Having worked under EA, Capcom and THQ I can confirm that the whole industry is nuts.

If you like 40% less pay for 50%+ more hours be my guest but 5 years in the industry was enough for me(and considering the average career is ~3 years, for most people as well).

Fun problems and interesting products but not a sane career.

Having worked at both a small-time and significant studio, I too can confirm the whole industry is nuts, as the sibling comment says.

vvanders' comment is such a perfect illustration of the situation that you should read and re-read it and then force yourself to believe it. I didn't.

None of this will really change the minds of a determined 19 year old to become a gamedev, though. That's why gamedev is able to treat employees as if they worked at a startup while giving none of the benefits. If one leaves, there are ten young people who want to take their place, and are massively excited to do so. For a few years.

Yep, I've lost count of the people that I was unable to convince not to join the industry that came back a few years later(hell I was one of them).

Sometimes you can only learn a fire is hot by getting your hand burned in the flame.

I suspect Ubisoft has vastly different attitudes for different teams. You have the guys making the extremely fun, innovative, Rayman platformers, designing levels like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m5YQrucis8

Then down the hall you have the guys chugging out Assassin's Creed 57: Nothing At All New.

That said, I'm an outsider, I don't know, but I'm wagering those vastly different games have vastly different types of teams behind them.

CD Projekt was accused of abusive work conditions for Witcher 3, and stories about Rockstar's death marches surface after almost everything they release. I think good conditions at AAA studios are outliers. Game development is my dream job but I'm glad I didn't go down that path.

>CD Projekt was accused of abusive work conditions for Witcher 3

Yeah, I though about that when I played it: "Is CDP really this much bigger than Bethesda? Probably not..."

I'm still disappointed about having my suspicion confirmed.

But to add to the discussion: Funcom (of Norway) was often in trouble with the labor regulator for "mattress-in-office" working conditions, even though they had massive goodwill due to being the only big Norwegian studio at the time. I suspect the only reason I haven't heard something bad about Red Thread Games is because they're too small to be noticed.

Most of them are pretty bad. I had some roommates who were crunching for over 9 months on a title. They'd head to the studio around 8-9am and head home around 3-4am. Some days they slept at the office.

After the project, the company decided to take away a bunch of their leave days that were accumulated with the OT, because it was inconvenient for them. These are people who were there for 5-7 years.

I've freelanced all my life so I don't know how these things usually go, but it sounds pretty damn awful.

Sounds about right, when I left my last games gig I had to toss ~3mo of PTO because the company refused to pay it out(yay WA employment law) despite it being a specific benefit.

I never had a chance to use it since we were crunching so much that it just accrued until I left.