An Archived Managed World

This blog has moved to http://www.managed-world.com/blog

Home | Contact | Syndication

| Login

473 Posts | 0 Stories | 393 Comments | 1292 Trackbacks

News

Series

Tour de BCL 4.0

Twitter

jolson88 @codinghorror :O. Holy crapola. that's some amazing stuff right there. about 8 days ago

jolson88 @lazycoder LOL. That's AWESOME. Perhaps I should do the same thing (if only I could find the time to do so :( ) about 8 days ago

jolson88 It feels so great to hit ZEB (zero emails in inbox or other to-triage areas). On the flipside, now I have a boatload of tasks to do :). about 8 days ago

jolson88 @jglozano leasing is never a good option financially. There's a reason its nicknamed "fleasing" :) about 17 days ago

jolson88 @aaronjensen: I just had my first experience installing the latest Ubuntu into free VMware Player. Very pleasant and painless. about 21 days ago

jolson88 And yes folks, I'm not dead. I just haven't had much time for twitter lately (and been doing most of my updating on Facebook). about 21 days ago

jolson88 Installed the latest Ubuntu into VMware Player to get a frictionless experience for SSCLI hacking. Really liking all the social integration. about 21 days ago

jolson88 @chrisgwilliams are you serious? about 58 days ago

jolson88 @RockyLhotka That's what I'm talking about :) about 120 days ago

jolson88 LOL, though I'm not sure I want to admit it, I'm looking forward to reading it for the compiler construction part on p-code and PL/0. about 120 days ago

Post Categories

Blog Roll

The Professional Life of a Game Developer?

A friend pointed me to this link, which is a letter posted by a spouse of an Electronic Arts employee. Seeing that I haven't worked in the game industry, I can't really say just how common this is. However, with all the stories I've heard from developers that have worked in the game industry, my gut tells me that this story is entirely legitimate.

I thought if that just a couple of you readers posted this link on your blog, or shared the link with friends, maybe we could up awareness at least a tiny bit. I can't even start to say how to cure this problem, but one thing is for sure, everyone needs more awareness of this problem and to realize that they can do something to prevent this from occurring.

Share the love, people :).

posted on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 6:15 PM

Feedback

# re: The Professional Life of a Game Developer? 11/11/2004 2:19 AM Tony Alderman

I attended the <a href=” www.indiegamescon.com”>Indie Games Con</a> last month in (of all places) Eugene, Oregon. I’m not a game developer, but I found the conference very interesting and informative. I had no idea that there was a conference designed to help the small-guy compete with the major game studios. If anyone is thinking about game development, I highly recommend the conference for next year.

# re: The Professional Life of a Game Developer? 11/11/2004 6:40 AM Jack

Unfortunately this is the almost way every consumer oriented software product has been brought to market.. It is also the reason I got out of that sector of the business.

The main reason it is so bad is you have not "real" schedule and any schedule is often underestimated so you end up killing yourself just to meet an insanely wrong schedule.

The only company that I worked for that was different was "Sierra" and then only one division of them. The amazing thing we shipped every product ahead of schedule with every feature asked for and NEVER hit crunch time for more than 1 month. Bottom line is management needs to react differently and as long as people are willing to put up with it they won't stop.

# re: The Professional Life of a Game Developer? 11/12/2004 2:06 AM Chris Lundie

The games industry sounds pretty screwed up. You toil for one or two years (or even more, 3D Realms I'm looking at you) and there's no guarantee that anyone will buy your game if it's not a sequel.

# re: The Professional Life of a Game Developer? 11/18/2004 1:01 PM Tony Alderman

It looks like this story made it to CNET News...

http://news.com.com/For+developers%2C+its+not+all+fun+and+games/2100-1022_3-5457274.html

# re: The Professional Life of a Game Developer? 11/22/2004 12:08 PM TomB

From Slashdot yesterday (Nov 21) a link to a New York times article

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/business/yourmoney/21digi.html?ex=1258693200&en=40a60cc6d7971ab2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

# re: The Professional Life of a Game Developer? 11/22/2004 8:58 PM gamer and software engineer, not

I play games a lot, both PC and console games. I also track game news every day. Every time I heard is they pushing a well expected game again and again. Halo2, Fable, HL2.

The common response from game publisher on it is "we ship (the game) when it is ready".

From an outsider, it looks like they (game company exec) are pretty reasonable people and do care of product quality and user experience.

Why they do so badly to their workers? 70 hours a week is insane. I'm a software engineer working on commercial software. I work overtime very few times. It kills productivity eventually.

When I play all the great games, I know the game developers are the most talented and skillful engineers in the world. I asked myself "Can I do it?". The answer is a big NO.

I wish all the best to the game developers.