For many people, the chance to make PS4 and Xbox games is a dream job – but the reality of working conditions in the video game industry can be six-day working weeks, 24-hour shifts and unrelenting stress. Sam Forsdick speaks to the employees who have experienced the dark side of the industry.
Nobody – from cleaner to programmer – should be working or should be expected to work these kinds of hours in these kinds of conditions. It’s inhumane and should be illegal in any functioning modern society. This is barbaric.
I’ve worked 11 days straight with no time off, worked 24 hours straight when needed. Barbaric is cutting someone’s hand off for stealing. Having “stress†is called being an adult.
Rockstar should fire any and all employees who try to unionize.
Edited 2018-11-28 22:45 UTC
I don’t know about barbaric, but I know what stupid is, and that’s you, stupid.
Yeah, because who wants competitive wages, sane hours, and other benefits when they could work 11 straight days, including 24hr days when needed? Oh, by the way the owner’s mistress’ brother with absolutely no qualifications needs a job so you’re fired.
Just another temporarily embarrassed millionaire trying to protect their future fortune…
You didn’t worked in gamedev, right?
I agree. Most major titles are released in a state that can only be explained by severe battlefield fatigue and shellshock…
Stress is actually a bad thing because it damages happiness and health. You can make up new definitions in order to make stress sound good but only a fool would fall for that because that is just playing with words and not an actual argument.
I can play the same game too: You should not have tolerated those working conditions and stood up for yourself. It is called being an adult. However I normally do not resort to this because it is not a real argument but rather just a stupid manipulation trick that only stupid people fall for.
If your definition of adult incorporates being sick and unhappy due to stress, then I am not an adult in your definition, nor would I want to be.
I never understood that anti-union sentiment.
Unions are great for employees.
I can sympathize with that feeling. There is an odd pride as you tell your coworkers “my longest week was 120 hours,” or even “I had to sleep under my desk for a week,” or “good thing they have showers in the building or my stench would send you running.” Then, you even view unions as a threat to your lifestyle (which has been reduced to slaving away for some emotionless company that doesn’t give a damn about you and might can you tomorrow just because they feel like it.)
However, the sad news is that too many studios use these tactics to exploit workers and normalize unfair employee wages and treatment. Too many people aren’t joking when they say “I’m making like $5 an hour. Unions are your friend. Imagine if you could tell your employer that you have a right to go home and have dinner with your family, and they can’t fire you for it. Imagine if you could go on a family vacation when your kids are on summer break from school. Imagine being able to go out for drinks with your friends in the summertime when the sun is still out.
These are things that crunch season takes away from you. These are things that get fixed when you have a union, and you tell your employer I want to $130K for a 40 hour week, and I will only occasionally work overtime.
The rest of the software industry has a term for the way gamedevs are treated. It’s called a death spiral. It wears you down, reduces the quality of work, and burns you out before you reach your prime. It’s the result of poor project management, not “excellence” or some dogmatic sense of nobility. It also puts projects at risk, and can lead to missing ship dates and releasing poor quality products.
Electronic Arts was the mother of crunch times and poor working conditions.. In fact it got voted the worst company in America for two years straight.
It took the CEO to realize how much customers resented the company to turn it around..
An interesting read about the period can be read here.
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-electronic-arts-stopped-being-the-wors…
Many IT workers are legally exempted from overtime pay in the US, which means there’s little incentive for employers to respect the federal overtime laws based on a 40hr work week. I’ve regularly worked 55-60hr/week with unpaid overtime, which I consider typical. Some “crunch weeks” may be more, but 100 hours… Wow, I’m thankful not to have that job.
My old boss used to always tout that the ‘normal IT people work 60-80 hours a week’ and that he was being nice because he only made us work 50… We used to refer to it as ‘sourly’ wages, because we’d be paid salary (no overtime) but still paid the wages an hourly person would make.
My response to him saying that was ‘bad administrators work that many hours, good ones don’t because their stuff works!’ Then again he was a firm believer that non-busy admins were terrible, when people should know that the really busy ones means they don’t know what they’re doing and so everything they set up is broken.
Pretty much this..
Mix with Agile movement where nobody does any kind of testing before deploying a release (since the automated testing scripts should have worked without hickups) and you can easily reach this number of hours per week.
Fast delivery, quickly fix the issues, no rollback and still hope we can make the release on time.
This applies to other industries as well..
“Electronic Arts released its first blockbuster title in 1988”!? They published hit games long before that, eg. Bard’s Tale for example.
There used to be a site that was run by former/current ea employees. I think it was ea sucks, they posted horror stories about how they would sleep on their desk and the crap they went through for the corporation. It was not because ea employees wanted to get more overtime, it was because of unrealistic deadlines.
I know in Richardson Tx a company called stream international had a in-call center where people would sleep on the desk to get overtime. That was before India.
It’s not surprising to see that rockstar operates in the same level now, after all they compete with EA
Edited 2018-11-29 00:31 UTC
This has been studied like a bazillion times over the last 100+ years – when people work more than something like 32 hours a week, their output per week decreases! This is basic math. Why do so many employers force their employees to work longer hours, and then get less out of them for it? It’s just pure insanity, even from an employer’s perspective.
Because executives are morons who have been taught only two things: nothing matters but the bottom line, and greed is good. When that is all you teach your business majors, don’t expect corporations to be decent places to work.
That’s exactly my opinion too.. stockholders and bottom line.
I can’t stand some of the attitudes of people that beat their chests and tout how they ‘work hard’ by putting in tons of overtime hours, and then look down on co-workers that realize how important balance and family are in your life. These kind of people seem to have a lot of issues outside of work too. And yet, management LOVES this. Blind dedication..
Almost always, when there is some big problem or issue, the solution comes while I am at home relaxed and thinking freely, rather than staring at a monitor for hours on end at work.
I work in the U.S. for a German company, and MUCH prefer German management and attitudes toward work. They seem to understand it. Working TONS of hours rarely fixes productivity issues.
I don’t know how you could have/raise a family working at someplace like the article states.
But even here it makes no sense. If you are getting less out of employees by making them work longer hours, as most of these studies show, then that surely impacts the bottom line. It makes no sense, even given those awful motives.
Executives aren’t people known to have sense.
(But then, there are also idiots like the guy up top who boasts about being exploited and proud of it.)
So they are Ferengi?
I’ve worked at an ISP the standard 44 hours week(Brazil) plus 60 to 100 additional hours per month about 12 years ago.
Grades at the University went down as f–k(except networking and database related courses), and man, not even my worst enemy deserves this kind of labour condition.
I didn’t burnout cause sometimes in life you have to swallow this kind of situation to avoid(and fear of) being unemployed
Edited 2018-11-29 10:14 UTC
look into the medical field in the U.S.
Nurses working 16 hour shifts is so common it is not funny. Doctors in ERs who work 24, 36 and 48 hour shifts.
Guess what, they are not playing a game, they might be saving your life or operating on you.
While I agree with 0% of it (from the game industry to the medical field), one question pops up, why? I do not know the answer, but I know medical doctors who worked 48 hours straight and they can not explain why.
I wouldn’t say nurses are the best argument here. Nurses who do 16 hour shifts usually have 32 hours off afterwards, so they end up having the same time working and off over every two day period that a normal 9-5 job does, it’s just organized differently.
But that’s not a good counter argument either. If there are people who you want working at their peak when they are working, it’s medical professionals.
The human body simply doesn’t work like that. There’s no such thing as “making up the hours later”. You can get at most 6 hours at a time out of people. You may as well be throwing money away after that because you’re just paying them to be there.
I worked at Bungie Studios for the Halo 3 launch as a contractor. We worked 16 hour days 7 days a week from the middle of May until the end of August. They never said you had to work overtime, but if you didn’t, it wasn’t likely your contract would be renewed at the end of the month. I was told one day after lunch that I had to turn in my badge, butI could bill an 8 hour day.
Following that, I spend 10 years working several contracts for Microsoft Game Studios. I never got notice when I was being let go, they would just show up at my desk with a security person and ask for your badge. That happened at least once a year.
The upside, was that I had a good reputation with a few studios, so I was rarely unemployed for more than a day or two. Someone was always hiring, and occasionally I would choose to go on a vacation for a few months if the layoffs overlapped with the end of my lease on my apartment.
Crunch time was the same everywhere I went. Months of long days working 6 or 7 days a week. I learned quickly to never accept salaried overtime-exempt positions, and that made a difference by more than doubling my paycheck during the crunch season. Even though some positions didn’t pay 1.5x time for overtime. One time I even got double time for every hour over 80, which was huge when you work a 100 hour week (40 + 1.5 * 40 + 2 * 20 = 140 * 15 = 2100 – tax)
Eventually, it dawned on me that $2,100 a week was what many employers would consider a bargain for a 40 hour week. I jumped ship and went from Game Testing to general Software Development, and never looked back. Now I know what it is like to have work-life balance, and in fact, I specifically ask employers about that when I am interviewing.
In the end, I’m not sure I would trade that experience for anything. I learned so many useful skills and made so many good connections to talented people. I learned how to deal with unemployment and the importance of continuing your education after school. On the down side, I do sometimes feel like I lost years of my social life; in a time when I could have met a girl and started a family, I was working long hours every day. I lost touch with a lot of my friends, and I felt like I was older that I should have been when I finally did get married and start my family. However, one advantage to working that many hours is that you never had time to spend your money (and they gave us free lunch and dinner most days.) So I ended up saving over half of my income, which was HUGE when I went to buy a house.
imthefrizzlefry,
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I think it’d be neat for everyone here to post a bio about themselves. I enjoy reading up about what others are doing and have gone through.
I don’t make nearly that much money though. All of my employment positions have been salaried overtime exempt, so maybe you have a good point there. Realistically it adds up to 1000+ unpaid hours/year when overtime isn’t paid. These days I’m self employed, which is a mixed bag because it’s easy to get small clients that a large firm wouldn’t touch, yet they don’t pay nearly as much. With huge companies like amazon crushing the smaller guys, I’m afraid many of my clients could be out of business in the next decade.
It’s why I’ve decided to make a jump from what I know and invest in AI and somehow try to make a living that way. I bought a new high end computer to run neural nets on, it should be arriving next week. I paid a ton of money for it (by my standards), hopefully I can build something people with money won’t mind paying me for
Are we living in a modern society that cares about people? The more I read Bill Bryson’s One Summer book, the more I think nothing every changed. Deepfake pictures vs composographs, for instance.
In any case… The American steel industry in the twenties had something called the “Long Shift” — that was twenty-four hours of working in a blast furnace just to make the usual twelve hour shifts, shift. See http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file… .