I really liked DmC, honestly. I had no idea about the lead designer thing.
A New York Times article, written by Jason Schreier, about how grueling crunch is for developers.
Very cool for him! His book was excellent. Also that article hit the front page of tomorrow’s NYT!
How to do Max Payne face
- Don’t go to toilet for a week.
- Go to the toilet.
The average American game developer earned $83,060 in 2013, according to a Gamasutra survey, or less than half the pay of a first-year associate at a New York law firm.
It’s a true American tragedy.
$80k living in, say, SanFran or Boston isn’t high rolling, and if you’re working 60+ hour weeks routinely, with the ever-present threat of being jettisoned after ship-day almost no matter what you do, it’s sort of a crappy gig compared to other stuff you could do with similar levels of education and expertise.
Yeah, I know. I don’t know from where these developers summon the will to continue.
Plus there’s the scourge of benign stomach pains they have to put up with. It’s a tough gig, man.
There’s room enough in this world to be upset about multiple things. Game development companies often mistreat their employees, and we can work on that while we also, you know, knock out systemic racism and class-based inequity.
Pay doesn’t have everything to do with it. For an extreme example, a highly paid woman who gets regularly harassed at work has just as much right to complain as a low paid one; the compensation doesn’t justify the mistreatment.
This has always been the case, remember “EA spouse” from 15 years ago? We had a similar thread about it then. Bottom line is working in videogames is cool and people are willing to put up with shit to do it.
Sure. Though I’d be willing to bet that game developers issues are taken care of first. We’ll knock out that pesky systemic racism and class-based inequity once that gets done. Also tax breaks for those poor Wall Street guys, of course. But then we’re really gonna get serious about racism and sexism!
Anyway, I was mostly poking mild fun at the super-serious tone of the article for something that barely qualifies as a problem.
An odd choice of comparison. A law degree requires 3 years of additional schooling, and fewer than a quarter of law school graduates get a BigLaw associate’s job at all, let alone the small subset that work in a high cost-of-living city like NY or SF. But they do know about crunch, I imagine.
Same for any aspirational profession like radio/TV/film, etc.
Absolutely. If you work somewhere cool, expect to pay for that.
Thought this was a fun little article looking back on Dragon’s Lair. I was totally obsessed with this game back in my arcade days but I just couldn’t afford fifty cents a go, especially when it was so brutally difficult.
I tried it a couple times and then was like, “so all I do is push a direction at the correct time?”. I was done.
Yeah, we didn’t have the term at the time but it’s just a giant QTE.
“She was giving these massive presentations on the story, themes,” said one person who worked on Ragtag. “EA executives are like, ‘FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year.’ Where’s your version of that?”
What a shame. What a clusterfuck.
Set between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Ragtag would focus on the impact of Alderaan’s destruction and tell a story about criminal families, scoundrels, and action-packed heists. “This was the coolest shit I’ve ever seen,” said one person who saw the story. “[Hennig] had total buy-in from the start on that. Everybody was buzzing.”
On the other hand…
By the middle of 2017, people who saw the game say it resembled Uncharted too much for EA’s liking. “The three levels we made for the 3.5 gate, every single one of those levels you could hold up a video of Uncharted beside it,” said one former Visceral employee, “and you could literally say, ‘OK, this part is like this part from Uncharted. This level is like this level from Uncharted.’”
Even better . . .
There was the engine, Frostbite, which had never been used to make a third-person action-adventure game. In the video game world, an “engine” is a collection of code that is reused across games, often including basic, boring features like physics simulators, graphics renderers, and animation systems. For the past half-decade, EA has mandated that all of its studios use the Frostbite engine, which was designed by the EA studio DICE in Sweden to make Battlefield games.
That good old “make it fit and it’s your fault if it doesn’t work” EA spirit.
“She was giving these massive presentations on the story, themes,” said one person who worked on Ragtag. “EA executives are like, ‘FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year.’ Where’s your version of that?”
People think, ‘Oh it must be so cool to work on Star Wars.’ It actually kind of sucks.”