This is meant as a basis for constructive discussion. We encourage you to contribute your views, knowledge and experiences — whether you are a developer, manager and/or player — here in the comment section, or, if you prefer, at my mailbox: raoul at innerbits.com.
A Proposal For Sane Work Conditions
It has long been the de facto standard for game developer employees to work long, draining hours for months at a time as a project winds down, in what is proverbially known as the crunch period. While most of us have a passion for game development, we often end up feeling mistreated and disrespected as professionals in major corporations. Most game developers have managed to turn their employees’ love of their craft against them by offering little or no additional compensation for sixty to eighty hour work weeks.
By fostering a work environment where challenging these systematic excesses is greeted with managerial intimidation and peer-pressure, corporate deadlines are met without a full appreciation of the sacrifices and wellbeing of the most critical asset of the games industry: game developers.
While some employees may be prepared to work all hours and sacrifice their personal life in order to establish themselves in the industry and refine their skills, such a work-life imbalance is, in the long term, unsustainable on an individual level and untenable from a corporate perspective. Employees, though passionate about their craft, are also fully functioning human beings with personal responsibilities that extend beyond game development to their families and to their own personal growth.
Frustrated developers end up leaving in droves to pursue other endeavors or set up shop independently. The remainder resign themselves to an overwhelming yet unrewarding professional life. Yet, those who choose to stay have failed to speak up as a cohesive group in an effort to influence the corporate practices of an industry that has only thrived as a result of our hard work and dedication.
Some have taken steps in that direction that we should do well to follow. EA_Spouse broke ground by speaking up on the toll the industry inflicts on worker’s families and their own personal growth. This first step has snowballed into class action lawsuits seeking compensation for forced unpaid overtime. EA was first successfully sued in California twice, and is facing further litigation in Florida. Similar suits targeting Activision, and Sony are in the works.
While in theory, no company wants its employees chronically depressed, tired and unproductive, profit margins remain the ultimate concern, regardless of our well-being. When push comes to shove, the possibility that a game’s anticipated release might be forced to miss its street date always seems to overshadow any attempt maintaining the health and happiness of employees. As impending deadlines loom ever closer, companies are quick to pull the trigger and push their entire development team into crunch mode; in the process, they perpetuate the cycle of panic and the sentiment that management will grind subordinates as long as it takes to appease pressure from the retail end of the supply chain. Unless game companies show consideration for matters above and beyond the bottom line, they will continue to suffer high staff turnover, low morale and the subsequent effects on productivity.
Thus, I present a simple guide to keep developers motivated. This is aimed both at companies, and at individual developers. Over the next few weeks I will delve into each of these areas in more detail.
It Starts at the Top
Good Management: I am not an expert on good management, but I know shitty management when I see it. Minimal or poor communication with employees is a telltale sign, as is the lack of a clear strategy, or effective planning. Good management is essential to employee satisfaction and therefore, performance. Workers need to know that they can trust their managers. Employees want clear and regular communication with management. At the very least, management should have developed a focused plan of execution, and a solid work scheduling system. Much too often game companies wing it, flying by the seat of their pants, focusing only on the next milestone, or rushing a game out, with little regard to the future. And the workers pay the price. (Read More…)
Relaxed Work Environment: The most conducive environment for effective work is a quiet space, which allows employees to focus without distraction. However, if you are going to make employees work unreasonably long hours, make sure that they can get away during breaks. Do not turn the work place into a crazy fun house, but at least provide an area where employees can get away from their desk to relax, have fun, or socialize.
Good Working Practices: This goes hand in hand with good management. Game development does not work like traditional software engineering. The inherent nature of game development necessitates a system flexible enough to deal with changes throughout the project, while maintaining a clear and honest picture of what can be delivered in time. This process demands a lot of work and discipline throughout the project, but the rewards are immense. There are many ways to accomplish this, including proper planning, agile development, a well-executed pre-production period, etc.
Create Team Spirit and Passion: As cliché as it sounds, team spirit is integral to developing a good game. Developers have to rely on each other all the time, and work closely with one and another. Regular company-sponsored events allow employees to socialize together outside the confines of work related problems. It is also an effective way of improving relations and communication between management and the people they manage. Being able to converse with a manager as an equal and in an informal setting will only increase the employee’s trust in the management.
Passion is another important trait which should be felt at the top. A dispassionate management team that only sees the game as it would any other commercial product and is only concerned about production deadlines will draw very little enthusiasm from its staff. Employees who are passionate about their own game want to see it succeed and will pour more effort and creativity into it. An equally passionate management team will see to it that they perform at their highest levels by respecting them rather than simply abusing this passion to guilt them into long hours.
It is a Business After All
Profit Sharing: Employers would do well to make their employees care about the game they are working on. It is unreasonable to expect employees to be forever content with the mere “joy of making a game”, while dedicating all their free time to it. The games industry is after all a profit-driven business. Giving your employees a financial incentive to work harder is not only an excellent motivation technique, but also the only sustainable path for the industry as a whole. Give your employees a stake in the company profit. Many large employers do this with stocks and bonuses. Smaller employees can (and should) offer small stakes in the company. Profit sharing is another excellent way of compensating employees.
Bonuses: When used correctly, bonuses become a very motivating factor for employees. Game completion bonuses are good, but companies should be careful. Employees want a clear idea of what is at the end of the road for them not just some vague promise of a bonus. Milestone bonuses are much more effective and have been used with great success by many smaller startups (such as mobile game companies).
Overtime Pay: This not only rewards employees fairly for the extra work required of them, it puts the onus on the company to plan the amount of overtime properly. This also eliminates the perception that extra hours from employees are free. It associates a cost to the company for the loss of productivity and creativity the extra hours entail. The number of companies which engage in overtime pay is increasing, especially in California. It is anyone’s guess whether this has anything to do with the recent overtime compensation lawsuits EA has lost in that state.
Competitive Wage: Game developers are skilled workers, and should be paid commensurable to other IT industries. Employers should no longer exploit the fact that “we love making games” to pay lower than average wages. Employees do notice that they can be paid and treated better outside the industry. Our industry can ill afford to keep losing veterans at the rate is has been for the last few years. Hiring graduate employees to replace those, more experienced, who were driven away (a la EA) is, effectively, a loss on investment, and therefore, deleterious to the corporate bottom line.
Employees – Your Most Valuable Resource
Proper Work/Life Balance: This is an key one for me. I work to live, and I want a life outside of work. If a company the size of BioWare can achieve this goal while still consistently releasing profitable AAA titles, then there can be no excuses.
Abuse of overtime is the sign of ineffective management, lack of planning and monitoring throughout the project. A positive work/life balance for your employees will affect their wellbeing — and therefore their productivity — more than almost anything else.
Value Your Employees and Invest In Them: Simply put, companies that invest in their employees invest in themselves – as retention is high and the benefits of experience are reinvested in the company. Mentoring, technical development courses, management training programs, developer conferences are all invaluable offerings that help advance the career of staff developers. Investing in your employee lets them know they are valuable to you. Show your employee you care, and they will care back.
Respect Your Employees: Treat your employees well. Seek their views about the workplace on a regular basis and act on their recommendations. Reward them for their extra efforts. Create an environment where your employees would not even want to leave your company. Formally recognize their accomplishments. The little-known practice of not including developers’ names in the credits of a game is both crass and extremely insecure. Too many developers (including EA) still engage in it (or hide the credits altogether).
“I know shitty management when I see it”: I’ve bitched about this before - depending on your perspective, I could be one of those shitty managers. But if you grade on a curve, I’m pretty good. If your game ships on time, gets over 80 on gamerankings, and averages 45 hour weeks over the life of the project, I’d call that good management. If your game ships on time, gets over 90, and keeps it down to 40 hour weeks (as some of the Tony Hawks and Call of Duties allegedly did), then that’s stellar, A+, top of the class management - although these projects were blessed at the strategic level by consciously being evolutionary deliveries on top of previous succesful formula.
“Good planning” - I have my own definition of good planning and it’s at the level of resolution that you find in Scrum or *Agile Estimating And Planning*. Others look at that level of planning and call it not enough. They’re wrong, but how could they know that? I’ve tried more - I’ve spent weeks and weeks mucking in project, linking dependencies, pretending that the duration of a given task is a constant rather than a fuzzy curve, looking for that critical path…only to discover the project file is hopelessly out of date almost as soon as I click “Save”.
Relaxed Work Environment: I’d say you have to make a choice. You can ask for “no more crunching” or you can ask for “let’s have a room where we can play console games and foosball” but you can’t have both.
Passion: word. Sometimes it’s missing in upper management, either because a) they’re from an old guard for whom game development just fell in their laps - believe it or not, way back when, some people didn’t even have to try very hard to get in the industry and some people would rather be in movies or working at Microsoft and game development was their fall-back or b) (much more common) they’re making the commercial game instead of the game they want to make. In that case they should either transfer to another team or find *something* about the commercial game that gets them excited. Double-edged sword, though: the passionate team is also the team that hates cutting features and either that, or quality, or the schedule has to give.
Profit sharing/bonuses: used to be a believer, but not any more. The royalty/bonus program at Treyarch ripped it apart. Part of the reason we were so gung-ho about Spider-Man 2 was because the royalties on Spider-Man 1 were so good - but it wasn’t talent that earned us those royalties, it was being in the right place at the right time. Spider-Man 2, although a better game than Spider-Man 1, sold the same amount of units and cost a lot more, so a lot of the team was upset that their royalties weren’t as big. Meanwhile, the rest of the company hated us for making more than they did (and then having the audacity to complain about not making enough!) I think stock options/equity sharing are the answer - the talent’s goals should be aligned with the company, which isn’t just to make one great game but to make many.
One final note: I think almost every manager I know believes in most of this - a lot of the problem is execution (it’s hard to do) and perception (talent feels they’re being mistreated when they aren’t.) When the managers I know decide to implement crunch it’s usually as a last resort. Or it’s because they’re crunching and don’t see why everyone else can’t put in the same effort. They respect the talent but may have trouble showing it - or the talent may want a disproportionate share of recognition. (”This game was pretty much all me!”)
I spent way too much time on this.
Left by Jamie Fristrom on October 13th, 2006