The great video game exodus

The great video game exodus
gamasutra.com

There is little work life balance. No matter what happens, no matter how many people you destroy, you will do whatever it takes to ship in time for the Christmas season. If you miss Christmas, your ROI plummets. Huge franchise games are an exception, but those of us not writing FIFA Soccer, Madden NFL, or HALO really care about Christmas. Why do people accept this kind of employer abuse? It's because there is this attitude of having your name in the credits of a game being some huge honor, for which you will sacrifice life, pay, and health. People who work on games are passionate about gaming, they love to play them, work on them, and the rewarding feeling of shipping your game is intoxicating. When you sacrifice everything to make Christmas, you sacrifice code quality, maintainability, even reproducibility, leading to a very slow start on your next iteration, and the cycle of crunch/crash repeats itself.

If you are into games, you put up with this for a while, but over time, you see your friends and colleagues get jobs in other industries, and they make more and are happier working on non-game stuff you consider boring. You celebrate with them as they buy their first home, or a nice car, and start to think that maybe the fun work (when it is fun), isn't worth being paid a lot less. It's not like game companies give stock options, and whatever profits are made don't trickle down.

Eventually, you get older, you start a family, and you want to spend time with them, and a game company isn't going to be friendly to that. The benefits aren't as good, the crunches are still there, the pay isn't great, so you decide to move on.

You hire some young developer, who is gushing with excitement about working on games, as you were once upon a time, and you do your best to train them without letting your disappointment in the industry show, and you move one, the cycle repeats.

I honestly have no idea why it is this way. Naturally, not all studios are like this, and there are exceptions, but the majority of the less successful studios are stuck in this seemingly unbreakable cycle.

I have since worked in many software companies, some of the making exciting things, others doing dull enterprise things, and I've been a far happier person in all of them. The passion for games is still there, ever since I bought my Atari 2600 with paper route money, but as an engineer, I'm done, never again.

Think of an actor coming to hollywood. It's not that different.

Artists are easier to hire, and I think that your explanation holds nicely.

The easiest to hire are playtesters, who think playing games for a living is awesome, until they realize that making Kirby jump over that cloud 800 times to reproduce bug is hell. Playtesters have the biggest swing from excitement to disillusionment.

Having a life/spouse and that industry just aren't compatible in the large majority of cases. Heck, I saw 3 divorces on the last team I worked on.