The Hermit
Member
As someone who owns a successful (non-gaming) software company, the extent to which game software companies have convinced themselves it is somehow a special snowflake where incessant overtime is both necessary and effective, is maddening.
It's exploitative. Full stop. When I visit a university to speak, I always ask a show of hands of who went into CS to make games, and 2/3rds of them shoot up. I then spend a few minutes explaining that if everyone wants the same job, the industry has all the leverage. You can make games, but you'll do so on shitty terms that'll chew you up and spit you out.
Or you could just make boring normal software and enter one of the most prosperous classes of non-inherited wealth in the history of humankind, guarded against almost all the macroeconomic forces threatening your cohort generation.
While boycotts would be effective if they were widespread, I'm not sure it'd be as easy (given the ratio of devs to users) as convincing 20-something dudes that gamedev jobs are a suckers game and boycotting their employment so that the market balances out and decent terms are feasible. (Also won't happen because naive 20-year-old men are a renewable resource.)
Amazing post, especially the last part.
I think this kind of view about the megacorps is one of the most important things we have to learn and teach in our generation.
I checked about Retro and just 3 people posted. They said the work conditions are ok, but the management are kinda lost.