"Sick of all the hatred from gamers" open letter from Anonymous game dev. via Kotaku

[DragoFireheart]

I come to work and put in 80 hours some weeks not because I have to, but because I love what I do.

I love masturbating but you don't see me do it 80 hours a week.

But you know you would if you could.

 

[Sranchammer]

I come to work and put in 80 hours some weeks not because I have to, but because I love what I do.

I love masturbating but you don't see me do it 80 hours a week.

But you know you would if you could.

Nope. No, I wouldn't. That's is plain ol' denial.

 

[AlexOfSpades]

There's nothing wrong with working for 80 hours if you love your job. There is a lot wrong with loving your job though, if you are developing a shit game like Thiaf. I'd cry for 80 hours a week if i was hired for that sad carcass of a game

 

[Gregz]

If artists are true to their hearts, they produce great stuff and are deaf to criticism.

This guy wants to be something he isn't.

 

[Luzur]

well, i dont know what he expects, if he makes a shitty game, then get people to pay for it, and then they come back and give him a fist in the face for selling them a shitty game, isnt he deserving it then?

oh well, lucky i stopped buying AAA games years ago.

 

[Oesophagus]

thousands will flock to the Internet and scream about how much it sucks—how it's broken, how it's buggy

Obsidian employee?

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

There's nothing wrong with working for 80 hours if you love your job. There is a lot wrong with loving your job though, if you are developing a shit game like Thiaf. I'd cry for 80 hours a week if i was hired for that sad carcass of a game

Actually, there's something bad about it - it encourages sub-optimal performance and may lead to a burnout.

I suspect that games that he works on wouldn't be so buggy and broken if they'd have any sense of mental hygiene.

 

[Machocruz]

“This is what happens when you have the artistic temperament but you are not an artist.” -Mad Men

 

[abija]

Actually, there's something bad about it - it encourages sub-optimal performance and may lead to a burnout.

I suspect that games that he works on wouldn't be so buggy and broken if they'd have any sense of mental hygiene.

Bullshit, amphetamine powered workaholics like Carmack built solid games from scratch while these whinny bitches can't even do minor scripting properly.

 

[veryalien]

Zero sympathy from me. He's complaining that the masses post insults about games he works on. That's really not so bad because you can choose to focus on the positive side of things.

-I- on the other hand need to be in a weekly meeting and face customers who can bitch at me and get personal if they want to. That's much harder to cope with because it's in front of me.

But drama queens be drama queens.

 

[:Flash:]

Hey guys:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...s-simcity-offline-took-six-months-to-complete

The team at EA Maxis worked for more than six months to get SimCity working offline.

Simon Fox, the game's lead single-player engineer,published a blog post yesterday to illustrate the complex process required to implement the offline mode - a feature that many felt should have been in the game from the beginning, and one that Maxis initially claimed contradicted its vision.

"Lucy [Bradshaw, senior vice president of Maxis] once said that Offline wouldn't be possible, 'without a significant amount of engineering work', and she's right," Fox noted. "By the time we're finished we will have spent over 6-and-a-half months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly."

For some, the arrival of an offline mode in SimCity will have felt like too little, too late, but Fox's post will go some way toward dispelling the notion that its delayed implementation was through a lack of will on the part of Maxis. Indeed, Fox claims he "rallied the team" to prepare for the feature, "as soon as practical after launch."

Fox added: "So yes, while someone was able to remove the "time check" shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities.

"I wish it were as simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with a dummy client rather than our server, but it's more than that. Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly."

Fox describes a litany of challenges and problems that his team faced, including but not limited to rewriting the entire system in C++, writing new code to provide crucial data the game would otherwise check the online servers to find, and extensively optimising all aspects of the game to run locally with no degradation from its live performance.

"So where are we at right now? We've been working on this since August and now, we've hit Alpha and are in the final stages of testing before we release it as part of Update 10 in the future. On behalf of the engineering team, thank you for your patience on this one. We know you want Offline play in SimCity and we are really happy that we are finally getting ready to deliver it to you."

I think I know who might have made that letter...

Wow, guy writes a blogpost that basically says "we are so bad at software engineering that we have created a product that is so badly written that even minor reengineerings will take half a year. Please applaud us." Assuming this is legit because "We had to redo everything in C++ because we don't use the Internetz any more and Java is only if u use the Internetz, lol" sounds more like a marketing intern being forced to write a blogpost.
I know I've coded shit in the past, but I don't go around on the Internet bragging about it.

 

[:Flash:]

There's nothing wrong with working for 80 hours if you love your job. There is a lot wrong with loving your job though, if you are developing a shit game like Thiaf. I'd cry for 80 hours a week if i was hired for that sad carcass of a game

Actually, there's something bad about it - it encourages sub-optimal performance and may lead to a burnout.

I suspect that games that he works on wouldn't be so buggy and broken if they'd have any sense of mental hygiene.

It's not just a suspicion. There has been serious research about this. Teams working on software for more than 40h/week for extended periods of time invariably produce worse software than those with sane work hours. Jury is still out whether that's because the team is overworked or because their management sucks. Probably both.

 

[Average Manatee]

If he actually loves his job and loves working 80 hours a week, why would he care about some faggot on the internet hating him? There's only 168 hours in a week, you spend 56 of those sleeping, and I'm sure he can have a nice meal and chat with his family for the other 32. So what excuse does this man have to not be 100% happy about his life?

The answer is that he doesn't love his job. He loves being surrounded by his sycophantic audience and praised as a god because he makes games for a living. He should realize this and find a job that he actually does enjoy, or at the very least wastes less of his time.

Wow, guy writes a blogpost that basically says "we are so bad at software engineering that we have created a product that is so badly written that even minor reengineerings will take half a year. Please applaud us." Assuming this is legit because "We had to redo everything in C++ because we don't use the Internetz any more and Java is only if u use the Internetz, lol" sounds more like a marketing intern being forced to write a blogpost.
I know I've coded shit in the past, but I don't go around on the Internet bragging about it.

Really, the excuses they give sound like the kind of shit you tell your non-technical boss so you only have to pretend to work for the rest of the day. Except here the wise-guys managed to drag it out for about 5.5 months.

 

[Average Manatee]

There's nothing wrong with working for 80 hours if you love your job. There is a lot wrong with loving your job though, if you are developing a shit game like Thiaf. I'd cry for 80 hours a week if i was hired for that sad carcass of a game

Actually, there's something bad about it - it encourages sub-optimal performance and may lead to a burnout.

I suspect that games that he works on wouldn't be so buggy and broken if they'd have any sense of mental hygiene.

It's not just a suspicion. There has been serious research about this. Teams working on software for more than 40h/week for extended periods of time invariably produce worse software than those with sane work hours. Jury is still out whether that's because the team is overworked or because their management sucks. Probably both.

From what I've read performance in all or almost all intellectual tasks starts to drop off past around 30-35 hours a week. Which isn't a huge problem for plenty of professions, but for something like programming where a bug takes 50x more manhours to fix than it does to create anything remotely close to 80h is literally shooting yourself in the foot.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

It's not just a suspicion. There has been serious research about this. Teams working on software for more than 40h/week for extended periods of time invariably produce worse software than those with sane work hours. Jury is still out whether that's because the team is overworked or because their management sucks. Probably both.

Team being overworked requires management sucking.

If he actually loves his job and loves working 80 hours a week, why would he care about some faggot on the internet hating him? There's only 168 hours in a week, you spend 56 of those sleeping, and I'm sure he can have a nice meal and chat with his family for the other 32. So what excuse does this man have to not be 100% happy about his life?

For the same reason why Africans dying from AIDS in shit-mud huts are happier than western Europeans. The kind of a mind that creates civilization and advanced technology is built for obsessive thinking about problems and solving them, not for happiness. It's probably brain interpreting aggressive types as problems that need to be solved and obsessively thinking about them.

From what I've read performance in all or almost all intellectual tasks starts to drop off past around 30-35 hours a week. Which isn't a huge problem for plenty of professions, but for something like programming where a bug takes 50x more manhours to fix than it does to create anything remotely close to 80h is literally shooting yourself in the foot.

Yeah, that's the problem with an obsession getting out of control. Not knowing when to stop.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

I come to work and put in 80 hours some weeks not because I have to, but because I love what I do.

In my current job (allied to software industry) our team worked at most 3 weeks for 70+ hours during deadline crunch time in the past two years. Most of time its standard 40 hour work week.

And my team got fucking award from the ceo for this shit.

Either he is lying through his ass or publisher hired themselves nice little bitch.

 

[abija]

How is he lying, "80 hours some weeks" can me 2-3 weeks over 5 years period...

 

[sea]

I come to work and put in 80 hours some weeks not because I have to, but because I love what I do.

In my current job (allied to software industry) our team worked at most 3 weeks for 70+ hours during deadline crunch time in the past two years. Most of time its standard 40 hour work week.

And my team got fucking award from the ceo for this shit.

Either he is lying through his ass or publisher hired themselves nice little bitch.

Software industry is far more professional and better managed than most game studios. Studies from the early 1900s were done by industrial enterpreneurs like Henry Ford and found that the drop-off point for work efficiency with employees is about 40 hours a week on average and literally almost every industry has followed that for the last century or so. We have solid data suggesting that crunch for any more than 2 weeks and without significant time in between crunches sees work efficiency (especially non-physical tasks) drop off dramatically. Not only does extended crunch lead to loss of efficiency to where the extra hours are totally meaningless (because the employees are exhausted), it also leads to them making more mistakes they would not have made otherwise, which further introduces delays and roadblocks.

Working insane hours is usually something bad management does because said manager wants to make him/herself look good by "showing how hard they're working", or a result of a project not being given enough time in the first place by, again, often over-zealous management or project directors who are more concerned about impressing their bosses than getting the job done or the well-being of the employees involved. In most other industries it's a clear sign a manager is a moron and should get the boot, but I guess there's always people out there who want to exploit workers as much as possible regardless of all that.

I think the games industry's relatively recent roots and "amateurish" origins probably are why you see so many sociopath asshole managers; without the same employment standards as other fields, and with the ability to justify work as "fun" and "passion projects" it created an opportunity for exploitation. At smaller studios run by developers first and foremost with real experience in the industry, work hours tend to be much more normal.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

I come to work and put in 80 hours some weeks not because I have to, but because I love what I do.

In my current job (allied to software industry) our team worked at most 3 weeks for 70+ hours during deadline crunch time in the past two years. Most of time its standard 40 hour work week.

And my team got fucking award from the ceo for this shit.

Either he is lying through his ass or publisher hired themselves nice little bitch.

Software industry is far more professional and better managed than most game studios. Studies from the early 1900s were done by industrial enterpreneurs like Henry Ford and found that the drop-off point for work efficiency with employees is about 40 hours a week on average and literally almost every industry has followed that for the last century or so. We have solid data suggesting that crunch for any more than 2 weeks and without significant time in between crunches sees work efficiency (especially non-physical tasks) drop off dramatically. Not only does extended crunch lead to loss of efficiency to where the extra hours are totally meaningless (because the employees are exhausted), it also leads to them making more mistakes they would not have made otherwise, which further introduces delays and roadblocks.

Working insane hours is usually something bad management does because said manager wants to make him/herself look good by "showing how hard they're working", or a result of a project not being given enough time in the first place by, again, often over-zealous management or project directors who are more concerned about impressing their bosses than getting the job done or the well-being of the employees involved. In most other industries it's a clear sign a manager is a moron and should get the boot, but I guess there's always people out there who want to exploit workers as much as possible regardless of all that.

I think the games industry's relatively recent roots and "amateurish" origins probably are why you see so many sociopath asshole managers; without the same employment standards as other fields, and with the ability to justify work as "fun" and "passion projects" it created an opportunity for exploitation. At smaller studios run by developers first and foremost with real experience in the industry, work hours tend to be much more normal.

People warned me software industry is buttrape stay away from it. most of the time is quite chill, 2-3 week crunches do come up occasionally but they rarely exceed 60 hours. Looks like similar tards in EA are there at all managerial levels.

The AAA developer can go suck publisher cock for 80+ hours/week then.

 

[dextermorgan]

And as I come to a close on another one of the AAA titles I have worked on....

....Game developers make art.

You fucking deserve it.

 

[Volrath]

Actually, there's something bad about it - it encourages sub-optimal performance and may lead to a burnout.

I suspect that games that he works on wouldn't be so buggy and broken if they'd have any sense of mental hygiene.

Bullshit, amphetamine powered workaholics like Carmack built solid games from scratch while these whinny bitches can't even do minor scripting properly.

Yeah. Like Rage.

 

[potatojohn]

Pretty sure Kotaku made this up, you retards.

 

[Ninjerk]

Pretty sure someone said that, you fuck.

 

[Kane]

I come to work and put in 80 hours some weeks not because I have to, but because I love what I do.

In my current job (allied to software industry) our team worked at most 3 weeks for 70+ hours during deadline crunch time in the past two years. Most of time its standard 40 hour work week.

And my team got fucking award from the ceo for this shit.

Either he is lying through his ass or publisher hired themselves nice little bitch.

I enjoy what I am doing, and I couldn't do it for 80 hours/week. As sea already explained, after about 9 hours I *need* my brain to do something else.

 

[taxalot]

Are we actually trying to decide whether working 80 hours or not is actually a good thing ? Have the chinese got to you already ?