Confessions of a Game Developer

[Karen]

Hello everyone, I had an interesting conversation the other day with my neighbor that I thought I would share with you. Since I'm sure my neighbor doesn't want his real name anywhere, we are simply going to call him Colin.

Colin is a game designer from France who worked at EA North Carolina from 2008 all the way till it's closure in 2013.

Colin and I were conversing about what I was thinking on doing for college, and he knew I had an interest in game design. He worked on freemium mobile games and some of the sports games that came out of that studio. He blatantly said up front that EA was the worst company he has ever worked for, for a number of reasons.

-He had previously worked for EA at another studio since the late 90s but was transferred here when EA NC was low on staff.
-When the mobile game boom started to happen (2009ish) was when Colin really started to notice something was wrong.
-For some of the micro-transactions that "needed" to be implemented into mobile games, programmers had to scramble to get them in, some of these ended up messing with the already existing code and would cause the game to be a huge mess.
-Most of his co-workers hated the business system of the free-to-play games they were making, yet were coerced into doing them in fear of losing their jobs.
-Many mobile projects were dropped in a matter of days, their elements being implemented into other projects.
-The timetables for a new sports game's release were so ridiculous that they would be made in a matter of weeks.
-Only the sports games were playtested (to his knowledge anyway)
-Working hours were abnormally horrible for a studio and ended up with about a dozen employees getting hospitalized a year.

Fortunately Colin is now working at Red Storm and does some independent stuff on the side.

I'd still thought I'd share this with the forum, because I know some people here are also interested in working in the games industry.

If anyone has any questions I can ask him if you want.

 

[Anchuent Christory]

It's a sad fact that a job in the games industry is a dream for many, but the reality is much more grim and depressing. people see prominent industry figures like West and Zampella, Notch, Carmack etc with their millions and think it's an attainable dream.
I've heard so many stories of frankly ridiculous working hours and pathetic salaries with zero job security. As much as I love games I'd never in a million years want anything to do with their production.

You also highlighted something many players seem unaware of; the fact that in many cases the developers know that their game in unfinished or just plain terrible, but the decision to release it is completely out of their hands.

 

[Smokedaddy]

I was "laid off" from EA Austin in early Y2K after working there 59 days. After 60 days, they'd have been obligated to move me back to Los Angeles, so they came up with excuses to fire me on day 59. The next day, they laid off 250 people from that studio (and closed it a few weeks later). They'd figured out how to mail my paychecks to the wrong address (I went without eating for a week, among other fun things -- gasoline remaining in my car wasn't meaured in gallons, but rather in "molecules"), so I found myself rather broke, 2000 miles from home, and looking for a game job in a town where 250 other people were also looking for game jobs. I hadn't had time to make any, like, friends (everyone else on the team was married) and it was a weird couple of months until I found a way to get to Baltimore. Austin was great, but EA sucked hard. Richard Garriott had quit or been fired (depending on who you talk to) a few days before.

 

[Mister Lister]

I've worked on a couple of games in the past, thinking at the time that game development would be my dream job.

I geared all of my education towards it, but was encouraged by my old man not to choose any courses which were 'game specific'. I will never be able to thank him enough for that. So i ended up taking software engineering in college and 3D design and animation in university, courses which could set me up for a wide range of jobs once I had graduated, unlike the poor souls on courses with catch-all titles such as 'game design' and 'computer and video games'.

Like Smokedaddy has previously said, even with my degrees I was forced to begin at the bottom, and so quickly found myself a job as a games tester for a small company in Liverpool.

I would like to go on record and say that games testing is not fun. Contrary to popular belief, this job does not involve sitting around all day playing games and drinking mountain dew. Most testing revolves around things such as "I wonder what happens if I press all the buttons at once?" or "If i jump everywhere instead of running, will my character turn into a broken mess of pixels?". Of course once you find that yes, jumping everywhere instead of running does indeed turn the character into a broken mess of pixels, you then have to write a report about it. Bug reports (from good testers at least) can run into a page or more for just one bug. At the end of the day early on in the games development, I would be handing in a stack of papers as thick as my thumb.

You are not there to play the game, you are there to break the game. And then write about how you broke it and how to recreate it at great length.

The first games I worked on were such rip-roaring titles as Stuart fucking Little and The Cat and his stupid fucking Hat. Testing even the most AAA titles can be mind numbing, but goddamn did I want to kill myself after even a week with these games. Things picked up eventually and I found myself a job at another company across the country, working on what sounded like an incredible upcoming game. It was called Fable.

Let me put it this way. I was a tester for the original Fable. One of the greatest games of its time. I hated it. It killed my spirit and made me a hollow shell of a man who was so once full of wonder and amazement at the magic of the games design industry. I got out while i still could. If I had stayed the course then I could probably have found myself in a production position, I did after all have modelling and programming skills, but it was already too late. My image of the games industry was shattered, as was i.

If you really want to do it, then do it. For some people it will still be their dream job, and nothing else will match it. Just remember that (pun completely intended) it isn't all fun and games.

 

[_blank_]

This thread and the comments thus far have pretty much confirmed for me my fears. Y'see, I wanted to try my hand in game design. I've worked in print, web, radio, video, but the one field I really wanted to try my hand in is game design. I'm in my early 30s so I've been weighing whether it'd be worth to try attending a game design college or would my age pretty much hamper me from ever being taken seriously in the gaming field (dunno if employers would be interested in naive youngbloods or actual experienced workers). But reading all of this, I really don't know if it'd even be worth my time to even attempt.

I realize I'd be coming in on the ground floor and the hours would be stupid long, but if the end product would be worth something, then I'd be game (no pun intended) for it (and honestly 50-60 hour work weeks sound completely normal to me now). But it sounds more and more- not just from this thread, but others I've stumbled upon, and seeing and playing what has been coming out recently- that the game industry is being run by headlong into a brick wall. Either you go AAA and get turned into mulch, you go Middle Market and people bitch that it isn't AAA quality, or you go indie and have to deal with a sea of pretentious fuckwits.

Further, out of the 10-20 new release games I played last year, maybe 5 of them felt like A) a finished product; B) wasn't made exclusively to sell more DLC or some bullshit UPlay/ Origin game group; and C) was made by people that actually cared for what they were working on. While I know each year there will probably be crap releases, 2014 was just exceptionally disappointing for me.

I dunno. I know I'm rambling from disjointed point to disjointed point, but is what I'm feeling correct? It feels like my old friend vidya is curled up in a fetal position outside of a rehab clinic and no one inside is fucking paying attention.

 

[Vinluv Handesbukia]

I was "laid off" from EA Austin in early Y2K after working there 59 days. After 60 days, they'd have been obligated to move me back to Los Angeles, so they came up with excuses to fire me on day 59. The next day, they laid off 250 people from that studio (and closed it a few weeks later). They'd figured out how to mail my paychecks to the wrong address (I went without eating for a week, among other fun things -- gasoline remaining in my car wasn't meaured in gallons, but rather in "molecules"), so I found myself rather broke, 2000 miles from home, and looking for a game job in a town where 250 other people were also looking for game jobs. I hadn't had time to make any, like, friends (everyone else on the team was married) and it was a weird couple of months until I found a way to get to Baltimore. Austin was great, but EA sucked hard. Richard Garriott had quit or been fired (depending on who you talk to) a few days before.

You will not be forgotten

 

[Love Machine]

The games industry been mostly just companies taking advantage of people's passions for cheap and abusable labor. Never been a secret, the blizzard tax is well known after all.

 

[cummytummies]

Thanks for posting this, although it's not too surprising.

Game publishers know there are about 100 million former gamer kids eager to work in the industry. They can pull whatever crap and if the established workers refuse they'll always find a dozen people with more relaxed morals or who are more desperate for a reliable income to replace them within 24 hours.

 

[Fapcop]

Interesting thread to necro!

Just wondering... For those of you who work in the industry: Any thoughts on Star Citizen and CIG?

(Basically a 400 million dollar version of Yandere and the closest thing the industry has to a lolcow.)

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Aspirant game developer here. Here are my notes:
- Game colleges are useless. They focus on Game Engines and nothing else, leaving you not very versatile and unable to work outside engines/go to another market
- It's easy to come with outside knowledge (art, music, programming) into the industry, and often it's very valued
- Ideas are worthless. Nobody cares about your shitty ideas. People want to see implementations
- If you have a family/life outside of work, you are crippling yourself; this is a very competitive industry with companies trying to squeeze every cent
- People who do most of the work get least of the credits.