I won't even play games anymore because I find those conditions to be deeply disturbing on many levels. I can't in good conscience support these workers grinding themselves to the bone just so I can receive slightly more motor cortex stimulation than I would spending the night on HN.
The film industry figured out long ago that they need to treat their employees with respect by giving them predictable hours, fair compensation for overtime, and guarantees that they won't lose health/retirement benefits across projects and studio closures. I do believe the game industry will get there eventually, but it seems it will take a lot of kicking and screaming.
You can't support these workers grinding themselves to the bone? What are you talking about?
There's no slavery here. I've been there. Unlike the people making your shoes in Bangladesh, everyone making your games is there because they love it. These are talented individuals who could easily go work in other industries.
People in the industry want better conditions, and more power to them. But this is not slave labor and no one is stuck in the game industry.
What you're saying is tantamount to not buying a painter's painting because he worked too hard on it. Trust me... the people you think you care about want you to buy the games.
> everyone making your games is there because they love it
That's simply not true. I'm sure most of them entered the industry for the love of it, but that doesn't mean they love their current job or being expected to work long hours.
> These are talented individuals who could easily go work in other industries.
There's a lot of shovelware in the games industry and I doubt many people love working on it. Do you really think the people working at studios churning out hanah montana games love their jobs? At best their hoping to work on something better in future, at worst the probably can't move elsewhere.
It can be a lot harder to break out than you think, the type of skills a game developer would have aren't in high demand in a lot of places and they could be missing some important skills used in the the more general industry, like SQL. This is an industry that loves to type cast, even something like getting a c# job as a java developer can be tough.
And then you've got the non-developer jobs. Graphic artists, writers and music composers don't have nearly as many options available.
Based on first hand experience, no it's not that hard to get out of games industry, not for a sw dev anyway. It's true that (for example) intimate knowledge of real-time 3d rendering is a rather niche skill, but OTOH knowing how to write fast code has much wider applicability, and most game developers will tend to be much better at that then your average sw dev.
If anything, it's harder to get into the games industry than to get out because there is relatively more competition for gamedev jobs than for other sw dev jobs. So I would argue that if you can get in, you can get out, and when getting out you have the added advantage of being more experienced than when you got in.
Late to the party but wanted to point out that in other industries like application development you are probably more likely to accept slower code if it means more readable and maintainable code whereas in games you often (opinion) need to really crank out the performance at any cost.
But I mean.. You know those interview questions people complain about? The ones with the binary trees and inverting? There is a certain group of people I'm thinking of who would have no problem with those questions... Besides High Schoolers! 'Cause let's be honest here, graph and tree traversal is High School level comp sci...
The reason there is so much shovel-ware is because there are so many people interested in making games. So many individuals involved in shovel-ware are talented. Perhaps not the best artists, or game designers, but certainly have enough technical chops to do other work.
That's a capitalistic outlook though. I don't particularly subscribe to "choice" or "free will" in general though to be honest..
Maybe people are working themselves super-hard to make indie games, but it's self-directed and totally by individual choice. Tons of great indie games out there.
So are people working for regular employers making video games. There's just more people who want to make games than work on insurance calculation (etc) software. That's why wages are lower.
As the film industry has demonstrated it is perfectly okay for independent productions to be non-union. There is little need or use for organized negotiations in that situation.
I agree, but I'm not sure any potential union would.
E.g. want to hire a union programmer for your 3-person team? Whole studio has to now follow union rules and bring all other developers into the union as well. Forever.
The film industry figured out long ago that they need to treat their employees with respect by giving them predictable hours, fair compensation for overtime, and guarantees that they won't lose health/retirement benefits across projects and studio closures. I do believe the game industry will get there eventually, but it seems it will take a lot of kicking and screaming.