If you don't know about Rockstar then don't comment. This is a great game and it really appears that the developers have put their everything in building it. Sometimes people want to work hard to make sure their output is a success. It is not always about 40hrs work week. A great company is one which creates a culture to build impressive products and where employees feel motivated to be a part of it. I am not saying that Rockstar employees worked more than 40hrs/week (I have no idea) but if I were a Rockstar employee I would be damn proud of the output.
Man, you have swallowed every last drop of the koolaid they're selling you.
Consider this situation: You've spent most of your life training yourself as a game developer, only to find out that every company you'd like to work for will drive you like a slave. 50+ hours per week is not merely an option, but a necessity if you want to remain competitive. And since everyone wants to be a game developer, that means your salary is less than in other types of compsci jobs.
So, that culture stuff you're speaking of? It's bullshit. Ultimately it's a method of getting you to do the bidding of others. It's not about you at all. No one is looking out for you, and while you may feel like you're part of a team, that team has no loyalty to you. If you stop performing at peak level for even a couple months then your prospects will be severely harmed.
Employees get to feel proud they've literally sacrificed part of their life to help someone else succeed. And you're supporting pervasive lawbreaking in the name of "that's just what it takes"!
If game companies are finding it hard to recruit talent, well, that's probably because people are finally wise to their ways. You won't find anyone who was more in love with the idea of being a game developer than I was, but the reality of the industry is abhorrent. The shared culture has utterly decimated any hope of work-life balance in the gamedev industry in the US. My options were to work elsewhere or to move overseas. And by working elsewhere I get more cash, get to work on problems that are more interesting, and I learn more.
European developers seem to have figured out how to develop next-gen games without any of the bullshit methods of control you've described. Maybe US companies should start caring how.
> So, that culture stuff you're speaking of? It's bullshit. Ultimately it's a method of getting you to do the bidding of others. It's not about you at all. No one is looking out for you, and while you may feel like you're part of a team, that team has no loyalty to you. If you stop performing at peak level for even a couple months then your prospects will be severely harmed.
> Employees get to feel proud they've literally sacrificed part of their life to help someone else succeed.
Your tone suggests outrage but you're just describing the nature of competition. You are agreeing to trade your time and skills for money. "Getting you to do the bidding of others" is a cynical way to put it, but if a certain type of team building yields good results why would a company not go down that path? Of course you're going to be replaced if the you aren't producing the results you were hired for, this is the nature of competition. There is no fair or unfair. Employees are not sacrificing part of their life for someone else, they're trading their time to someone else. No one is forcing anyone to be a game developer.
That's a fine-sounding statement but in reality if you want to be a game developer in the US then you'd better be willing to live a life where you wake up, go to work, get home sometime later than 8pm, spend ~2 hours unwinding and maybe visiting with your SO, and then go to bed. Repeat forever. A lot of times even on weekends. The studios I worked for all made it regular habit to make pizza available in the evening and then refuse to allow devs to leave. Crunch time became a way of life. Anyone who dared not to like it risked ostracism. Those who were fired for it severely harmed their career prospects, precisely because every other employer has the exact same culture of insanity.
Put that way, it's more than a little bleak. If I sound outraged, it's because it's outrageous that it somehow became the norm in the US and that nobody bats an eye because "that's just the way it is."
It's not about fair or unfair. I'm not saying anyone should force the companies to change. I'm saying the companies had better change themselves before the nice little train of momentum they've built up from legions of starry-eyed young developers finally runs out when those developers realize they could be going off and starting their own companies rather than playing by your rules.
It's a social problem: those who don't want to work 50+ hour weeks are made to feel as if they're a bad employee. Those who don't need to work 50+ hour weeks are steadily assigned an increased workload until they are. It's a nuanced situation that I doubt a legal system could address without introducing horrific unintended consequences of the new laws, as new laws so often do.
Unionizing is only effective in situations where employees can band together into a shared social framework. During the industrial revolution this was facilitated by the massive size of workplaces. But at each studio there are usually less than 30 devs.
I think ultimately the solution is to start our own companies imprinted with a culture of employee well-being and work-life balance. If it's a success, and it's located in a gamedev hotspot, then all of the top talent will want to work there. This synergizes well with free market aims, because competitors who don't get top talent soon go out of business.
8-hour workday laws are not new laws. Why do you think they are? And your view is basically that there should be no new laws, isn't it?
The relevant California law is that computer professionals are exempt from overtime law if they "mainly perform intellectual or creative work that requires independent judgment in the design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing, or modification of systems, programs, software or hardware. In 2012, they were required to earn $38.89 or more an hour ($81,026.25 or more annually, or $6752.19 or more monthly)."
My modification to that law would be to raise that to $75 or more per hour. What might be reasonable "horrific unintended consequences" of reclassifying programmers thusly?
"But at each studio there are usually less than 30 devs"
You don't know much about the history of unionization, do you. That's okay, neither do I. But I do know a bit more than you do.
The early unionizations include unions that came out of the guild system, not the factory system. For example, Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), which settled that unions were legal in the US, dealt with the journeyman shoeworker Jeremiah Horne, who charged less than what the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker’s Society required.
It was legal for him to charge less, but then the Society would have called for a walkout. The master of the shop "would not wish to lose five or six good workmen for the sake of one", so fired Horne instead.
So we have a union which is effective even against a shop of 10 "boot developers", as it were.
Why do you think that unions are only effective in large factories? Do you mean to disregard the history of craft unionism, or are you speaking mostly out of a lack of knowledge?
I have never worked in game development but I know people who have. The impression that I have got was that processes were often not well thought out and people were sent down pointless rabbit holes on a whim since employee time was not considered a scarce resource and could be squandered.
They have no real incentive to optimise their workflows to be more productive in less time because they could simply crunch their staff until they burned out and then bring in a fresh batch of recent graduates.
It is true that people work voluntarily but on the flipside it is still important to highlight these things so that potential game developers can make informed decisions before deciding to invest heavily in this career path.
The original was developed in Dundee. Rockstar North, who developed GTA V, are based in Edinburgh.
Thankfully, there are still a handful of game developers in Dundee. One of the original designers on GTA now runs Tag Games in Dundee, which does some quality mobile games.
given that rockstar is a UK company then I think we can safely say that it was developed by European developers who have decent working conditions and hours.
The UK allows employees to opt-out of the working time directive. My experience was that you signed the opt-out by default when signing your contract. You could always opt back in again, but the cultural pressure to do overtime was huge, and you could kiss good bye to any bonuses if you don't crunch. Without bonuses the pay was crap.
[edit] I'm not talking specifically about Rockstar or games companies - this is standard practice in many sectors.
FWIW, GTA is developed by Rockstar North, rather than San Diego (which produced RDR), meaning they at least benefit from the additional employment protections offered in Europe (vs the US: things like 5+ weeks of paid holiday, etc).
I can only speak to anecdotal evidence, but I've hired several engineers who previously worked at Rockstar in the UK and haven't heard anything outside of the ordinary.
They way they chose to compose that open letter meant I could not take it seriously at all. (And my partner is in employment law so I have an above casual interest in these kind of things in all industries.)
The fact that they're not represented in this letter doesn't mean they don't have these complains. They may not have voiced them, or voiced them privately or elsewhere.
If I write a blog post about how I feel I'm being exploited by my employer, that doesn't necessarily mean my colleagues don't feel the same.
