NRS Working Conditions - A Former Employee Speaks Out - Or, "Why I Can't Compete in a Capitalist Market"

oldTireWater said:
I don't get the whole "crunch" thing with tech work. It's not like filling sandbags, where you can whip the drones into filling faster and longer. If a coder doesn't have a real fucking clear idea what their requirements are, and the exact scope of their work, then making them work longer has very diminished returns. And if the DO have well defined requirements, then a crunch should be avoidable.
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Do studios just not have the balls to tell publishers "it's not ready yet, we'll tell you when"?

Or is it that they set a deadline for release and then twiddle their thumbs and navel gaze for too long?
 
DanteAlighieri said:
Do studios just not have the balls to tell publishers "it's not ready yet, we'll tell you when"?
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No one wants another Duke Nukem Forever to happen
740428
 
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DanteAlighieri said:
Do studios just not have the balls to tell publishers "it's not ready yet, we'll tell you when"?

Or is it that they set a deadline for release and then twiddle their thumbs and navel gaze for too long?
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Guessing the former, especially in the current state of the industry, where it’s very common for retail copies of games like FO76 and Sea of Thieves to basically be betas printed on Blu-Rays
 
All parts of the entertainment industry have hard deadlines—TV, film, games—that’s hardly a new development. Places like NRS can hires contact workers for pennies because the market is saturated with art school grads, etc..
 
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DanteAlighieri said:
Do studios just not have the balls to tell publishers "it's not ready yet, we'll tell you when"?

Or is it that they set a deadline for release and then twiddle their thumbs and navel gaze for too long?
Click to expand...

Most of the time, it's all about appeasing the higher-ups.

Most game companies aren't self-regulated entities anymore - they're owned by larger companies like EA, Bethesda, 2K Games, Activision-Blizzard, Square-Enix, and so on. And these companies are usually controlled by groups and people that own stocks in said companies and expect things to be done and released at a certain time in certain financial quarters to meet their earnings quota. This is also why most bigger AAA companies don't try to try anything too experimental despite having the finances to do so: they're only looking at profit. Same thing for NetherRealm, as this game was produced by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

As stated, this is generally the case most of the time. However you do find out sometimes that indeed game dev companies actually do fuck around until the last possible minute, as is the apparent case with Bioware's Anthem. Sounds like the game was basically in the conceptual phase for years before the higher-ups told them to stop wasting money and get the game done in the space of like 18 months or some ridiculously short time frame.
 
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purpleboy said:
I hear crunch is way worse in Japan, in Japan there’s rumors that people fucking die while working on games and anime due to stress
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Crunch/overworking in Japan is constant in most fields. The primary reason they are failing to procreate is that nobody has time to do the prerequisite fucking. One particularly sad case was a female voice actor that died in the middle of production for an anime. Basically she overworked herself until her immune system gave up. She was 38. If you go into her backstory it was pretty clear she gave up a lot for her career. Nips are obsessed with the idea of a young wife and after hitting 25 it becomes much harder to find a husband, usually turning to foreign men or arranged marriages. She even had a wedding themed birthday party at one point.

Here's an article on the phenomenon in general: https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-karoshi-japanese-word-for-death-by-overwork-2017-10
 
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DanteAlighieri said:
Do studios just not have the balls to tell publishers "it's not ready yet, we'll tell you when"?

Or is it that they set a deadline for release and then twiddle their thumbs and navel gaze for too long?
Click to expand...

_blank_ said:
Most of the time, it's all about appeasing the higher-ups.

Most game companies aren't self-regulated entities anymore - they're owned by larger companies like EA, Bethesda, 2K Games, Activision-Blizzard, Square-Enix, and so on. And these companies are usually controlled by groups and people that own stocks in said companies and expect things to be done and released at a certain time in certain financial quarters to meet their earnings quota. This is also why most bigger AAA companies don't try to try anything too experimental despite having the finances to do so: they're only looking at profit. Same thing for NetherRealm, as this game was produced by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

As stated, this is generally the case most of the time. However you do find out sometimes that indeed game dev companies actually do fuck around until the last possible minute, as is the apparent case with Bioware's Anthem. Sounds like the game was basically in the conceptual phase for years before the higher-ups told them to stop wasting money and get the game done in the space of like 18 months or some ridiculously short time frame.
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Valve is one major exception to this rule, as they like to praise their flat structure and not having shareholders so their employees can "work on whatever they want to do at their own pace". The other side of this is that stuff either takes very long to come out, i.e. Team Fortress 2, or never gets completed, i.e. Half-Life 3. The fact that Steam literally prints cash for them also allows for this.
 
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BECK, PLEEEEEASE 💸
@beckhallstedt

4 days ago, 23 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter

NRS is in a long building with 3 sets of bathrooms. they turned the woman's bathroom closest to contractors into a "unisex bathroom" b/c there are so few women. men would urinate with the stall door open while women were in there. fem coworkers told me not to bother to complain.

unless you were a woman like me, we got $11/hour

*woman-identifying, i'm nb masc btw
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Dollars to donuts, it was her who engineered the bathroom crisis.

Thiletonomics said:
Valve is one major exception to this rule, as they like to praise their flat structure and not having shareholders so their employees can "work on whatever they want to do at their own pace".
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Even I don't believe this, and I'm a commie. "Flat" structure = cliquism, corruption, middle management tyranny, and labor abuse.
 
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I get the impression that video game companies in particular are run for shit.
 
XYZpdq said:
I get the impression that video game companies in particular are run for shit.
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Are they run worse than the auto industry or no? Yes, video game companies are greedy, but you don't hear about people getting directly killed by them, compared to things in the auto industry such as Takata's exploding air bags, Ford Pinto's explosive fuel tanks, GM's faulty ignition switches, you name it.
 
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DanteAlighieri said:
Do studios just not have the balls to tell publishers "it's not ready yet, we'll tell you when"?

Or is it that they set a deadline for release and then twiddle their thumbs and navel gaze for too long?
Click to expand...

This is a publisher-side issue that Activision started, EA embraced, and WB has proudly driven forward.

Basically they want this shit yesterday, and with modern "release now, patch it whenever" mindsets, they'll force release whether it's ready or not. They tie bonuses and promotions to things like Metacritic scores, trying to ensure that the worker drones work on the game until it's sufficiently done to appease the overlords. Only the big stateside publishers have really embraced this shit (EA, WB, Activision); Nintendo, Capcom, and several other devs have adopted a "it's ready when it's ready" approach.

If you're wondering why this woke crap keeps popping up, by the way, it's because Social Justice types, after graduating from activist schools, are overwhelmingly going into ad firms and marketing firms. These firms then go on to insist that there's totally an untapped market there that can be grabbed if only the company embraces wokeness. There's no actual evidence they have that this new market exists, just their word.

Hilariously, this is not a new phenomenon. Companies make absolutely retarded decisions based on the word of incompetent marketing executives all the fucking time. Any time you've seen a 90s reboot no one fucking asked for, a show having stupid shit that ruined it or heavily edited it for no reason, or more recently, an ad campaign that failed miserably, chances are a shitty ad agency is to blame.
 
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Thiletonomics said:
Are they run worse than the auto industry or no? Yes, video game companies are greedy, but you don't hear about people getting directly killed by them, compared to things in the auto industry such as Takata's exploding air bags, Ford Pinto's explosive fuel tanks, GM's faulty ignition switches, you name it.
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iirc there was a kid who died from an X Box falling on it
 
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Oddjob OTP said:
Crunch/overworking in Japan is constant in most fields. The primary reason they are failing to procreate is that nobody has time to do the prerequisite fucking. One particularly sad case was a female voice actor that died in the middle of production for an anime. Basically she overworked herself until her immune system gave up. She was 38. If you go into her backstory it was pretty clear she gave up a lot for her career. Nips are obsessed with the idea of a young wife and after hitting 25 it becomes much harder to find a husband, usually turning to foreign men or arranged marriages. She even had a wedding themed birthday party at one point.

Here's an article on the phenomenon in general: https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-karoshi-japanese-word-for-death-by-overwork-2017-10
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Holy shit. If Japan keeps going at this rate there will literally be nothing left to save by the end of this century. No one is married, no one has kids, people are dying because their boomer boss wants to make a dime. Japan is what the west will become if people aren't careful.
 
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