A quick recap for those fresh faces: I’ve been in the video games industry for over two decades, however the current job market has become so saturated even people with my CV are having a difficult time finding skill level appropriate work.
So maybe it is time to cut bait even if it means I will end up in a boring job, doing boring work, and surrounded by people who would shake their heads at my “I am a Slow Fat Ninja” t-shirt (thx Andy Dotson) or didn’t understand why getting podded after losing my Hookbill was worse than losing the Hookbill in the first place.
What This Isn’t
A black pill for people trying to find work or who are aiming for a job in the video game industry. The industry is a hard nut to crack, but once you are in you’ll find it well worth your time to spend some time there! Maybe not forever, which brings me to this series of articles.
Ok Then, What Even is This?
This is me diving back through my past to reflect on my time in the video game industry, or at least my perspective of history, in a way that may help clarify my path forward. Along the way, it may help give some insight to folks who want to know what the industry was and how it has changed over time.
Keep in mind, this is my experience having been through pretty much every aspect of the American video game industry. Culture has a lot to do with how people work, and I’ve not had the chance to work much in environments you might find influenced by European or Asian values, but I suspect a Venn diagram overlaps… a lot.
Anyway, the first was the Horseman of Treasure. There are a lot of misconceptions about how good (or bad) money is when you work in the industry. But the nutshell is that it isn’t really any different from most other industries. You get paid for your work, and you can make a good living, but you aren’t likely to get rich.
However, there is a “tax” you incur for what a friend once called “the dubious honor of working in the games’ industry.” You will likely always make less than if you did the same job in a more traditional, enterprise style, software vertical. But, dang it, you will be among your tribe! Just having the energy of a team around you who share your interest in video games is often worth the price of admission, IMO. You’ll have ping pong tables in the break room and tons of snacks, plus built-in D&D and table-top game groups! Only you can say how much that is worth.
Today I want to focus on diving into another characteristic of many high stress, high pressure industries.
The Horseman of Endurance
“And, lo, the dark cloud swept through the valley, shackling the legs and arms of the people and clouding the mind till the smallest movement or quickest thought was impossible.”
- Me (it sounded way cooler in my mind)
Let’s talk about time. These are just some jobs known for their intense time commitments. Be it in Legal, Alaska Fisherman, Medicine, Oil Rig Roughneck, Finance, and Software chance are you’ve heard the horror stories about time commitments. Now, I don’t know how all the rest of them help defray the amount of extra time but when it comes to video games, the management has been known to Poo-Pourri away the stench of long, sustained crunch with free food, comp time, unlimited PTO, and (usually) lip-service about “work/life balance.” You’d spend a week doing postmortem write ups which were apparently promptly thrown away because the next project has the same problems! And this was endemic to the entire game industry.
Gamasutra (now www.gamedeveloper.com), used to publish postmortems submitted by development teams showing how and when things went wrong and how they fixed ‘em (usually by invoking crunch time). Long ago, these were all collected into a book and, if you read that book, you’ll see how often the exact same thing went wrong.
See, the problem is that poop happens. And it happens particularly often in video games because, for a variety of reasons it is hard or undesirable (not impossible!) to templatize a lot of our work, resulting in a lot of novel system implementations. Even when a product is only a refresh of a previous product, or just an incremental improvement, the chances of something going wrong are high. Combined with a criminal lack of quality Program Management practices, lack of quality control at the nearly every phase of software creation until the end of production, a lack of accountability, and ignorance about the Sunk Cost fallacy and… well, the dung doth flow.
When I was starting in the games industry, when you hit the home stretch, three or four months before shipping, some people brought sleeping bags to work so they could crash under their desks and fit in 18–20 working hours in a day. The development cycles were usually measured in a maximum of a couple years, unlike the modern day where a cycle can be 5 or more years so a few months of crunch at the end was expected. Crunch was present, though less prevalent, in enterprise software but for games? This was the way.
Unfortunately, this idea of enduring high levels of crunch became a badge of honor, one the game industry struggles to shed even today. It was this behavior that meant, for a long time, someone with 5 or 6 years in the game industry was considered a veteran. A gray-hair. An anomaly. People who had 8–10 were almost mythical figures.
As time went by and games got more complicated, team sizes, dev cycles and crunch timelines also extended. A few months of extreme crunch were expected, but there were times when games would do 6 (or more) months of 100+ hours per week.
One day, someone saw how much money video games were making, and a whole host of investors started sniffing around for opportunity. After the disaster that happened with video games in the 80s things were starting to ramp up on the home front again moving into the 90s. For the longest time your biggest audience was on some sort of computer and if you could sell 250,000 units you had a blockbuster on your hands. The real octane kicked in from the mid-90s to the turn of the century and really solidified many of the industry’s business practices we see today. With 2 or 3 viable platforms a decent game could get 500k units across all platforms and those real special games… well 1m units was just the starting point. Of course, the marquee IP console exclusives were still anyone’s guess but, at the time, they could outperform any multiplatform blockbuster.
But that meant bigger budgets to cover all the different platforms, and these new investors wanted to protect their money. Enter the professional class. These were folks with organizational experience under their belt who would try to impose structure and processes on an industry where we were still making things up as we went. They would try to wrangle the cats and help add similar levels of predictability to the games industry as they had in the rest of the (boring) software industries. Often failing to do anything but irritates the development teams.
Sure, there were a few home-grown candidates who knew which way was up but, unfortunately, most of the new professionals, due to their lack of domain knowledge, were shunned as interlopers. The industry remained largely unchanged except in the big corporations where suddenly video game people were indoctrinated with yearly training like “Standards of Business Conduct” presentations on top of having to face crunch. Torture of tortures!
Still, at least these otherwise impotent PMs would bring ice cream or coffee to your desk and order crunch dinners.
The industry matured as more people and more money were being injected into all the various projects. Employees were also spending more years with gaming companies or in the games industry.
We morphed from an industry started mostly by talented, self-taught folks, and visionaries to an industry infused with people who had real education to back up their talent, people who had options other than video games. And these new folks liked the formality of having an accurate schedule to follow. Video Games suddenly became a real career where people reasonably expected to spend their professional lives working on games. This meant facing the gigantic obstacle of trying to figure out how to create a sustainable pace to prevent the churn and burn which had been a characteristic of the industry since the 1980s.
Despite this, the crunch persisted and, in some places, got even worse as the people with the money would turn the screws. The discontent was kept from boiling over with a soothing word here, the application of a small bonus there, and a few extra comp days.
But in the early 2000s, a Significant Other flipped the script. The publication of the “EA Spouse” open letter was one of the most significant inflection points in this conversation. It was an unvarnished account showing how much crunch culture damaged not just the wellbeing of the employee, but entire family units.
This got people talking, and not just video game people. This spread across the tech sector and was seen by a much larger audience than any similar statement in the past, I think partly because it wasn’t an employee complaining in a sea of other employees complaining. Regardless of why EA Spouse went viral, this was the type of publicity and airing of dirty laundry that was bad for business, and bad business meant less money. Suddenly, the term “work/life balance” started getting much more attention. Things didn’t change overnight, but things did start changing.
Today, you’ll find most studios have some sense of wellness, mental and physical, as part of their culture and benefits package.
Most games still crunch, though usually with a slightly more predictable velocity and for shorter amounts of time. PMs who know games AND process have gained the credibility needed to structure teams and companies around effective methodologies. Also, companies are more likely to suffer a *slight* delay rather than fail compliance or release a buggy mess into the market. It doesn’t save all games or teams from the fate of a bad release or horrid crunch, but it helps.
To further assist in helping de-stress teams are changes in the market allowing for more viable release windows throughout the year. In the past, if you missed the Christmas season, your game was doomed. Nowadays, many games have found success releasing in the winter and spring. Knowing that revenue numbers can still be high outside of the Christmas window eases the minds of business leaders if a delay to March-ish or August is suggested.
Despite the institutional improvements, one area that still seems unchecked is the self-imposed crunch. Due to misplaced pride or fear, people can push themselves to what are occasionally unhealthy limits. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people working late or checking things in over weekends trying to finish up a deliverable even though the team is not stressed. Still seems to be a fair amount of fear that admitting someone may have bitten off more than they can chew. This is almost like an ouroboros that relates to how hard it is to get into the industry to begin with an how failure used to be severely punished.
The pride of getting done on time is one aspect, but I worry more about people fearing repercussions when they think they’ve let themselves, their lead, or their team down because they couldn’t finish based on some timeline that was either unrealistic to start with or became unrealistic as emergent circumstances appeared. We have a long way to go before this will be solved but considering the effort so many studios are putting into wellness, I hope to see this diminish dramatically in the coming 3–5 years.
Project leaders must also take better care of themselves. Currently, we are poor role models in this respect because we often push well beyond typical work hours. This is exacerbated with work-from-home where it is easy to just stay in your office and keep going. There are a lot of things project leaders are doing behind the scenes; time sinks which are rarely accounted for but drag them down. For example, anyone who wants to do a GREAT job on performance reviews is going to dedicate at least several hours every performance increment just to writing somone’s review, much less collecting information and then delivering the review. Easily a week, if not two, can be invested into reviews for a good sized team, but the leader is still expected to carry their regular workload as well.
One studio I worked at had unlimited PTO, a great benefit for sure (and makes it so the company doesn’t need to pay out PTO when laying off an employee, but I digress!), however it was a benefit utilized mostly by the rank and file, the leaders couldn’t break away from work for any amount of time to maximize the PTO policy. In some cases the leaders were denied PTO due to their being considered too crucial to some effort or another.
A quick aside about another downside of “unlimited” PTO. The world has yet to catch up to this particular time off implementation. Because workers don’t accumulate there is no entitlement to be able to take any particular time off; PTO is requested and must be approved based on the percieved business needs of the company. In many parts of the US (not all), you’ll find it is against labor laws for a company to block an employee from using accumulated vacation days at the time of the employee’s choosing. Sure, it is nice make sure you being out isn’t going to hurt the company, but it isn’t necessary. You may technically have fewer days off, but at least you will likely get to take them when you want.
Lastly, there’s one more thing I want to talk about and that’s time off in general. Most people feel uncomfortable taking time off at all. There are emails that can be missed, meetings you won’t be attending, and information you’ll miss out. Many studios will close for a week or two around Christmas. Daniel Erickson of the game company Thought Pennies suggested an idea I’ve really grown to love, that the studio shut down for a short time sending everyone on a coordinated (paid) summer vacation. After all, if the whole studio is shut down you eliminate most of the anxiety about missing emails, meetings, or information being lost.
I have heard of this whole company taking a sabbatical at the same time before, but not the games industry. Plus, before, I was not in a position where I could influence a studio to consider such a thing so I paid less attention. Maybe, one day, I will be able to implement something like this. Or maybe some leader reading this will consider the idea and figure out a spin that works for their company.
The Pony of Endurance
So, over the last 20 years, while we haven’t slain this particular foe I think we can demote the Horseman to mule riding “sidekick”. A twist on Sancho Panza of “Don Quixote” fame; but despite a demotion, we must be vigilant, especially as the current environment is likely going to spur a lot of new indie studios and other start-ups. People in these companies tend to work hellish hours because it’s “do or die” for them. There’s no budget or buffer for failure.
No matter where you look, big companies or small, I think, pound for pound, you’ll find people in the game industry put in more hours than those in other software verticals, but we’ve gotten miles better. And I think there’s a surprising number of people who prefer the way things are. The flexibility to work more, if necessary,
I’ve recently adopted a phrase I saw someone mention was “work/life harmony” and I like that better than “work/life balance.”
That brings me back around to the original question: how much does the crunch culture influence my decision to want to stay or leave the industry?
TBH, there was one particular crunch a little over a decade ago that totally broke me. I put so much time and work, especially a crazy burst at the end, that I think it permanently crippled my ability to crunch.
But, in that same time the industry has changed a lot and I haven’t had to crunch like the bad old days. So, as long as we maintain the status quo, I think I can almost take this item off my list of “cons” for staying in the gaming industry.