Greggman’s comments on working longer for less pay but greater (royalty) reward may still apply to certain companies in the industry but this is changing. Team sizes for next-gen games are getting much larger meaning that the royalties are spread thinner and the reward in this regard diminishes. Some companies don’t even give royalties anymore and either just pay a little better or offer a set bonus based on overall company performance.

My point here is, as we move to the next generation of game development the rewards for an employee are going to diminish. Working 9+ hours a day wont come with a big reward at the end but you will probably still be required to put in those 16hr crunch time days.

Getting a game out on time with your team working 8 hour days is possible. I have been in the industry several years and still experience crunch times but I can see why it happens. Publishers continued reviews and decision making during the development life-cycle are a big cause of extra work, the other is a lack of solid management from within the developer itself. Many still rely on people promoted into the positions of Producer and Project Manager from other code/design/art areas. They usually have little experience in management and therefore cannot help a team work efficiently within an 8-hour day.

There is no easy solution to the problem of overtime but it can be easily minimised by managing your publisher properly and ensuring the people running your team are trained to do so. There are other areas that help too that I wont go into but they include things such as flexible working hours and our continued reliance on milestone snapshot releases.

Thanks for listening.

I detest Steam because it took FOUR HOURS to install the game (on a 2MBit connection! A friend is on a 56K modem and he had to leave it running overnight, NOT good fun); I’ve occasionally not been allowed to play even in single-player because it couldn’t connect to the Steam server; and the object that I bought for 30 pounds will not exist forever – I can (and do) still play old Spectrum games that I bought in 1985, what’s the chances I’ll be able to play Half Life 2 if I decide to load it up for another blast, in 20 years time?

On passion… I am passionate about making games. But I’m paid for working 9-5. You can’t eat passion, or pay the rent with it. If I’m required to work ridiculous hours (as opposed to occasionally staying late to finish some stuff off because I want to and I’m in the zone) I expect more money, simple as that.

And planning to crunch? It amazes me that this happens (it’s even happening on the project I’m working on right now). I find it absolutely staggering. If you plan to fail, you will fail. If you plan to crunch, you will probably crunch and crunch and crunch and crunch some more.

I don’t think anybody thinks the industry is horribly broken because crunch exists. It’s the fact that crunch is considered a normal aspect of game development, and, to a certain extent, a badge of honor that is a huge problem.

As for the industry being horribly broken, do you know of any other industry that has a 35% turnover every 5 years, and with about 60% of the people having less than 5 years of experience. I think those facts (taken from the IGDA QoL whitepaper and the latest GDmag salary survey) speak for themselves.

As for the topic of “passion”, apart from the money issue that Kyle mentioned, I think an even bigger issue are team sizes. Working with a team of 10-15 people, you really feel that you’re doing something together and you can put a lot of yourself into it. When you’re one out of a hundred, it’s much harder to be motivated and feel like you’re really making much of a difference.

But that’s a separate issue from crunch anyway (or should be). Even for the things I’m most passionate about (game development being one of them), I have to pace myself or I’ll crash and burn really quickly.

Don’t even get me started with gas-guzzling cars! For the record, I want to say that I put in about twice as many miles on my bicycles than I do on my car every year

As for Linux, all I can say is give it a try. You’ll be surprised how little you really depend on MS Windows: you get great email programs, browsers, office programs (compatible with MS Office), and a full development environment for many different languages. And even emulators for those few pesky apps (Quicken in my case). Yes, games are lacking (although not completely missing), but that’s why I keep an old Win98 partition, and my PS2 is getting more and more of a workout every day.

Here are some no-risk ways of trying Linux with a live CD:

http://www.mandriva.com/products/move

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

In addition I have enough sympathy for what Valve is trying to accomplish (fighting piracy, moving power from the publisher back to the developer), that I am willing to overlook the less desirable aspects of Steam.

Still I sympathize and agree with many of your concerns regarding software services. Large software coporations are slowly owning us. I am so entrenched in Windows I don’t know if I could make the switch to Linux. In a lot of ways I miss the old days…

As far as passion for the industry, I’m sure there’s a lot of room for it so long as you don’t take online reviews that pan your game personally. My first console game just shipped this month and I’m proud to have worked on it, even if it has gotten critically panned. In an industry that’s so unglamorous most of the time, it’s hard to be content without at least a little passion.

The Sly Cooper talk sounds interesting, thanks for the recommendation (and the link).

Oh, yeah, go ahead and rub it in! You’re going to make me break my own principles and go out and buy it if you keep this up I did really like the original Half Life and I was really looking forward to this one.

Must… resist….

But despite all this I really enjoyed the game, and in fact am playing it a second time (very rare for me).

Oh, as a player and a developer, I’m totally behind the idea of the developer getting a good chunk of the money. If Steam had just been a digital distribution channel, it would have been awesome.

My objection is that they bundled a bunch of other questionable things (auto patching, multiple downloads, etc) and made it into a service. To play, you basically need to connect to their server and “authorize” your copy of HL2. So in a way, the $50 doesn’t buy you the game, it buys you the right to play the game while the have the server up and running and they don’t change their policies.

I would have been all over it if Steam had been a way for me to download HL2 instead of buying a copy in the store and everything else had been the same.

Frankly, it’s not that different from the registration system of Windows XP, and that’s what finally tipped the scale for me and made me switch from Windows to Linux permanently a few years ago (and I’m kicking myself for not switching a lot earlier).

The whole idea of games or applications (Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, etc) becoming services that you pay a monthly fee (or a per-use mini-fee) completely horrifies me. And no, I don’t play MMORPG games for that reason too (and the fact that I would get too addicted).

It is my experience that the 12-16 hour/day developers tend to write the worst code that break builds and require the most bug fixes and rewrites. Sure there are times when you are on a roll and want to work a late night to finish something up. But continual long days are not passion but usually panic and sometimes despair.

I used to force myself to grind through a difficult problem hour after hour until I somehow completed it, because I wanted to be seen as dedicated, passionate, on-time. The funny thing is that almost invariably once I stopped went home and relaxed (washing dishes, cooking dinner, cleaning bathrooms, whatever) a satisfactory solution or at least a good approach would just come to me. Then I would go back to work the next day and rewrite what I previously grinded out … big waste of time. I now take regular walking breaks (admittedly difficult to do under tight deadlines), write better code and waste less time.

Unfortunately many long hours are worked to either a) Look good to management or b) Hide the fact that you are way behind on schedule, clueless, and severely panicked (oh yeah, I’ve been there).

By the way, I really really like HalfLife2 … just an awesome game. Maybe I was one of the fortunate few but Steam wasn’t a problem at all for me. Also I like the idea of the developer getting most of the cash reward for a great product rather than the “evil publisher”.

No, most developers never see royalties because we’re salaried employees. If our next game turns out to be the next Halo or GTA3, we’ll get sincere thanks and maybe an extra company trip to see Star Wars Episode III, but we aren’t going to be buying any fast cars and we’re certainly not going to be cashing in and retiring early with our millions.

http://www.oberg.org/gdc2005_bruce_oberg_final.zip

these are the final slides i used. there are several “hidden” slides – things i cut for the sake of time. the conference proceedings include a slightly earlier verion of the same slides (i had to submit a set several weeks before the talk).

enjoy!

Yeah, if crunching is a good thing, how come Shiny games tend to suck? (Four years making *Enter the Matrix*, presumably a lot of crunching, and all they ended up with was that?) On the other hand, *Call of Duty* for the PC was done without crunching. (We need more *Call of Duty* like examples.)

There’s also risk / reward issues as well. 9 to 5ers in most industries generally get their salary and that’s it. Developers get royalties. Sure, most developers never see royalties because their games are not hits but the point is they are willing to take that risk. They risk working more hours for less money in the hope that they will be the next Carmack with 3 Ferraris (or David Perry with a Viper).

One argument would be that for people that just want to work 9 to 5 (ie, take no risks) there should be less reward (ie, no backend). I’m not sure if that’s the answer either, in fact I don’t know what the answer is but my impression is movies and TV work just as crazy yet no one complains about it. Way is that? Maybe because those are not for 18 months? But they are in many ways a similar endeavors. Could it be that creative projects are inherently not 9 to 5 but that it’s basically not been until recently that common creative endevors took so long?

I’m just rambling but I can’t imagine the game industry as a 9 to 5 business and so I’m trying to work through both that gut feeling and the desire to also have a life outside of game development.

HL2 did everything right except “blurring the lines between single player and multiplayer”… the RIGHT way of doing that is PGR2, where there’s no requirement to connect to Live but if you do, even in single player, there’s a lot of benefits.