Gamedev along with Startups has always been a highly abusive work environment of longs hours and death marches were they just hire and use until they’re burned by the job whilst paying them less than similar jobs outside the industry, an endless parade of bright eyed young people.
They’re part of what I call “Prestige Industries” - alongside things like Modelling and Theatre, they are industries which attract tons of young people who, knowing only the externally visible side of that Industry, think that it must be incredible to work doing those things. With such an unending supply of eager and naive young people, such industries invariably end up (at least within the largest companies) being places with a very young workforce, highly exploitative (sometimes in more ways than just low salaries and long hours) which burn out their workforce or throw them out when they get older and wise enough to want better pay and work conditions.
This they’re now doing looks to me like just doing more openly and on a schedule that’s more convenient to them something they already did individually and on an ad-hoc basis (often on timings that were more convenient to workers, for example when people chose to quit after realizing they were being paid shit to work stupid hours).
The general problem of “Prestige Industries” has always been that they basically throw away most of the expertise they’re building training people on the job for a couple of years, having basically an ocean of juniors, pretty much no mid-level types and then at best a handful of top experts. This IMHO is why both gamedev and Startups produce much buggier software than the rest of IT.
Probably part of it, but games are also more difficult to test automatically (which also means fast, often and predictable).
“Given these entities, make sure the price is correctly calculated as XY” is way easier than “make sure this game object doesn’t clip into the ground”, especially with the indeterministic physics systems that are often used.
Gamedev along with Startups has always been a highly abusive work environment of longs hours and death marches were they just hire and use until they’re burned by the job whilst paying them less than similar jobs outside the industry, an endless parade of bright eyed young people.
They’re part of what I call “Prestige Industries” - alongside things like Modelling and Theatre, they are industries which attract tons of young people who, knowing only the externally visible side of that Industry, think that it must be incredible to work doing those things. With such an unending supply of eager and naive young people, such industries invariably end up (at least within the largest companies) being places with a very young workforce, highly exploitative (sometimes in more ways than just low salaries and long hours) which burn out their workforce or throw them out when they get older and wise enough to want better pay and work conditions.
This they’re now doing looks to me like just doing more openly and on a schedule that’s more convenient to them something they already did individually and on an ad-hoc basis (often on timings that were more convenient to workers, for example when people chose to quit after realizing they were being paid shit to work stupid hours).
The general problem of “Prestige Industries” has always been that they basically throw away most of the expertise they’re building training people on the job for a couple of years, having basically an ocean of juniors, pretty much no mid-level types and then at best a handful of top experts. This IMHO is why both gamedev and Startups produce much buggier software than the rest of IT.
Probably part of it, but games are also more difficult to test automatically (which also means fast, often and predictable).
“Given these entities, make sure the price is correctly calculated as XY” is way easier than “make sure this game object doesn’t clip into the ground”, especially with the indeterministic physics systems that are often used.