A while back I was chatting with an engineer who worked on the network code and infrastructure for a popular simulation game. After all the heavy lifting was done, he and others were promptly fired and replaced by contractors. The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a paycheck, yet he was literally replaced like a cog the minute a spreadsheet called for it. So much for wanting talented and loyal employees. It must be too easy to forget that all these business decisions affect real human beings, not empty automatons.
>The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a paycheck, yet he was literally replaced like a cog the minute a spreadsheet called for it.
This is one reason why "follow your passion" is a bad career strategy.
It's not unique to this industry. Look at all the folks who get PhDs and waste their 30's doing low paid postdocs ($50K is higher end).
Strange if that's the norm now too, some of the best games of the 90's seemed to all come out of dedicated teams who just loved their craft. In fact most of my favorite games I could probably point to a development team that worked well together and cared about their projects and stuck together after a release. Its too bad, I like Rocket League's simple premise and execution (it basically builds off of some mods I used to play in Unreal Tournament 2004). If they brought some of the dedicated contractors on full time for their next project and fostered a great culture I'm sure it would help much more than the short-term gains they'll get by their current practice.
A professor in college told us in class: "If you want to waste all the knowledge you gain here and get paid terribly, go into the video game industry."
I know many developers in gaming and I constantly tell them to leave the industry for anything else. But they rarely do. And over time I see them get more run down and despondent. I actually see them age over a short period time. It's some sort of occupational Stockholm Syndrome.
The proper way to work in the game industry is to make your cash in another industry and then start your own game studio.
> The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a paycheck
That's why you don't do that unless you own the business or shares of that business. Stick to what you're were hired for, don't be over invested, don't put on extra hours of work thinking you'll be rewarded somehow. I'm pretty sure this guys is burned out now. There is no such thing as being a "loyal employee" when your boss isn't paid to be loyal to you. That's business not some social club.
They do not want loyal employees nor care about loyalty. Game industry wants cheap replaceable employees. Since many want to work there because due to emotional ties toward their childhood games or wish to brag about working on famous game, cheap bodies are available.
Game industry has ridiculous turnover, for developers it is something like five years and you are likely to be out.
Now, is this partly an age thing, though? As for myself, as I got older (late 30's) I became far more pragmatic. A mortgage helps. Financial goals help. Then there is life experience: seeing many many rounds of layoffs in multiple companies I worked for, and somehow being spared.
I just wonder if the 20something who dream of stock options and fame, of the game developers who dreamt of doing this since they were children, just haven't reached a point where the disappointment has hit. That, or internalized so strongly that they get promoted and catapulted up the chain. Workaholism, or 'passion' as some call it, can get noticed by the brass and now the passionate people are handed whips.
Age makes you more rational and common sense makes you see exploitation when faced with it.
But boy, IT folks seem to be the LAST to see it. Why is that? It's not like it's the only profession in the world where people can really enjoy what they do.
Wow, that is crazy. The more I hear the stories the more it makes me want to go back into management, its just whether or not I want to sharpen the elbows again.. Honestly, in my experience, dealing with the blowback from other supervisors and managers is much more difficult than any challenge the employee will bring. However, I hate seeing people treated as you describe.
Dear employees, please do not be loyal to your employers. You can be loyal to your boss if he deserves it but your employer is not a natural person, it is a legal person and as such it can not be loyal back to you. If the situation requires you will be made redundant or replaced or moved - or promoted. There is a contract between you that defines what you owe to each other and if you are loyal beyond that you are essentially giving your money to some shareholder on the other side of the world. When dealing with a legal person always act in your own interest.
My boss actually "beats" this into people. He explains repeatedly that the company has no loyalty to you, and that you must have some sort of a life outside of work and extra work is giving more to the company than what you are paid for. I saw him threaten to fire someone for working overtime once, because he can't fix the staffing problem until the company feels the pain of having a staffing problem.
This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors. Contractors get burned by spending a lot of time bidding on the wrong projects. These problems will continue to get worse as the stakes rise, as there will be even less time to make decisions properly. The project management debt they mention doesn't go away, it increases exponentially.
The article suggests industry shifts more towards project-based economies as they progress, but I think this is wrong. The examples of Hollywood and video gaming are both outliers, because both of these industries have put up huge resistance to lengthened product cycles. In part they perceive it as reducing competition. And it's true, but personally I am starting to wonder what all this competition is actually getting us. Prices for customers are dropping, however we seem to get a lot of sequels and recycled content in the name of cost-cutting, and then a lot of extraneous fighting over who gets to release what on what platform just to push royalty charges up. And what do we have to show for it? A lifetime of fickle and perpetually unhappy customers? Please make it stop.
The only solace that I have is that a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race. This won't end, but we will start to see more consolidation as the industry continues to mature.
Video game studios often go cheap on things besides contractors, my experience from the inside is that the majority of voice talent is used outside the usual Hollywood system because they don't want to pay close to a union actor's competitive wages, and forget royalties for people who are not Hollywood famous. For instance, this is part of the reason Bill Roper is the voice of a lot of Warcraft 1 characters - they didn't want to pay professionals, and he was already there.
I haven't been on the inside in a while but we might have one musician on a AAA title and he/she would compose all the music and they might also do all the foley work because musicians you might have heard of would probably laugh at the wages and would demand royalties. Obviously part of the issue is making video games can be a crap shoot where a game with original IP is just as often a failure as a success so it can be hard to justify spending money on an unknown entity, and royalties don't exist except for bigger successes for the most part.
What makes this so frustrating for game developers looking for work (or people wanting to get into the field) is that it is really difficult to find the names of those contract companies. Most dont even think to look for something like this. People usually think "Oh i love that companies games so im gonna apply there." Only to never hear back, because they contract.
I have years of professional game development and simulation work under my belt and I find it one of the most difficult fields to actually get in to. I always end up just doing the usual software development while still aspiring to actually get a job as a game developer. IMO this is a slippery slope for game companies
> it is really difficult to find the names of those contract companies.
I worked in games for 3 years and we worked with a few contractors. I noticed a few bizarre things about the contractors we used. We never worked with the same contractor for two different games in a row. Every contractor we used we heard of through word of mouth. They were all small (2-20 people) and most of the time they had no to little online presence. The most effective avenue for getting jobs seemed to be handing your business card out at GDC to as many people as you can.
As far as I can see, if you want to be a game contractor, you're better off starting one on your own than trying to get hired by a contracting company. Find a game artist who's also just starting out, launch a shitty game or two to show that you can, then hand your card out at GDC.
Let's not forget the barrier to entry for shipping video games is going down drastically (except for AAA where it keeps getting more expensive!).
So, the big publishers are shipping AAA games with margins that are getting thinner and require careful balancing acts to make those releases profitable. Players expect better Gfx, Sound, Music, VR/AR, Multiplayer and vast open world universes, these things are not cheap ...
As an alternative path, many 'indies' are able to make it on their own and it's possible to work as a contractor and indie dev. Tools like Unity and Unreal and the plethora of mobile gaming plaforms are very accessible to almost anyone with basic technical knowledge.
With 17 years experience as a Dev, I can tell you the most talented, creative and smart devs/progs/engineers I have met are in the Video games industry, I haven't been in any other industry where it gets even close to that.
The videogame industry is in bad need of a more developed studio system like what's used in the movie industry. It exists to a point, but it's usually a large developer establishing short-term studios to capture geographically located talent (or converting acquisitions into short-term studios to squeeze the last bit of talent out of a geographic area).
Too many videogame industry jobs are 1-off, lasting only so long as their part in the production of a single game exists. In essence, they work for the game. This is also true of the movie industry in many cases, but more often than not, work is farmed out to a variety of small production companies who each bring a few bits to the table. In a movie, the lighting guy works a steady-ish job for a lighting company, the cameras are rented from an equipment company, many of the actors will work for a couple agencies and so on.
The production company hires out and assembles these pieces, which are often union supported, and makes a movie. It's not too many people who work for the movie.
Once the movie shuts down production, the lighting guy goes back and asks his company where his next gig is, the actors have their agency working for them, the cameras go back into rentable inventory and so on.
This spreads risk out and keeps the industry from going through huge hiring/firing cycles.
The video game industry hasn't really matured to this point. You get a job working for EA Games East or wherever, get assigned to work on "Dog Touch Magic 2 - iOS" do your work, and if you're lucky will get asked to work on "Dog Touch Magic 3" or whatever. If you don't work for a studio directly, you're probably freelancing. But there's very little middle ground like in the film industry.
There's no real equivalent of say "I need 3d modelers for this game, let's get 2 or 3 contractors from Modelhaus Inc." bring them on for 4 months to make some models and then return them to their company to be hired out again. Instead EA Games East will have staff modelers or some freelancers, and their jobs may last beyond the game or task they're assigned to.
It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't done it yet.
> It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't done it yet.
Game industry veteran here. It's not surprising to me at all. Large dev studios don't want unions. They've been able to capitalize on an endless sea of starry eyed young devs willing to work 60+ hour weeks for months on end for half the salary they could make in other software fields until they get burned out, just so they can say they worked on the 10th sequel of a game they loved as a kid, or tell their friends 'I worked on this game you can download here!' and it doesn't look like the supply of that has gone down at all.
Meanwhile, individual software developers not in the midst of a company death march and are probably doing the Indie thing and tend to see themselves as lone wolves and thus don't make much effort to organize with their other developers.
There's associations like IGDA (International Game Developers Association), but in my interactions with them, I haven't seen them organize anything more than social activities with some veteran from the game industry to give a talk.
The article says 89 employees. A game studio in Seattle I worked at had 77 FTEs and we made AAA sony games. We'd contract up ton 120 or so in house pre-launch and of course hired mocap studios and other project shops. But I'm actually surprised Phoronix has that many employees.
Anyway this is actually a pretty large size for a game studio. More numbers from studios building much larger (RL is more about balance and in game items than story or world building):
Bungie had around 550 (heavily staffed up) before Destiny came out. Zipper had 250 before they shut down. Naughty dog I think had around 150 before they spun up LoU, I recall them around 250 now.
This article is dreadful. Here's an alternative view:
Talented software engineers are sick of 80-hour-week grinds as underpaid salary employees in an industry where nine out of ten products fail. By working contract/hourly, they get actual money in liu of their name in a credits list that nobody reads - even in the unlikely event their product ships.
I don't get it. They seem to imply there's more done by contractors than not, with "Network of contractors" and "Lean core of in-house", but in both examples given (rocket league, blizzard), full time outnumber contractors 2:1 or 3:1?
I agree, the article reads like they had an idea for a story and tried to fit the facts around it.
The heaviest use of contractors in the games industry is, as they imply in the article, in test. Typically you'll have a small core test group in-house to handle test during development and then a much bigger outsourced group you'll ramp up prior to release. In a large multiplayer game you may want 100s of testers on hand at any one time, but only for a few days at a time. Outsourcing gives you that.
Depending on the game you may be content heavy in which case may use outside contractors (or outside studios) to help with the mass of work but that seems to have dropped off as a practice in recent years. Using Chinese and Indian art outsourcing studios was big 10 years ago.
More recently the big players have moved to a model where each of their development studios has a game (or two) in development with a core team working only on that game and a content team who will work on whichever studio needs their help (typically the next game for release).
If you are not 'outsourcing' the entire game development you'll typically want most of the core staff in the same location and full-time. Design, code, technical art and art direction all have to work very closely together. Not something you can easily split around the world or assign to short-term contractors.
Psyonix did outsource their console versions to another studio (likely comprised of full-time employees), which is common with smaller companies who would rather not have to ramp-up their engineering staff for console support. It also saves Psyonix the large capital expense of purchasing development kits.
It's wasn't uncommon several years ago at one studio I know of to have core components of multiple titles maintained by permanent in-house staff and much of the feature development done by contractors. They had a ratio almost inverted from what you describe (approximately contractor:perm::3:2).
The video game industry is the new movie industry -- except nobody is unionized. The film industry is notorious for this crap as well; look at the Sausage Party controversy for a recent example. Honestly, a programmer on a video game is not much different than a camera operator, a film editor or a VFX engineer. Sure, you need quality work in those areas to have a good product, but great work in these areas can still be submarined by a terrible concept (ahem ScarJo's Ghost in the Shell).
And really, can you blame them? Revenues are largely based on the work of the producer (marketing / promotion), the director (overall tone / quality) and the acting talent (big names = box office draws); the folks behind the scenes get screwed over (or they would if they didn't have unions ensuring some long-term consequences for producers acting in bad faith).
Some of the most cynical middle and senior manager types I've ever met were hiding in the woodwork at Sony Playstation. Invisible if there was any danger to them and not supporting the people doing challenging work, and taking credit and ownership anytime anything was successful.
Not a good HR model for the wellbeing of 'free agents'
The example in this article is for game development. I've been thinking about this for SW development in general, and to me there seem to be two strong reasons why it makes more sense to have permanent employees than contractors:
- SW is never done. Any successful application is continually developed, so there are always more work to be done on the application.
- Knowledge gained. The longer you work on a product, the more you learn about it, the source code and the domain. With permanent employees, the knowledge is retained (until they quit), but with contractors the knowledge is lost more quickly.
This isn't anything new to how the business is structured. Note the elision of the 50+ employees in-house: even if it's one artist and one programmer, you really need them to be full-timers to run the main production cycle, or at minimum longer-term contractors who have time to ramp up. Otherwise you get too many bottlenecks. Outsourcing ports, localization, and audio was done almost from the beginning. (Go look up how Rob Hubbard wrote the soundtrack to Commando on C64 for one example)
That said, the trend definitely continues to lean towards a small core team that can put the pieces together, and then external teams who can leverage a longer term specialization, lowering management risks on both ends by reducing the "seasonal layoff" dynamic of game launches.
I haven't read the article but I do have my two cents to add toward the subject of game development hiring.
Going into college I had the dream of eventually working at Blizzard or some other big video game company. However, I ran into articles about studios of beloved games hitting misfortune (Sierra, Westwood Studios, etc.) from either bankruptcy or being bought out by bigger game companies. I also read articles on how former big studio employees were being dumped at the end of projects. You can see Hideo Kojima as a latest example.
There is, however, a silver lining. All, if not most, of the tools for developing software are out there to use for free or with doable licensing which usually rely on sales of the developed game. Unity, Unreal being big, powerful game engine examples while Gamemaker or even straightup IO libraries like SDL being on the other side of the spectrum.
With these tools, coupled with various distribution methods like GoG, Steam, eShop, itch.io, or just straight binary hosting, indie developers have been killing it in the video game space when it comes to creativity and originality. There is the problem of the door for entry being a bit too open and so you tend to see a lot of vaporware, clones, bad games, or even alpha/beta games that seem to just stagnate due to feature creep or other misfortunes. But there are gems being put out that even surpass the crap AAA companies put out.
I see former workers of big companies ditch or get laid off from their former employer to start their own gig or join one. It's exciting to see what they come up with and which ones succeed.
> Consulting firm Accenture PLC, one of the world’s largest outsourced labor providers, calls it the “liquid workforce,” which can be turned on and off like a faucet.
A faucet of 10k H-1B visas a year making an average salary of just 81k.
This is the way film production has been for decades. The problem with games is that there isn't a union to protect credits or establish work rules. If there was, I would only work as a contractor.
[+] [-] alxmdev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BeetleB|9 years ago|reply
This is one reason why "follow your passion" is a bad career strategy.
It's not unique to this industry. Look at all the folks who get PhDs and waste their 30's doing low paid postdocs ($50K is higher end).
[+] [-] TheGRS|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kangdolit|9 years ago|reply
I know many developers in gaming and I constantly tell them to leave the industry for anything else. But they rarely do. And over time I see them get more run down and despondent. I actually see them age over a short period time. It's some sort of occupational Stockholm Syndrome.
The proper way to work in the game industry is to make your cash in another industry and then start your own game studio.
[+] [-] camus2|9 years ago|reply
That's why you don't do that unless you own the business or shares of that business. Stick to what you're were hired for, don't be over invested, don't put on extra hours of work thinking you'll be rewarded somehow. I'm pretty sure this guys is burned out now. There is no such thing as being a "loyal employee" when your boss isn't paid to be loyal to you. That's business not some social club.
[+] [-] grecy|9 years ago|reply
In every industry, everywhere, employees are an expense.
To maximize profits, expenses must be cut.
Maximizing profits is currently the goal of our society, and we seem hell bent on doing everything we can to achieve that goal.
[+] [-] watwut|9 years ago|reply
Game industry has ridiculous turnover, for developers it is something like five years and you are likely to be out.
[+] [-] tomjen3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mancerayder|9 years ago|reply
I just wonder if the 20something who dream of stock options and fame, of the game developers who dreamt of doing this since they were children, just haven't reached a point where the disappointment has hit. That, or internalized so strongly that they get promoted and catapulted up the chain. Workaholism, or 'passion' as some call it, can get noticed by the brass and now the passionate people are handed whips.
Age makes you more rational and common sense makes you see exploitation when faced with it.
But boy, IT folks seem to be the LAST to see it. Why is that? It's not like it's the only profession in the world where people can really enjoy what they do.
[+] [-] russdpale|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thezilch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sevenfive_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dandare|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemiller2002|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdeadringer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacelizard|9 years ago|reply
The article suggests industry shifts more towards project-based economies as they progress, but I think this is wrong. The examples of Hollywood and video gaming are both outliers, because both of these industries have put up huge resistance to lengthened product cycles. In part they perceive it as reducing competition. And it's true, but personally I am starting to wonder what all this competition is actually getting us. Prices for customers are dropping, however we seem to get a lot of sequels and recycled content in the name of cost-cutting, and then a lot of extraneous fighting over who gets to release what on what platform just to push royalty charges up. And what do we have to show for it? A lifetime of fickle and perpetually unhappy customers? Please make it stop.
The only solace that I have is that a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race. This won't end, but we will start to see more consolidation as the industry continues to mature.
[+] [-] stevenwoo|9 years ago|reply
I haven't been on the inside in a while but we might have one musician on a AAA title and he/she would compose all the music and they might also do all the foley work because musicians you might have heard of would probably laugh at the wages and would demand royalties. Obviously part of the issue is making video games can be a crap shoot where a game with original IP is just as often a failure as a success so it can be hard to justify spending money on an unknown entity, and royalties don't exist except for bigger successes for the most part.
[+] [-] mungoid|9 years ago|reply
I have years of professional game development and simulation work under my belt and I find it one of the most difficult fields to actually get in to. I always end up just doing the usual software development while still aspiring to actually get a job as a game developer. IMO this is a slippery slope for game companies
[+] [-] lj3|9 years ago|reply
I worked in games for 3 years and we worked with a few contractors. I noticed a few bizarre things about the contractors we used. We never worked with the same contractor for two different games in a row. Every contractor we used we heard of through word of mouth. They were all small (2-20 people) and most of the time they had no to little online presence. The most effective avenue for getting jobs seemed to be handing your business card out at GDC to as many people as you can.
As far as I can see, if you want to be a game contractor, you're better off starting one on your own than trying to get hired by a contracting company. Find a game artist who's also just starting out, launch a shitty game or two to show that you can, then hand your card out at GDC.
[+] [-] kelvin0|9 years ago|reply
Let's not forget the barrier to entry for shipping video games is going down drastically (except for AAA where it keeps getting more expensive!).
So, the big publishers are shipping AAA games with margins that are getting thinner and require careful balancing acts to make those releases profitable. Players expect better Gfx, Sound, Music, VR/AR, Multiplayer and vast open world universes, these things are not cheap ...
As an alternative path, many 'indies' are able to make it on their own and it's possible to work as a contractor and indie dev. Tools like Unity and Unreal and the plethora of mobile gaming plaforms are very accessible to almost anyone with basic technical knowledge.
With 17 years experience as a Dev, I can tell you the most talented, creative and smart devs/progs/engineers I have met are in the Video games industry, I haven't been in any other industry where it gets even close to that.
[+] [-] bane|9 years ago|reply
Too many videogame industry jobs are 1-off, lasting only so long as their part in the production of a single game exists. In essence, they work for the game. This is also true of the movie industry in many cases, but more often than not, work is farmed out to a variety of small production companies who each bring a few bits to the table. In a movie, the lighting guy works a steady-ish job for a lighting company, the cameras are rented from an equipment company, many of the actors will work for a couple agencies and so on.
The production company hires out and assembles these pieces, which are often union supported, and makes a movie. It's not too many people who work for the movie.
Once the movie shuts down production, the lighting guy goes back and asks his company where his next gig is, the actors have their agency working for them, the cameras go back into rentable inventory and so on.
This spreads risk out and keeps the industry from going through huge hiring/firing cycles.
The video game industry hasn't really matured to this point. You get a job working for EA Games East or wherever, get assigned to work on "Dog Touch Magic 2 - iOS" do your work, and if you're lucky will get asked to work on "Dog Touch Magic 3" or whatever. If you don't work for a studio directly, you're probably freelancing. But there's very little middle ground like in the film industry.
There's no real equivalent of say "I need 3d modelers for this game, let's get 2 or 3 contractors from Modelhaus Inc." bring them on for 4 months to make some models and then return them to their company to be hired out again. Instead EA Games East will have staff modelers or some freelancers, and their jobs may last beyond the game or task they're assigned to.
It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't done it yet.
[+] [-] cableshaft|9 years ago|reply
Game industry veteran here. It's not surprising to me at all. Large dev studios don't want unions. They've been able to capitalize on an endless sea of starry eyed young devs willing to work 60+ hour weeks for months on end for half the salary they could make in other software fields until they get burned out, just so they can say they worked on the 10th sequel of a game they loved as a kid, or tell their friends 'I worked on this game you can download here!' and it doesn't look like the supply of that has gone down at all.
Meanwhile, individual software developers not in the midst of a company death march and are probably doing the Indie thing and tend to see themselves as lone wolves and thus don't make much effort to organize with their other developers.
There's associations like IGDA (International Game Developers Association), but in my interactions with them, I haven't seen them organize anything more than social activities with some veteran from the game industry to give a talk.
[+] [-] rodionos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grogenaut|9 years ago|reply
Anyway this is actually a pretty large size for a game studio. More numbers from studios building much larger (RL is more about balance and in game items than story or world building):
Bungie had around 550 (heavily staffed up) before Destiny came out. Zipper had 250 before they shut down. Naughty dog I think had around 150 before they spun up LoU, I recall them around 250 now.
[+] [-] stickfigure|9 years ago|reply
Talented software engineers are sick of 80-hour-week grinds as underpaid salary employees in an industry where nine out of ten products fail. By working contract/hourly, they get actual money in liu of their name in a credits list that nobody reads - even in the unlikely event their product ships.
[+] [-] dmoy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midnightclubbed|9 years ago|reply
Depending on the game you may be content heavy in which case may use outside contractors (or outside studios) to help with the mass of work but that seems to have dropped off as a practice in recent years. Using Chinese and Indian art outsourcing studios was big 10 years ago. More recently the big players have moved to a model where each of their development studios has a game (or two) in development with a core team working only on that game and a content team who will work on whichever studio needs their help (typically the next game for release).
If you are not 'outsourcing' the entire game development you'll typically want most of the core staff in the same location and full-time. Design, code, technical art and art direction all have to work very closely together. Not something you can easily split around the world or assign to short-term contractors.
Psyonix did outsource their console versions to another studio (likely comprised of full-time employees), which is common with smaller companies who would rather not have to ramp-up their engineering staff for console support. It also saves Psyonix the large capital expense of purchasing development kits.
[+] [-] sidlls|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exelius|9 years ago|reply
And really, can you blame them? Revenues are largely based on the work of the producer (marketing / promotion), the director (overall tone / quality) and the acting talent (big names = box office draws); the folks behind the scenes get screwed over (or they would if they didn't have unions ensuring some long-term consequences for producers acting in bad faith).
[+] [-] olivermarks|9 years ago|reply
Not a good HR model for the wellbeing of 'free agents'
[+] [-] henrik_w|9 years ago|reply
- SW is never done. Any successful application is continually developed, so there are always more work to be done on the application.
- Knowledge gained. The longer you work on a product, the more you learn about it, the source code and the domain. With permanent employees, the knowledge is retained (until they quit), but with contractors the knowledge is lost more quickly.
https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/22/software-development-and-...
[+] [-] zubat|9 years ago|reply
That said, the trend definitely continues to lean towards a small core team that can put the pieces together, and then external teams who can leverage a longer term specialization, lowering management risks on both ends by reducing the "seasonal layoff" dynamic of game launches.
[+] [-] otachack|9 years ago|reply
Going into college I had the dream of eventually working at Blizzard or some other big video game company. However, I ran into articles about studios of beloved games hitting misfortune (Sierra, Westwood Studios, etc.) from either bankruptcy or being bought out by bigger game companies. I also read articles on how former big studio employees were being dumped at the end of projects. You can see Hideo Kojima as a latest example.
There is, however, a silver lining. All, if not most, of the tools for developing software are out there to use for free or with doable licensing which usually rely on sales of the developed game. Unity, Unreal being big, powerful game engine examples while Gamemaker or even straightup IO libraries like SDL being on the other side of the spectrum.
With these tools, coupled with various distribution methods like GoG, Steam, eShop, itch.io, or just straight binary hosting, indie developers have been killing it in the video game space when it comes to creativity and originality. There is the problem of the door for entry being a bit too open and so you tend to see a lot of vaporware, clones, bad games, or even alpha/beta games that seem to just stagnate due to feature creep or other misfortunes. But there are gems being put out that even surpass the crap AAA companies put out.
I see former workers of big companies ditch or get laid off from their former employer to start their own gig or join one. It's exciting to see what they come up with and which ones succeed.
[+] [-] aanm1988|9 years ago|reply
A faucet of 10k H-1B visas a year making an average salary of just 81k.
[+] [-] ocschwar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jscipione|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgeecollins|9 years ago|reply