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Media Molecule - "We aren't curing cancer. There's a human cost to making games".

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
Passion begets excellence. There is one problem and one problem only: games are too "produced" (which means the teams are too big and they take too long to develop). A random cog in the machine may kill themselves for 14 hours a day and invest as much "passion" as they possibly can, but it will almost never end up in the final product since everything is decided by consensus and market research. When you have small teams, passion translates directly into actionable ideas and adjustments. When you have huge teams full of remote workers and temps, passion means nothing.

In Stones of Venice, Ruskin talks about how we should not encourage the manufacture of cookie-cutter, mass-produced products of artistry (oh! Like a modern Ubisoft game?) because it devalues the worker and cheapens the art:

For instance. Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are copped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail.
Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or fuse the fragments. have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.
But glass cups and vessels may become the subjects of exquisite intention; and if in buying these we pay for the invention, that is to say, for the beautiful form, or colour, or engraving, and not for mere finish or execution, we are doing good to humanity.

It's as if videogame developers are finally waking up to the uncaring reality of corporate work.
 
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wipeout364

Member
and most importantly the disgusting leeches scum investors that are milking (stealing if you really get down to the bottom of things but that's another topic) with no work, no sweat, no contribution, not even risk, most of the juice and money out of slimmer and slimmer teams under more and more pressure.
I think investors have lots of problems but I disagree. Without investors there would be no AAA industry and possibly no console industry, There are not many game designers who could build a 50 to 200 person team pay them for 24 to 36 months then advertise and ship a game. I don’t Believe any AAA developer is private and none of the console makers are; the reason they needed cash at various points to stay in business or to expand.
Don’t forget also that when you get up in arms about something and it spreads ( example Star Wars loot boxes) investors feed that back to Disney and EA by dropping share value and sometime it is enough that the problem goes away.
 

RScrewed

Member
Claiming a point is invalid or absurd is not the same as demonstrating it. I'm going to level with you, I was perfectly aware that you were going to double down before I even began writing my response. I still took the time because I like to think truth has just enough value to be occasionally worth it for it's own sake.

But ultimately, unfucking the ideas expressed in your posts is not my responsibility. My actual opinion of you the individual is that you don't care what kind of idiotic things you say, you think none of it matters, so you'll just post whatever flies into your head when you want to get a rise out of people.

All you have shown yourself capable of is apathy and repetition. You're free to do that of course, but if you think it requires any kind of intelligence you are fooling yourself. It's transparent and vacuous. Try to understand, I'm not really judging you that harshly as a person. I don't pretend to know you, apart from the impression your poorly thought out posts provide. I've rebutted your ideas, and you just repeated them because that's all you are here for. If that's how you want to spend your time, by all means, carry on making the forum stupider. The reason more people aren't arguing with you is because you haven't shown yourself to be worth their time. I've already given you enough of mine.

Go ahead and repeat yourself more, but don't imagine for a second that you are doing anything other than rolling around in a pile of dogshit, because for whatever fucked up reason, it seems to make you feel good.

Pretty sure it's illegal to beat children like this.
 

OldBoyGamer

Banned
The problem with the 'they died for their art and it was worth it' argument, is that it completely fails to take into account exactly who died for their art? Who was taken advantage of? Who was abused? Who had the power and who abused that power? And finally - who got the rewards?

You see, at almost every games studio across the world, as with most movie production companies across the world that have suffered serious work/life balance as a direct result of a single or multiple project/s, you have the boss who's vision it is and then you have a management team just below them who either believe in that vision or know full well that they are going to be very, very well rewarded for helping see that vision come to fruition.

Below that, you have everyone else, and they are split into several camps:
- Those that are happy to have their life completely disrupted for the work they are currently doing. In my experience, this accounts for a very small number of the overall people involved
- Those that begin happy with the work levels and quickly or soon after realise that the cost is too high for them. I believe this number to be a little higher than those mentioned above
- Those that find themselves in a situation that they do not want to be in and are forced to do as they are told and have their lives turned upside down as a result of the project. Of these, some leave, but many can't - because unlike what many people say, finding a new job isn't as easy as baking a cake. In my experience, this makes up the vast majority of the workforce on these projects

tldr; Those at the top use those at the bottom to further their careers and get high rewards compared to the far lower rewards of the large workforce below them
 
Is it a given that video game developers are expected to work 80 hours a week for months on end and then get shit-canned when the project is completed? What a terrible industry, eating its young.
 
Also remember this is nothing new in the software industry. Back in the 1980s, remember the Mac team had those "90 hours a week" t-shirts? Steve Jobs was very proud of that and I read that Bill Gates drove his team to similar lengths. Essentially all startups throughout time have required inhuman levels of work to the point of burnout. Survival of the fittest?
 
I think investors have lots of problems but I disagree. Without investors there would be no AAA industry and possibly no console industry, There are not many game designers who could build a 50 to 200 person team pay them for 24 to 36 months then advertise and ship a game. I don’t Believe any AAA developer is private and none of the console makers are; the reason they needed cash at various points to stay in business or to expand.
Don’t forget also that when you get up in arms about something and it spreads ( example Star Wars loot boxes) investors feed that back to Disney and EA by dropping share value and sometime it is enough that the problem goes away.

You're either out of your mind or never worked in a corporation.

Investors ARE the reason why they put Star Wars lootboxes and all kinds of crap like this in games.

Now you're right about you're budget investment, it's actually always the same "deal with the devil" conundrum of ambitious projects that require budget, but it's still a choice.
 

A.Romero

Member
I understand being passionate about your job and thinking about the legacy you are leaving. I'm an IT consultant, for most people it's just a job but to me it means a lot more. Hours fly, I'm often working until very late at night or weekends. Most of the times not for a release date but because I chose to invest more time.

If I didn't like that I could probably be doing something else, like most people on the game industry.

Should devs be better compensated? Probably. But it has a cost, just the same as having electronics not built in Chinese workshops and we as consumers are not willing to do what it has to be done about it (paying 30% more for a smartphone or a tablet).

Gaffers are probably some of the people that spend the most in these kind of products and we constantly bitch and moan about different business models design to increase the income so bigger teams can be paid. It's not rocket science. If a product needs 200 man hours to be completed, you can either hire two developers and have them work 9 to 5 for a month or have a single developer work 40 hours overtime in a week and decrease costs.

We are the ones who could instigate a change if we vote with our wallet and agree to pay more for games either upfront or through micro transactions or dlc instead of wait for sales or trash a game for trying to pull more money.

Indie games have to make it work with less resources so the product scope is either smaller or graphics more simple or whatever. We, as consumers, refuse to pay $60 or more for that product so they have to lower the cost to something more palatable like $20 in order to be sold at all.

It's not a big studio issue only. It's a problem where studios, developers and consumers all play a part in.
 
"We are making entertainment," she emphasised. "We aren't curing cancer. We need to understand the human cost of making games and make the doom manageable."

Creating something is hard, who'da thunk it. You think painting the Sistine chapel or building the Sagrada Familia was easy? Doom is part of the creative process. And yes, creating art isn't the same as curing cancer, but it's not any less important.
 
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Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Creating something is hard, who'da thunk it. You think painting the Sistine chapel or building the Sagrada Familia was easy? Doom is part of the creative process. And yes, creating art isn't the same as curing cancer, but it's not any less important.

Its about sustainability in a collaborative environment. What part of this is difficult to understand?

The overwhelming majority of people in games, much as they love what they do, do the work primarily because its a J.O.B. Its a means to pay their bills and put food on the table for themselves and their dependents. Keeping these people functional and productive staff members as opposed to burnout cases is as important in a commercial sense as it is a basic humanitarian one.
 

wipeout364

Member
You're either out of your mind or never worked in a corporation.

Investors ARE the reason why they put Star Wars lootboxes and all kinds of crap like this in games.

Now you're right about you're budget investment, it's actually always the same "deal with the devil" conundrum of ambitious projects that require budget, but it's still a choice.
The reason the loot boxes were in was to maximize profits, shareholders ask for the company to grow and maximize profits. The reason the loot boxes are out is negative blowback dropping share price and investor outcry. I have worked for a corporation and I am an investor. I would be surprised if investors had any say about loot boxes implementation, they drive the company to be profitable and reward them with increased desirability and share price, they do not generally make decisions like loot boxes or pay to win mechanics.
EA could charge 50 dollars for a loot box if it was simply about greed but they have to balance public perception, their customers expectations and investor expectations. If there customers get upset, investors get upset and heads roll ( I wouldn’t be surprised if this is why Patrick Soderlund and loot boxes are gone).
 

Hanon

Banned
i'm still interested in getting the game when it comes out, but you shouldn't use cancer to demonstrate a point.
 

Redneckerz

Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
I get the comparison that is made: Often gamers and perhaps managements alike forget that making games is still a human effort, and that this one little problem you may encounter may prove to be detrimental making the game or breaking the game. But far too often the employee's needs are ignored. And on 200+ employee teams you are bound to have some kind of manager trying to redelegate things. In that sense, i see employees more akin to pre-baked lighting and its render jobs: You need a manager program to oversee things.

I agree that management should be more inclusive of the morale on the workfloor: A happy employee is a better employee in the long run. You need to be one on the team but also make decisions when needed. Telltale was a story of a management making too many bad decisions against a worker group that was deliberately left in the dark and pushed to the limits of what is humanly possible, with all the health risks that came with. This is something that needs to improve and something i reckon Media Molecule is pushing for aswell.

"We aren't curing cancer."

What a dumb statement and stupid comparison to make to justify mediocrity.
If i would believe every single post you made, you would be the hidden wunderkind, the secret Tim Sweeney/John Carmack of gaming. I think we all know that ain't the case, as is demonstrated by the plain rhetoric of your post.

I think art is actually more important than the medical field when it comes to overall quality of life. The developers of most seminal games killed themselves to get them out the door, it shows, and it was worth it.

jMLf2NG.gif


Protip: Shoot the Cacodemon until it dies/Insert some nuance in your texts before hitting ''post reply''. :pie_eyeroll:

Who is going to work long hours passionately for a fucking Burnout game?
People who made it further to the top carreer wise than you seemingly? I dunno man, the Burnout series is one of the worst examples to name as cookie cutter sequels. Especially when Burnout Paradise exists which is perhaps the least unlikely sequel to classify as cookie cutter, with its open world free roam spec and all.

Atleast pick the FIFA Legacy editions then with updated suits. Still a terrible example to make (As updating rosters/compiling for legacy platforms is still hard work) but that would make more sense.

Even still, you have zero idea what you are saying with your implications and if you are a dev, then your mentality as one is absolutely terrible. Developers realize that games are a labor of love and cooperation. What you are suggesting with your entire post history, is that games should be developed purely for PC, chaotically and in small scale and efforts should be doubled without any incentive.

Perhaps thats how you do your developments, but most of the game industry has taken a more healthier stance. Despite this, its still readily apparent (by way of Telltale) that year long crunch times are still a thing of today. And talking about it usually delivers you a shunning by management.

Art is more important than the medical field. Suck it.

Oh and the rest of your points are invalid and absurd. I don't like RTS games. Never liked a single one.

I realize only one gif saves this terrible doubling down on one of the more WTF-worthy posts of recent days:

SourFlusteredCoelacanth-size_restricted.gif


Show your credentials for once if you have such stark opinions against everything that isnt the PC or a retro game. For all that bragging, i have yet to see anything substantial from this. All ive heard is that you are a developer of games (Without naming even one) and were involved with MAME patches.
The cancer line is bad, but it's just a silly example.

The point she wants to get across is work shouldn't be a nightmare.
Exactly. I think every developer with a reasonable frame of mind is aware that crunch times exist and that these are a blessing and a cure as games go into their final stage of development. But it is absolutely toxic to be in that mindset all the time or have the feeling you are chased at during your game. The best games are created when, through thick and thin, a team remains a team, and not become seperate islands of activity.
 
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AlexxKidd

Member
People live for art. I think art is actually more important than the medical field when it comes to overall quality of life. The developers of most seminal games killed themselves to get them out the door, it shows, and it was worth it.

Ok i realize this guy has been banned so quoting him is jusy piling on, but im just coming across this and had to highlight one of the most head-up-your-ass statements ive read in a while. Also worth noting thus far six people have liked his post:messenger_beaming:
 

GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
i'm still interested in getting the game when it comes out, but you shouldn't use cancer to demonstrate a point.

It's not taken literally in Britain. There's nothing wrong with what she said. It's just an expression of how insignificant something is compared to something of great importance.
 

Graven

Member
Not only the gaming industry, but, im all in for any industry that pushes it's workers way too much, to re-think their ways and change their approach. Even if the production take a step back.
 

iconmaster

Banned
If you're really passionate about something, it's basically your life. There's no de with a culture of it being a 9-5 job end up like games that look like someone worked on it 9-5. It's not good enough. We need to stop pretending that creating art is some kind of desk job. If you turn it into that, you get boring games like these and soul-less corporate Hollywood movies.

I’d like to know more about Nintendo’s game development approach. I bet if anyone could make amazing games on a regular 9 to 5 schedule, it’d be them.

Edit: after a little research this seems unlikely. There has to be someone though, right?
 
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dirthead

Banned
So basically, I talked about games, gave many specific examples, and some people personally insulted me, gave no counterexamples, and I was banned. Great moderation, GAF. Good job.

So anyway, I can produce an exhaustive list of great/seminal games that were developed with an "unhealthy/crunch" whatever you want to call it, and I can't find a single great/seminal game that wasn't developed this way. No one in this thread who personally insulted me has been able to list a single example of a great game that was developed using this mystical superior development methodology (because there aren't any).

That about sums it up.
 

GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
So basically, I talked about games, gave many specific examples, and some people personally insulted me, gave no counterexamples, and I was banned. Great moderation, GAF. Good job.

So anyway, I can produce an exhaustive list of great/seminal games that were developed with an "unhealthy/crunch" whatever you want to call it, and I can't find a single great/seminal game that wasn't developed this way. No one in this thread who personally insulted me has been able to list a single example of a great game that was developed using this mystical superior development methodology (because there aren't any).

That about sums it up.

Deadlines lead to crunch. Clearly MM don't have crunch so therefore don't have what you would call deadlines, and clearly Sony are OK with this because they value the company. Perhaps Sony will adopt this for other studios and allow for any extra year of polish instead of a six months rush to finish.
 

Harlock

Member
Besides the first LBP, I dont think MM has the necessary output to get the respect to say how games dev should be.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
It's not taken literally in Britain. There's nothing wrong with what she said. It's just an expression of how insignificant something is compared to something of great importance.

I know, the reaction to such a simple metaphor is utterly baffling to me as well, I panicked and thought I was on a certain other easily triggered board for a moment!

Curing cancer: A matter of life and death, therefore of real importance in the world.
Making games: Creating commercial pop-entertainment products, not a matter of life and death, just another element in the crowded cultural landscape.
 

GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
I know, the reaction to such a simple metaphor is utterly baffling to me as well, I panicked and thought I was on a certain other easily triggered board for a moment!

Curing cancer: A matter of life and death, therefore of real importance in the world.
Making games: Creating commercial pop-entertainment products, not a matter of life and death, just another element in the crowded cultural landscape.

Don't fear, everyone has a right to their opinion even if it's not popular. If GAF started doing the reverse of what that 'other' forum was doing, I'd be the first to support their right to an opinion. Don't lose sight of what we're fighting for on this forum. The other forum bans people for not falling in line, on here, we embrace differences and argue the points.

This is still ridiculous though ...
 

Redneckerz

Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
Ok i realize this guy has been banned so quoting him is jusy piling on, but im just coming across this and had to highlight one of the most head-up-your-ass statements ive read in a while. Also worth noting thus far six people have liked his post:messenger_beaming:
The bad part about it is that there is an occassional interesting point to be found around his posts, but its completely blown away by the carelessness of the other things that are said. If you are going to claim that art is more important than the medical field, you should be subject to elaborating on this statement. Just claiming you can prove your point without actually proving your point is just silly.

So basically, I talked about games, gave many specific examples,
Alright:
  • Please explain why Burnout is a proper specific example, as outlined by your post.
  • Please elaborate as to why Art is supposely more important than the medical field when viewed through the lens of game developing, as outlined by your post.
  • Please elaborate as to why G GrimDarkDarrel 's proposition is, in your eyes, ''valid and absurd'' and then think your link is going to be read after saying that, as outlined by your post.
  • Please produce this list of ''dozens of games that support my claim'', as outlined by your post.
The last time you were given a list to elaborate upon (And it being my first post in that very thread) you ignored it , so feel free to prove everyone wrong this time around. Oh right, i forgot, i am on ignore...

and some people personally insulted me, gave no counterexamples, and I was banned. Great moderation, GAF. Good job.

So anyway, I can produce an exhaustive list of great/seminal games that were developed with an "unhealthy/crunch" whatever you want to call it, and I can't find a single great/seminal game that wasn't developed this way. No one in this thread who personally insulted me has been able to list a single example of a great game that was developed using this mystical superior development methodology (because there aren't any).

That about sums it up.
  1. Perhaps take air your grievances with the actual staff instead of airing it publically.
  2. Alright, show the list then. :messenger_grinning_sweat:
  3. You may have a wrong impression of what personally insulting means. People calling you out on your argument for its ridiculous premise isn't the same as personally insulting you. You can't fault others for addressing your generalizing stances. If you don't want to have that, then make better, more thought-out posts. :messenger_smiling_with_eyes:
Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind as a game whose development was relatively healthly. Ofcourse, every game has a crunch time, but that is readily apparent with any game. Guerilla however, seemed to have been given all the time they wanted for their title.

Deadlines lead to crunch. Clearly MM don't have crunch so therefore don't have what you would call deadlines, and clearly Sony are OK with this because they value the company. Perhaps Sony will adopt this for other studios and allow for any extra year of polish instead of a six months rush to finish.
Internal devs or studios Sony has a intimate relationship with are usually given all the time they need to get their product up and running. Its why things like Horizon: Zero Dawn took as long as they did, but it also was one of the more polished titles when it did came out.

So there is definitely some merit on allocating longer dev time to big projects. Heck, its why Activision now employs three different studios for its COD series, so each dev has a year extra development time to their disposal.
 
So basically, I talked about games, gave many specific examples, and some people personally insulted me, gave no counterexamples, and I was banned. Great moderation, GAF. Good job.

So anyway, I can produce an exhaustive list of great/seminal games that were developed with an "unhealthy/crunch" whatever you want to call it, and I can't find a single great/seminal game that wasn't developed this way. No one in this thread who personally insulted me has been able to list a single example of a great game that was developed using this mystical superior development methodology (because there aren't any).

That about sums it up.
Your feelings of grievance are misplaced. I aggressively attacked your ideas, but the worst I've said about you is that you have not shown yourself to be capable of real discussion, that all you can do is repeat your one note argument and that you are just looking to get a rise out of people. Instead of complaining about how insulted you feel, prove me wrong.

I want to address this idea you have that giving examples on either side proves anything. Work conditions for the vast majority of projects are not widely publicized, but that doesn't mean there is no data to be found. Gamasutra published a series of articles in 2015 exploring the effects of crunch on the game industry, and undertook a large scale survey to produce actual data.

This page from the survey article contains the data related to crunch and overtime.

Notable excerpt:
Even in the area where you might expect crunch would improve things – project delays – crunch still showed a significant negative correlation, indicating that it did not actually save projects from delays.

This suggests that not only does crunch not produce better outcomes, but it may actually make games worse where it is used.


The next article in the series goes into much more detail analyzing the data and the conclusion remains clear. Projects that do not force their workers to "crunch" measure as more successful by a broad range of metrics, including ROI and metacritic score. The lone exception to this is projects where the overtime was completely voluntary, and as the article points out, this does not imply any specific degree of additional time spent in the office. It could be 45 hour weeks or 90, but it probably isn't 90.

So when I said to you that you were going to bat not for quality in games, but mindlessly arguing with unsubstantiated authority for the benefit of nothing but exploitative business practices, I was right. If you actually care about good games, stop digging into this ridiculous idea that the people who make them need to suffer for them to be good.

That's what data looks like. What will you do now? Are you going to dismiss everything that doesn't fit your narrative and carry on playing the victim? I'll be honest, after all the stupid shit you've already said, I don't expect you suddenly realize what an argument looks like and actually field one, but you can prove me wrong at any time.
 

Terce

Member
There seems to be an odd misconception of killing yourself at work means you're more passionate. In some cases I could see this (Musk sleeping on his factory floors) but to me it just looks like the deadlines are far to stringent and has nothing to do with "passion" for the project. Can you say with authority that the development team that worked 14+ hour days for months on end is any more or less passionate, talented, or even efficient than the team that worked the 9-5 over an extended period.

Sure if you pull a 9-5 for 1 year and compare it to 14+ hour days for the same period, you will have a different and often considered "better" outcome for the team with more hours spent. But that is an unfair comparison, the crunch time teams should be compared to 3-5 year developments.

It's really strange to see so many people supporting terrible work practices and even encouraging them to a degree by saying that they produce better results. The industry has evolved to this means of production because of how impatient the consumer is, expecting yearly releases of their favourite titles that often feel rushed and are poorly received. Vote with your wallets folks
 

dirthead

Banned
Deadlines lead to crunch. Clearly MM don't have crunch so therefore don't have what you would call deadlines, and clearly Sony are OK with this because they value the company. Perhaps Sony will adopt this for other studios and allow for any extra year of polish instead of a six months rush to finish.

Every game has a deadline whether they admit it or not. When you truly have no deadline, you end up with Duke Nukem Forever. Just because deadlines aren't made available to the public doesn't mean they don't exist.
 
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GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
Every game has a deadline whether they admit it or not. When you truly have no deadline, you end up with Duke Nukem Forever. Just because deadlines aren't made available to the public doesn't mean they don't exist.

Bit of a strange game to be trying to make that point with. It would be like saying that in a Last Guardian thread. If MM say they don't crunch then clearly Sony hasn't set a deadline, which of course is why they've been able to iterate on the engine and the tools for so long.
 
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dirthead

Banned
Bit of a strange game to be trying to make that point with. It would be like saying that in a Last Guardian thread. If MM say they don't crunch then clearly Sony hasn't set a deadline, which of course is why they've been able to iterate on the engine and the tools for so long.

Last Guardian had deadlines. It just missed them. There's no way MM doesn't have internal deadlines. If they say otherwise, they're lying. Everyone has an internal time table unless they're completely mismanaged. I mean, MM has released E3 demos in the past. How the fuck can you prepare an E3 demo if you don't have a dead line for it?

iu


I think it's more a case of their games being so unambitious and boring that they can actually set deadlines and meet them without working too hard.
 
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Bill O'Rights

Seldom posts. Always delivers.
Staff Member
D dirthead - For clarity, I checked the log and you weren't banned for your conduct in this thread. And I'd ask you bear in mind that other moderator actions to other people in threads are not visible to you (e.g. reply bans, PM's) before you start platforming yourself as a victim.


The point is that if you're going to engage in a manner of this style, then you have to be OK with getting responses that are tonally the same. In essence you forego certain protections, we're not here to let you cower between our legs when you poke bears. If you want to speak to people in a certain way, then you have to be prepared to receive the same attitude back. From this, you grow and adapt to articulate yourself better, moderate over time and experience and eventually become more well-rounded.


Most, if not all of your opinions are 'extreme truths' that only 'you' can see. At some point, when you pick away the rhetoric you see that there is a point of continuity in threads that derail, turn into shit flinging, console wars and petty retorts. If that point of continuity is yourself you need to reflect a bit on why that is.


The worst things is you actually make some points worth discussing, but you seem unable to finish a sentence or debate without some sort of 'flourishing' put down. If you want to use a thread as a pulpit to try and get attention or people to look at you then you will get called out. And there is a difference to a personal attack and your comments being labelled as such. In this thread alone, you have asserted three very controversial stances as 'facts' and still have not provided one shred of evidence or exposition on why you 'feel' this way.


So before you cry again - and because you chose to make this public in an unrelated thread - here is the truth. Three separate mods have added four warnings to your account in the past two months. All unexpired. They were all added without the desire to ban you and give you time to burn out this 'phase'. Your ban was the threshold point for multiple displays of petulance and childish retorts.


Now that's out the way, welcome back. Make your points better and without the air of arrogance that they definitely do not have the nuance to carry.
 

dirthead

Banned
D dirthead - For clarity, I checked the log and you weren't banned for your conduct in this thread. And I'd ask you bear in mind that other moderator actions to other people in threads are not visible to you (e.g. reply bans, PM's) before you start platforming yourself as a victim.


The point is that if you're going to engage in a manner of this style, then you have to be OK with getting responses that are tonally the same. In essence you forego certain protections, we're not here to let you cower between our legs when you poke bears. If you want to speak to people in a certain way, then you have to be prepared to receive the same attitude back. From this, you grow and adapt to articulate yourself better, moderate over time and experience and eventually become more well-rounded.


Most, if not all of your opinions are 'extreme truths' that only 'you' can see. At some point, when you pick away the rhetoric you see that there is a point of continuity in threads that derail, turn into shit flinging, console wars and petty retorts. If that point of continuity is yourself you need to reflect a bit on why that is.


The worst things is you actually make some points worth discussing, but you seem unable to finish a sentence or debate without some sort of 'flourishing' put down. If you want to use a thread as a pulpit to try and get attention or people to look at you then you will get called out. And there is a difference to a personal attack and your comments being labelled as such. In this thread alone, you have asserted three very controversial stances as 'facts' and still have not provided one shred of evidence or exposition on why you 'feel' this way.


So before you cry again - and because you chose to make this public in an unrelated thread - here is the truth. Three separate mods have added four warnings to your account in the past two months. All unexpired. They were all added without the desire to ban you and give you time to burn out this 'phase'. Your ban was the threshold point for multiple displays of petulance and childish retorts.


Now that's out the way, welcome back. Make your points better and without the air of arrogance that they definitely do not have the nuance to carry.

Extreme truths that only I see yet my posts have multiple likes. Really strong argument there, dude. I couldn't care less about people's tone. Just don't insult me personally when I'm not making it personal.
 
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GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
Last Guardian had deadlines. It just missed them. There's no way MM doesn't have internal deadlines. If they say otherwise, they're lying. Everyone has an internal time table unless they're completely mismanaged. I mean, MM has released E3 demos in the past. How the fuck can you prepare an E3 demo if you don't have a dead line for it?

iu


I think it's more a case of their games being so unambitious and boring that they can actually set deadlines and meet them without working too hard.

I haven't got a clue why you'd accuse a developer you don't like of lying ...
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
I understand the angle of "doing what is right for the workers", but to D dirthead 's point I have also worked with software developers and they are among the most short-sighted, illogical people you are liable to meet. Coding something? Creating assets? Gotcha covered. But mushing it together into a viable (shippable) product? Goodness, it's like herding cats. I have immense respect for any developer who understands project mgmt and long-term planning because most do not.

The "tech field" (I'm throwing a big umbrella over gaming, hardware tech, internet hosting, etc) is absolutely starved for competent management. This often results in needless "crunch time" due to a bunch of starry-eyed developers rolling their desks together and coming up with a harebrained scheme that evaporates into nothing after 4 months of planning and fantasizing. And then they jerk off during a "scrum" and cross the project off their kanban boards and then they whine about crunch 6 months later because all their other projects got neglected.

Crunch happens in large part because videogame companies are among the worst-managed companies.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
I think it's more a case of their games being so unambitious and boring that they can actually set deadlines and meet them without working too hard.

Boring, is a matter of opinion so even if I disagree I can't say I have a problem really except to say that its a matter of creative direction and unrelated to any aspect of work ethic. Hence irrelevant to supporting your point.

But, in what reality is Dreams unambitious? I mean seriously, its an utterly perverse accusation to level.
 
The "tech field" (I'm throwing a big umbrella over gaming, hardware tech, internet hosting, etc) is absolutely starved for competent management. This often results in needless "crunch time" due to a bunch of starry-eyed developers rolling their desks together and coming up with a harebrained scheme that evaporates into nothing after 4 months of planning and fantasizing. And then they jerk off during a "scrum" and cross the project off their kanban boards and then they whine about crunch 6 months later because all their other projects got neglected.
What the heck dude? This is some awful generalizing on display here.

I'm not saying there aren't incompetent people in tech. Far from it. But your sweeping statements are complete nonsense and have nothing to do with the reality of project delivery. It applies to games as well as business software, that when anything in the requirements changes, the scope of the project changes and that causes delays. Delivery is the responsibility of the entire team. Sometimes the developers fall short by underestimating something they haven't done before, sometimes their manager falls short by not budgeting time properly or failing to insulate them from distraction, sometimes the business people fall short by not making up their damn minds. In no universe is it reasonable to just shit on devs the way you did.

I don't know where in your experience it comes from, but the world is a lot more complex than just "devs r stupid."

D dirthead You could have countered with real arguments. Instead you ignore everything you can't handle and hide behind Likes, as if that gave your posts substance. An adult can deal with an argument without falling back on unbacked assertions, a child takes his ball and goes home when he is challenged. What you are doing is cowardly.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
What the heck dude? This is some awful generalizing on display here.

I'm not saying there aren't incompetent people in tech. Far from it. But your sweeping statements are complete nonsense and have nothing to do with the reality of project delivery. It applies to games as well as business software, that when anything in the requirements changes, the scope of the project changes and that causes delays. Delivery is the responsibility of the entire team. Sometimes the developers fall short by underestimating something they haven't done before, sometimes their manager falls short by not budgeting time properly or failing to insulate them from distraction, sometimes the business people fall short by not making up their damn minds. In no universe is it reasonable to just shit on devs the way you did.

I don't know where in your experience it comes from, but the world is a lot more complex than just "devs r stupid."
If "devs r stupid" is what you got out of my post, then you didn't read my post.

Management tends to be terrible at tech companies. This is because many who pursue MBAs or even a BBA go elsewhere since there's not a lot of money in middle-managing a tech company in relation to the high workload. Most devs lack self-management skills (let alone team mgmt), especially the good ones. So, either you have a manager swinging way above their paygrade (which is often less than what the devs themselves make) to keep things in check or the bad behaviors go on longer than they need to. Multiply that across an entire team (or an entire company) and you will end up having to crunch at the end.

This is moot for startups and small indie devs. They don't require overarching management to keep everything on track. And of course, I'm not claiming that every dev team is to blame for crunch. Rather, lack of management is to blame (whether that's self-mgmt or actual managers).

A big company like Ubisoft, Rockstar, EA, etc needs layers upon layers of middle-management to keep everything moving forward.

No need to get into a pissing match about whose experience is more valid. I've worked with plenty of dev teams across dozens (probably hundreds by now) of businesses and have been apart of plenty of projects, big and small. What I described is the cold reality of working as a developer in a modern corporation.
 
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#Phonepunk#

Banned
refreshing to have someone be so frank and honest about an industry.

i think too many people these days confuse Consumer Products with Art. yes the former can be the latter but not necessarily so. still you will see people saying all movies are art, all videogames are art, etc. at that point it becomes a meaningless term, anything representational or visual that can be commodified is art. the fine art world itself reached this conclusion half a century ago, giving birth to pop art, postmodernism, conceptual art, etc.

imo too many people elevate entertainment these days. conflating it with the outmoded pedestal of "art" is just one of the ways. there is a big element of self gratification in it -- now that thing you love to consume makes you not a lowly consumer but a connoisseur of the arts! most of these people have never taken an art history class and have never created anything themselves that wasn't a response to some product.

in this thread there are people saying art is more important than medicine, which is flat out insane. the moment you value a fictional construct over human life, you are sniffing your own glue, buddy.
 
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If "devs r stupid" is what you got out of my post, then you didn't read my post.

Management tends to be terrible at tech companies. This is because many who pursue MBAs or even a BBA go elsewhere since there's not a lot of money in middle-managing a tech company in relation to the high workload. Most devs lack self-management skills (let alone team mgmt), especially the good ones. So, either you have a manager swinging way above their paygrade (which is often less than what the devs themselves make) to keep things in check or the bad behaviors go on longer than they need to. Multiply that across an entire team (or an entire company) and you will end up having to crunch at the end.

This is moot for startups and small indie devs. They don't require overarching management to keep everything on track. And of course, I'm not claiming that every dev team is to blame for crunch. Rather, lack of management is to blame (whether that's self-mgmt or actual managers).

A big company like Ubisoft, Rockstar, EA, etc needs layers upon layers of middle-management to keep everything moving forward.

No need to get into a pissing match about whose experience is more valid. I've worked with plenty of dev teams across dozens (probably hundreds by now) of businesses and have been apart of plenty of projects, big and small. What I described is the cold reality of working as a developer in a modern corporation.

There's no need to call this a pissing match. Maybe you meant to say something less sweeping and general and not to lay the blame so much on developers the first time but that isn't what you actually wrote. You made a bad post, then a more reasonable one, while acting as if my reply was in response to the more reasonable one. A bit disingenuous but we are more or less in agreement now so time to move on I guess.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
There's no need to call this a pissing match. Maybe you meant to say something less sweeping and general and not to lay the blame so much on developers the first time but that isn't what you actually wrote. You made a bad post, then a more reasonable one, while acting as if my reply was in response to the more reasonable one. A bit disingenuous but we are more or less in agreement now so time to move on I guess.
If you are a developer, sorry if I offended you.

But if you are a developer (or interact with devs), you cannot convince me that you haven't seen "lazy dev culture" at least once in your career.

What I described is a widespread problem. I wasn't being disingenuous. Painting it as such isn't the conversational win-button you think it is.
 

AancientOne

Neo Member
Last Guardian had deadlines. It just missed them. There's no way MM doesn't have internal deadlines. If they say otherwise, they're lying. Everyone has an internal time table unless they're completely mismanaged. I mean, MM has released E3 demos in the past. How the fuck can you prepare an E3 demo if you don't have a dead line for it?

iu


I think it's more a case of their games being so unambitious and boring that they can actually set deadlines and meet them without working too hard.

So, I have a few points/questions:

A) Regarding deadlines, are you/we taking into account that most developers don't usually have a say (or at least not the final say) on deadlines? Passionate, creative people can still be run dry when working day and night is not a choice but a pressured obligation.

I'd wager that in the vast majority of games you could list, the developers (the actual people doing the work) did not have a say on when things needed to get done and therefore how much crunch they'd have to go through.

B) Related to deadlines, you keep hammering the point that people should live and die for their art. This makes me wonder, is it your belief that a good artistic product can only come from personal sacrifice? Do you think the long hours and crunch somehow extract people's best?

Do you believe that if the same exact people could take longer, if only to get a good night sleep (even if they work 7 days a week), that the product could not be the same in the end?

C) (A little less relevant one) So not every game needs to be this revolutionary thing. Just like any other entertainment form, there can be good products without being revolutions in themselves that can be produced without working people to the bone or into sickness. Is it your belief that these are not worthwhile if the people who created it didn't sacrifice for it?
 
If you are a developer, sorry if I offended you.

But if you are a developer (or interact with devs), you cannot convince me that you haven't seen "lazy dev culture" at least once in your career.

What I described is a widespread problem. I wasn't being disingenuous. Painting it as such isn't the conversational win-button you think it is.

Saying that I am trying to use the term "disingenuous" as a conversational win button is again, a weirdly passive aggressive way of being intellectually dishonest about my actual problem with your second post. But considering I have much greater issues with your arguments as a whole, I'm happy to let that slide.

Lazy dev culture, sure, it happens. But it is no more worthwhile to point the finger at developers than the CEO, CTO or systemic problems affecting the corporation as a whole. A lot of businesses fail to deliver for a lot of reasons. You think you figured it out that it's the developers, then you focused more on the MBA middle managers. Again I'm not saying bad devs and managers in toxic cultures don't exist, but pointing the finger at that as a blanket statement is giving leadership a free pass.

It's worse in the context of the rest of this thread, which is about the working conditions of developers and the crunch they probably shouldn't be forced to endure in order to keep their jobs. Where I think you're continuing to be wrong on this issue is trying to think any one single target is meaningful here, but if you have to oversimplify and blame someone, blaming the people who don't make the decisions in the organization is pretty backwards. Blaming the people on the bottom for mandatory overtime is just messed up on so many levels.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
Saying that I am trying to use the term "disingenuous" as a conversational win button is again, a weirdly passive aggressive way of being intellectually dishonest about my actual problem with your second post. But considering I have much greater issues with your arguments as a whole, I'm happy to let that slide.

Lazy dev culture, sure, it happens. But it is no more worthwhile to point the finger at developers than the CEO, CTO or systemic problems affecting the corporation as a whole. A lot of businesses fail to deliver for a lot of reasons. You think you figured it out that it's the developers, then you focused more on the MBA middle managers. Again I'm not saying bad devs and managers in toxic cultures don't exist, but pointing the finger at that as a blanket statement is giving leadership a free pass.

It's worse in the context of the rest of this thread, which is about the working conditions of developers and the crunch they probably shouldn't be forced to endure in order to keep their jobs. Where I think you're continuing to be wrong on this issue is trying to think any one single target is meaningful here, but if you have to oversimplify and blame someone, blaming the people who don't make the decisions in the organization is pretty backwards. Blaming the people on the bottom for mandatory overtime is just messed up on so many levels.
I literally said "Crunch happens in large part because videogame companies are among the worst-managed companies."

Rant at someone else.
 
I literally said "Crunch happens in large part because videogame companies are among the worst-managed companies."

Rant at someone else.
Take the line you just quoted, then look at the rest of that same post. You think that line changes the problems I raised with it? I called you out for shitting on devs, then you tried to disingenuously rewrite history. You called the word disingenuous a conversational win button, and when challenged further, you call it ranting. You definitely don't have to admit anything to me, but I'm not obliged to ignore bad faith arguments.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
Take the line you just quoted, then look at the rest of that same post. You think that line changes the problems I raised with it? I called you out for shitting on devs, then you tried to disingenuously rewrite history. You called the word disingenuous a conversational win button, and when challenged further, you call it ranting. You definitely don't have to admit anything to me, but I'm not obliged to ignore bad faith arguments.
Do you know what "disingenuous" means? You've used it four times already but apparently you don't: it means that I'm pretending to know less than I do to sarcastically make a point or to derail the argument. All of your responses to me are full of buzzwords. A bad faith argument? Where was my lie or my intentional deceit? Again, your feelings are getting in the way of you using words that actually apply to our situation.

Please stop badgering me if you don't have an argument. You obviously took offense but that doesn't mean I have to kowtow in response.

Most software developers are terrible at project management and self management, separate from whatever other talents they have as a developer. Most companies do a poor job of managing their developers. This leads to runaway nonsense like I described (meetings about meetings about meetings, rolling the desks together to brainstorm, putting all sorts of nice-sounding things on the kanban board). Better management would greatly reduce this behavior and keep things on track, reducing future crunch.

This was all stated in my first post, but then you started jumping to conclusions like

pointing the finger at that as a blanket statement is giving leadership a free pass.

I didn't do that. Sounds to me like you have a personal axe to grind against (I can only guess) bad leadership at the top of the company, or something? Cool. Upper management sucks too. Was all this posturing just because you thought I was claiming devs were wholly to blame?
 

iconmaster

Banned
I wonder if the people actually trying to cure cancer are just completely freaked out all the time.

“Well it’s not like we’re… wait, yes we are. AHHHHHH”
 

Redneckerz

Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
Extreme truths that only I see yet my posts have multiple likes.
It is concerning when your rebuttal revolves likes as some kind of metric of how much you are respected here.
Its not really a mature metric fam.
For every like you are getting for the one post that has some valid points there are at least 9 that make no sense, involve ludicrous claims and a pattern of not putting the walk with the talk. You seem completely oblivious as to why people would want a more meaningful discourse, pointing to likes and basically saying: ''See? I provide meaningful discourse, just look at these likes!''

With flagrant disregard that such posts are far more uncommon than you make them out to be.

Really strong argument there, dude. I couldn't care less about people's tone.
Well then you shouldn't be surprised that people call you out on your personal tone. Mirror's aren't expensive, you know.

I understand the angle of "doing what is right for the workers", but to D dirthead 's point I have also worked with software developers and they are among the most short-sighted, illogical people you are liable to meet. Coding something? Creating assets? Gotcha covered. But mushing it together into a viable (shippable) product? Goodness, it's like herding cats. I have immense respect for any developer who understands project mgmt and long-term planning because most do not.
The irony of his point is that he is a developer himself and what you are attributing in general falls perfectly valid upon himself aswell.

Now, i agree that management, especially in bigger studios is an absolute must. You cant have 75 to 200 people working perfectly in unison without roadblocks on the way - This is where a manager steps in. Like a Queue Manager on a renderjob, a manager should be distributing jobs equally and seamlessly. That means talking with your crew, and be one of them. Stories like Telltale exist because management is allowed to (and permits itself to) exist in a bubble, unbeknownst to what the crew is saying. If left on their own, yet enforcing ever more strenous demands upon them, you will get a chaotic situation. There is no queue manager, and the renderjobs start rendering parts of a scene (Read: The game) with incorrect flags, or even rendering parts they aren't equipped for.

Crunch time is a thing that will almost always happen as a product comes to a close and PR is starting to do its magic. Its when a game goes from complete to shippable and painters polish the resulting product. Proper crunch should result in a good gold master, like Horizon Zero Dawn. Bad crunch results in a half-assed product with weird gameplay choices or long ridden bugs. Like Telltale, or like Duke Nukem Forever. Yeah, even DNF was a crunch, i reckon.

The morale of this story: Management should be a central role in development, yet understanding enough of what problems the artists will face during development. And more over, make decisions that benefit the team instead of putting them in despair. A happy team is a good team.

I got lost in this thread with the “art is more important than the medical field” post.
The sad part is that i can even understand why he is saying that, but it is missing so godawful much context that on its own its just a complete dumbfounded take to make. Posts need nuance, else things like these come across as if you are out of your mind.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
The morale of this story: Management should be a central role in development, yet understanding enough of what problems the artists will face during development. And more over, make decisions that benefit the team instead of putting them in despair. A happy team is a good team.
Yes, it would be ideal if management had one foot in development and the other foot in team-management. But this is even rarer.

Alas, this is a common problem in nearly every corporate environment.
 
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