That article brought to mind the bad press surrounding the development of LA Noire a few years back that overshadowed the launch of the game itself. The complaints are similar - overbearing managers, stressed out staff, 80-hour weeks to push a product out on schedule. Apparently this sort of setup is endemic throughout the industry, to the point where crunch time - a sort of misery session at the end of a project where everyone overworks themselves to death to get the game out on schedule - is a standard and accepted practice.
What makes the video game industry so susceptible to this kind of bad management? I mean, if you need your staff to work 80-hour weeks for two months to finish on schedule, then the problem is with the schedule that management have drawn up, not the staff themselves. Is it just that the expectations are unrealistic in terms of what can be delivered in an acceptable timeframe? That demands on workers are only going to increase as games become more complex?
You can’t say that this is ‘teething problems’ with a new industry, either - mass market video games are thirty years old at this point. It seems an unsustainable way to run a billion-dollar industry.
Being in the industry has a coolness factor, so there’s an endless stream of young talent who are willing to put up with tons of shit for a place at the table. The music industry has a history of treating bands like garbage for similar reasons. The only reason Hollywood isn’t just as exploitative is that it’s heavily unionized.
I don’t think those problems are limited to the video games industry. Those sound like general gripes I’ve heard from my friends who are programmers for boring utility programs. When it gets close to release they’re working extremely long hours under very stressful conditions.
Here’s what i don’t get about this whole crunch time in software development.
I mean we know, i mean we know right, that the 8 hour working day developed for a reason.
It is the most efficient combination of time worked to efficience of work to provide maximum productivity. Working longer hours doesn’t actually make you more productive.
12 hour work days cut productivity by 25% over the 8 hour day, because exhausted workers doing 12 hour shifts are only 50% as efficient.
NB. Important Caveat. You can increase productivity in the short term, a few days or so, but not months of crunch time.
Making your poor employees work 90 hour weeks is not going to increase the work done, it’s going to* increase *the time it takes because people aren’t robots and your normally skilled programmer is going to be working with all the speed, efficiency and lack of error as if you were dosing him up with Thorazine.
Don’t they teach this in business school’s? Do managers just have an irrational belief in longer hours? Or am i wrong.? Because to the best of my knowledge we’ve known this for about a 100 years.
The dirty secret of the video game industry is that it’s mismanaged at every level. The difficult part is that it’s not a single cause. There’s all kinds of reasons.
First, we have some studios which are essentially managed by a developer turned boss. The good news is that they are usually pretty knowledgeable about the craft. The downside? They’re also likely to be fanboys to an extent, make poorm decisions because of enthusiasm, and don’t necessarily have any talent for managing.
IOn the other side, we’ve got a lot of manager who seem to actively dislike gamers and gaming. There’s nothin g wrong with managers at any level who aren’t “intimate” with the field. I have no problem with a manager at a liquor plant who doesn’t drink, for instance. However, you still need to know about the craft and have respect for your customers.
IN both cases, you tend to get a lot of crunch. Neither group has a good handle for time manage, the former out of ignorance and the latter out of apathy. Both are likely to forget to build in proper testing and extended development time in favor of meeting their goals. And both have until recently been protected by the constantly-growing nature of gaming. But as gaming itself has matured, it isn’t growing at anything like the robust year-over-year expansion where even mediocre games could win. So now we see more and more cut-throat competition in a gaming landscape which is a lot more stable… or at least will be more stable until bad decisions start killing the next wave of victim companies.
In larger publisher/developers, the deadlines are set by the marketing department, without regard to the actual time it takes to make a good product. They work back from when they need to get on the shelf for Christmas or some other arbitrary date, and development must be done by then or else terrible things will happen (they won’t get their bonuses). If that means 80 hour weeks, so be it; the staff is usually on salary with some lame comp time benefit, if any. The marketing schedule runs the show.
Yes. So do many of the workers for that matter. The American Work Ethic is all about quantity of work, not quality; it’s “better” to work long hours and do a bad job than it is to do a better job in half the time and have free time left over. Especially since you won’t be allowed that free time, or rewarded for doing the job faster or better; you’ll just be handed more work. So you might as well stretch things out.
And with the managers, there’s the added attitude that employing anything over the bare minimum number of workers is a bad idea, and a way to save money is to work the employees you have harder while cutting back on their training and pay.
No. This is the way business simply is. It’s not unique to video games and I have no idea why a person would think otherwise.
Some video game studios are well managed (you don’t hear about them) and some are not. Welcome to life. ** smiling bandit**'s “dirty secret” about the video game industry is not no much a “secret” as a “generally universal truth about every kind of free enterprise ever conceived.” He perfectly described the welding industry, school bus manufacturing, mass production of flatware, magazine publishing, and the places that make safety ear plugs.
I would say that they are managed sub-optimally. In a perfect world you wouldn’t be schedule driven to the extent that we are, and you wouldn’t be driven by specific customer support issues that interfere with your ability to develop new features, but the reality is that we still need to pay the bills while development is going on. Perfect management only happens in isolation; the real world is a series of compromises.
I wouldn’t agree. Essentially all of the large video game companies are poorly managed in as much as I can tell. I’m no virgin when it comes to analyzing management, and you don’t see the kind of sloppy, disconnected decision-making in most corporations. This isn’t to say they’re all pillars of genius or anything. Any large organization will get plenty of chop and miscommunication because of sheer organizational complexity. But there’s so many factors in video games that we simply don’t understand.
Consider this: virtually nothing in video games is standardized. Oh, we’ve taken strides with game engines and graphics tools in some ways. But everything else in the game is custom-built to that game, and even engines are tweaked endlessly to produce the desired outcomes and effects. Everything from art assets to sound to world design to the fundamental rules of gameplay are put together specially and only for the game. This means that we know very little about the scope of the project before it begins, and the outcome depends heavily on the talents, interests, and skills of the team.
It’s one reason they’ve mimicked to a degree the structure of Hollywood. If anything, they need to go further in that direction, but should stop trying to imitate the style of Hollywood. They fail harder than H-Town due to a complete lack of clarity at the top. The big publishers are chasing the big hits and only the big hits, trying to orient their entire strategy around tentpoles. But there’s only so much room in the tentpole biz and its risky, because sales are much less predictable.
It’s not about perfect management, it’s about where you show up on the scale. The average company is poorly managed in a lot of ways, but still stays afloat. But that doesn’t place much higher up than many that fail. The really well managed companies are outliers, well known for their success, and even then top quality management usually has a limited life span. I don’t see video game companies being outliers in the other direction, just below average among the many companies that aren’t far from average.
I suspect that the game industry is mismanaged for the same reason the entire tech industry is mismanaged. Do people who program computers for a living strike you as the sort of people who embrace process, procedure, deadlines, schedules and other tenets of “management”?
I think msmith537 is closer to the root cause of this than a lot of people. Though smiling bandit is definitely creeping up on the real reason as well; We are still, at this point, fundamentally AWFUL at building software. Not just games, but ANY software. It has become a massive, super complicated undertaking and we don’t really have any good tools and methodologies in place to handle it, and even the tools and methods we do have which could help are often not used or used unevenly or ineffectively because of “common sense”. Take the whole “doubling the work week doesn’t actually get more done” problem and multiply it by dozens of similar problems where the “common sense” solution (“More hours means more work gets done!”) is wrong and you have modern software development.
I’ve heard it said that if we build cars (or bridges, or whatever) the same way we build software, we’d all be dead by now. Software “engineering” doesn’t deserve the name. At least, not yet.
And yes, as someone else mentioned, the problem is that most of these companies are either run by people who used to be engineers, and are therefore terrible at management, or people who understand nothing about software development and only know “business” and think that makes them qualified.
I don’t want to be that guy, but cite? I thought the 8 hour workday was basically a quality of life thing, not a productivity maximum. I’d love to see some research on the topic.
There’s another significant problem here that’s specific to software-- you can’t just hire another coder and fit them easily and neatly into the production team to double up on a project that’s behind the way you could hire another factory line worker at Christmas or another waitress for the dinner rush. It’s not that there aren’t coders available (though a shortage of skilled coders is a problem), it’s that one person can’t simply sit down and pick up precisely where the other guy left off without some serious inefficiencies in figuring out what the other guy’s plans for how to code this particular problem were. For short-term problems, overtime really is the best way to get this done. The problem lies in managers losing sight of what “short-term” is.
