of map-terrain. You can make the driving physics (the central gameplay element) arcady and fun (like GTA San Andreas) or realistic and still fun (like GTA 4 or Mafia 1+2). Or you don't care and get the driving mechanics mediocre like most such games (GTA V, Watch Dogs, Sleeping Dogs, Need for Speed, etc.)

chris_wot2• 12 years ago

I can't understand why this comment has been downvoted. It seems like a controversial but valid opinion. What are the specific objections?

agersant• 12 years ago

It's off-topic.

Iftheshoefits• 12 years ago

Game developers keep getting laid off for the same reason game developers generally earn lower salaries and have worse working conditions than other people in this industry: a robust oversupply of potential labor.

These companies can replace their entire development staff regularly. That is, of course, the successful ones can. Developers at smaller places are laid off when their studios are bought by the sharks or fail to achieve any success in the market.

mattm• 12 years ago

Yeah, I had a friend a few years younger than me say he wanted to get into game development. I told him the horror stories that many devs work all the time, get paid little and don't even have time to play games.

His response?

"I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."

tsotha3• 12 years ago

This is the key. You wouldn't want to be a game dev for the same reason you wouldn't open a surfboard shop or depend on your band to pay the bills. To much in the way of virtually unpaid competition.

mynameishere• 12 years ago

It's weirdly common to hear about people getting laid off from the same company more than once—i.e., they get laid off, rehired, and laid off again in a span of two or three years

It's not too weird. This was how factories used to work on a regular basis. Guys would work for 8 months, get laid off, get unemployment for 2 months and lay around the house bugging their wives, then get called back again. Repeat until retirement. The supply chain techniques have improved so that doesn't happen very much now.

seanewest3• 12 years ago

But that sounds like a dependable cycle... one you could financially depend on. Your situation is more uncertain when you get laid off in the game industry.

pjc50• 12 years ago

Which country/time period? Across much of Europe for much of the 20th century, trying to do that would bring your entire workforce out on strike.

collyw• 12 years ago

I would be quite pleased with unpaid leave for two months, if I knew it was coming.

yen2233• 12 years ago

That strongly resembles life of an oil-rigger. 6 months hard labour, 6 months vacation, rinse, repeat.

seanewest3• 12 years ago

I've worked in the AAA game industry and there are many factors. When you break down the interests of companies this seems like just a product of economic self-interest, financial risk, volatility, and publisher/studio relationships.

But the truth is that the practices of industries are often based on what the employees are willing to take. Employees in the game industry will come back after being fired ... and fired again. They won't quit their job even though they work 80+ hours a week for months on end. In other industries, this would never fly, and practices that assume you can do this to employees would have never caught on, because the employees in (many) other industries won't as consistently take that abuse.

The practices of the gaming industry have, over the years, formed around this fact of nature about the employees. None of it would be this way if employees weren't willing to take the abuse in the first place.

sportanova2• 12 years ago

But I'm guessing that a lot of these devs are really interested in x genre, but they're working in y genre, so why do they take the abuse? Is there just a huge over supply of game devs?

yen2233• 12 years ago

Is there just a huge over supply of game devs?

Bingo. Too many people think being good at playing games means they are good at making games.

x0054• 12 years ago

Wouldn't one solution to this problem be telecommuting combined with contract based model. You put a team together for a project, work the project, and let every one know up front that this is a temporary gig, not a permanent job. Like in the movie industry. But the twist is, you embrace a telecommuting model, allowing developers to move from project to project without having to move from house to house.

This would also make it much easier to rehire people who worked for you before, providing continuity to the games, and increasing level of code reuse. I know it's not a steady job, but perhaps it's a fair compromise. Also, this would allow the video game industry to keep older talent, as developers would be able to have a more flexible schedule and live in more family friendly suburban neighborhoods.

Just an idea....

ehurrell• 12 years ago

That does seem like it has a lot of potential to tackle this, though it would probably make game development less attractive (the illusion of a steady job is better than 'well in 9 months you'll be looking for work'). Game dev is hugely attractive of course, so it could conceivably take the hit.

One possible problem with this is what's already been happening with contract CG people in the movie industry. Their work is becoming increasingly devalued so there's a race to the bottom in terms of charging, such that situations like Ang Lee's Life of Pi, where he said something to the effect that he felt he paid too much for CG (I can't remember offhand the exact quote) and the CG people were barely making ends meet. They also aren't being acknowledged at awards, which for some can be a disincentive.

matthewmacleod2• 12 years ago

I'm really surprised that's not the case. Contracting would be great for this sort of thing.

kevingadd• 12 years ago

Remote contractors are heavily leveraged in the game industry. It's not a solution; it usually makes things worse.

yen2233• 12 years ago

I can't see how game devs can work remotely in any practical sense. It can't be easy pushing gigabytes of assets down the Internet.

notastartup• 12 years ago

I think developers/designers or any type of creative work that involves using the computer need a union of some sort. Artists have it, Writers have it, why not the tech crowd?

mattgreenrocks• 12 years ago

Naivete and immaturity. The tech crowd doesn't realize that the best time to work towards a better future for themselves is when things are [generally] going your way.

What many do not see is the rapid commoditization of the low-end of the market, fueled by OSS RAD tools.

chris_wot2• 12 years ago

I see you have been downvoted, but I've increasingly been of that opinion. I see developers being screwed over all the time by big corporations - as an example, Apple and Google with illegal agreements not to poach each other's workers. A union, IMO, would have helped.

angelortega• 12 years ago

It's a strange language when "getting laid" and "getting laid off" mean such different things.

thesteamboat• 12 years ago

To compound the problem, "getting off" happens when "getting laid".

aikah2• 12 years ago

Yeah,as a foreigner ,it's hard, never know what to put after a verb to get the right meaning,let's take "to go".

to go on,go back,go off,go around,go by

have a different meaning...that's the most difficult part of the english language imho,now you can use a different verb for each expression,but it wouldnt feel idiomatic.

At the same time,it makes english composable and easy to extend,it cannot work with my language.I wonder if other languages work like that too.

sammyd56• 12 years ago

Most Germanic languages have constructs similar to English´s phrasal verbs. Learning them, for a foreigner, is really difficult (I know, because I spend most of my time teaching English to Spanish students). I actually just released the Android app I´ve been building to help with this. I didn´t think it was worthy of a Show HN post, but now seems a good time to mention it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phrasalver...

tsotha3• 12 years ago

Several of the developers who contacted me for this story said they were fed up with layoff cycles and had left the video game industry entirely. Some told tales of endless relocations and unreasonable hours, and bragged that in their new fields, they were paid more to work less.

Yeah... this isn't exactly news. You work in the gaming industry because you love video games. It's not a career. It's a job you do when you have youth and health and minimum entanglements. When you get married or get older or get just plain sick of working around the clock for not much money then it's time to look around for something more stable and remunerative.

It's ridiculous to compare video game industry jobs with Big Grey Financial Company. If you want comparisons, look at the movie industry, where people get together to work on a project and then all get laid off when it's done.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry?

The tools people use in the movie industry are commodities with relatively slow innovation. People can get by on more or less the same skill set they had 15 years ago, and once the movie has been shot, virtually nobody has gained any new knowledge.

The game industry has to considerably up their game (no pun intended) with every new release. The only way they can keep up the movie-style cycle if a company producing a new game can pick up developers just laid off by someone else.

I doubt if that is sustainable in the long run. At some point hiring new devs with very recent experience will become more expensive than retaining knowledge.

The game industry will always have more dramatic cycles because any company is as successful as their last game, but the current state of affairs just reeks of immaturity.

ekianjo8• 12 years ago

The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry?

Well at the same time the technologies you used to make the game you worked on 2 years ago are probably going to be obsolete in the new game you'd be hired to work on. There's only a few jobs in the game industry where highly specialized, technical people are valued and retained. And there's a ton of talent pool to pick up fresh people from out there who are decent at what they do - probably more than there are jobs for them.

Look at Mercury Steam, they had no experience doing a AAA game (unless you consider Jericho one of them, but I'd say it was rather average in scope), and yet they managed to convince Konami they could do a reboot of Castlevania and they did it pretty well without much prior experience in the similar genre or scope.

thomasz• 12 years ago

The tools people use in the movie industry are commodities with relatively slow innovation. People can get by on more or less the same skill set they had 15 years ago, and once the movie has been shot, virtually nobody has gained any new knowledge.

I'm pretty sure you can only say that because you do not have the slightest insight into the movie industry.

tsotha3• 12 years ago

The tools people use in the movie industry are commodities with relatively slow innovation. People can get by on more or less the same skill set they had 15 years ago, and once the movie has been shot, virtually nobody has gained any new knowledge.

I don't think that's true at all, particularly with the amount of CGI they're putting into modern films. CGI changes pretty quickly, too - an effect that was good enough last year looks dated if you put it in this year's release.

herperderp• 12 years ago

employment is a scam

lazyjones• 12 years ago

Isn't the bigger issue here that game developers have been underpaid for many years? They are usually exceptional programmers who would be getting much higher salaries (and much better working conditions) elsewhere, so getting laid off would not be such a dramatic experience due to savings etc..

gambiting4• 12 years ago

>The average yearly salary for game developers, according to a Gamasutra study, was $84,000 in 2013.

I just got hired as a junior programmer at a large studio(one of the largest in the world in fact) and I make ~$30k a year - wonder where they get their numbers from, or if maybe the market in the US is better(I am in the UK).

hackerboos3• 12 years ago

That's low for any programming job. My first job out of university was $42k.

Where about are you based?

gambiting4• 12 years ago

I know it's low - and everyone is telling me that "that's how games industry is like". Both me and my girlfriend finished the exact same course at uni, and I got my dream job in games industry, making £18k a year, and she got a job in BT, making £30k a year. It's in the North East of England.

mattmanser• 12 years ago

Programmers make less in the UK than the US generally, so it's not worth comparing.

Like a senior dev in the UK is about £45k outside of London, which is $76k, much less than the $1xxk you often see bandied about here.

EDIT: I personally think there are two reasons:

1. Cultural - we almost can't imagine paying employees more than managers, regardless of skill levels

2. Demand - We ran out of developers later, the UK hit 'peak developer' a lot later than the US because of the BBC micro and the archimedes in schools meaning there were more people capable of programming available. Developer pay has ramped up fairly rapidly over the last few years

matthewmacleod2• 12 years ago

I don't agree with the cultural issue - I've certainly been paid more than my manager before, and when I've been in a tech management position I've paid more than my own salary for good candidates. That's never been perceived as unusual.

I'd add a third point there though - better public services (e.g. no healthcare costs) means there's less demand on salaries.

Developer pay is certainly ramping up, especially for good cross-platform folk.

was_hellbanned• 12 years ago

A good friend of mine has worked in the games industry for over a decade now. He worked on the Spore project at EA. It was insane how many hours he put in while on-project. He'd have to answer his phone at any time, and sometimes drop whatever he was doing to trudge back into work. At the end of a three month crunch, he said he'd spend about two weeks just dicking around at work, sort of an informal comp-time system. I remember the "EA spouse" incident, and by the sound of it, my friend was on one of the 'good' teams.

I once asked him why game developers don't get any royalties, since there was a time when that was at least not unheard of. He insisted that it would just cause people to game the system, with lazy people trying to get on the money-making teams. Personally, I fail to see how that's not always the case, everywhere, anyway. I think he's simply drunk the Kool-Aid and bought the line that upper management fed him in order to maximize their profits.

Why Game Developers Keep Getting Laid Off

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