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Forums - Gaming Discussion - The human cost of Red Dead Redemption 2 (Eurogamer)

potato_hamster on 29 October 2018
Cerebralbore101 said:
Conina said:

No, they don't say that. They force them into unpaid overtime and say things like "It's Mario time!":

https://kotaku.com/at-nintendo-working-all-night-is-mario-time-1794042341

https://www.thegamer.com/miserabl-reasons-working-at-nintendo-is-the-worst/

They were doing an all nighter to get the development docs finished. In game design you have to document how your game is being made. You have to write down every little detail of your game down to the nth degree. Game design docs are often hundreds of pages long. The game design doc is what the rest of your team uses as instructions to make the game. It tells your programmers how and what to program. It tells your modelers what 3D assets you need.  Until you get the doc out of the way, nobody else can begin work. That's why most companies will hammer out the game design docs in a few days of furious typing. After that they go back to a normal workweek. 

And unlike western game companies, once you have a job at Nintendo it is for life. 

lol. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

Here's just one example.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/nintendo-of-korea-laid-off-almost-80-of-its-employees.1201552/



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DonFerrari on 29 October 2018
Cerebralbore101 said:
DonFerrari said:

You shouldn't enter a student loan to enter a career that doesn't pay-off.

And at the Geralt discussion, it's ridiculous. The writer is a milionaire complaining the studio won billions and didn't pay him enough. Geralt defends what people are saying, yet we have seem a lot of complains on work conditions against CD Projeckt.

@bolded Yeah, I agree. Not to mention that everything you are taught at a "game school" is learnable on your own via the internet, and/or books. Learn to make your own games, and get that hit Indie on steam! Orrrrrrrr go into massive debt for the chance to work 60 hours a week for a company that will lay you off once development finishes. 

Yep. But that is valid for any career. If the expected wage of that career is X, calculate how much you are going to put to learn it and see if it's sustainable.

About game developers I would say that you are possibly right that someone learning on their own either EDX, Youtube even moving for 3 years to a country where the classes is quite cheap or whatever them making their portfolios or indie games would be a more efficient way to enter the market.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

Kerotan on 29 October 2018

What a bunch of legends. They sound like seriously hard workers. The world would be a better place is everyone work like them. Makes me want to buy this game even more to support their herculean effort. Well done guys. Can't wait to see what you do next.



Cerebralbore101 on 29 October 2018
potato_hamster said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

They were doing an all nighter to get the development docs finished. In game design you have to document how your game is being made. You have to write down every little detail of your game down to the nth degree. Game design docs are often hundreds of pages long. The game design doc is what the rest of your team uses as instructions to make the game. It tells your programmers how and what to program. It tells your modelers what 3D assets you need.  Until you get the doc out of the way, nobody else can begin work. That's why most companies will hammer out the game design docs in a few days of furious typing. After that they go back to a normal workweek. 

And unlike western game companies, once you have a job at Nintendo it is for life. 

lol. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

Here's just one example.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/nintendo-of-korea-laid-off-almost-80-of-its-employees.1201552/

I was talking about a job in Japan. Japanese companies hire for life over there. It's part of their corporate culture. 



potato_hamster on 29 October 2018
Cerebralbore101 said:
potato_hamster said:

lol. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

Here's just one example.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/nintendo-of-korea-laid-off-almost-80-of-its-employees.1201552/

I was talking about a job in Japan. Japanese companies hire for life over there. It's part of their corporate culture. 

Yeah, that's not true either. Nintendo of Japan has also done its fair share of firing/laying off people over the years. And I can also give plenty of examples of other Japanese video game companies lay off people and/or high up employees jumping ship (Kojima says hello!)

Perhaps you should stop with the generalizations.



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0D0 on 29 October 2018
KLAMarine said:
0D0 said:
People always say tech sector is full of jobs and super fun.

They have no idea.

I almost got a job in tech sector. What am I missing?

It's just a job you're missing.

I mean, people think that the sector job is like this:

 

 

Happy employees, having fun all the time, free coffee, free cokes, everybody's always happy, beautiful offices, video game time on Fridays.

Truth is, nah, it's just a job with tight deadlines, weirdly obsessed bosses, 12h of work p/day and the list goes on. Tech sector jobs are tough, software engineers and designers work on repetitive and tiresome tasks all the time.

Of course, I'm not saying that it's always like this, I'm just saying that tech is not as fun as most think. It's just a job and it usually comes with long hours and nutty deadlines.

People get out from college dreaming about working on Sylicon valley, google, face, twitter, some game dev company, whatever.. well, it's not the dream job people think. Lots of well payed engineers quit from those companies to get back to reasonable life balance again.



God bless You.

My Total Sales prediction for PS4 by the end of 2021: 110m+

When PS4 will hit 100m consoles sold: Before Christmas 2019

There were three ravens sat on a tree / They were as blacke as they might be / The one of them said to his mate, Where shall we our breakfast take?


GoOnKid on 29 October 2018
Kerotan said:
What a bunch of legends. They sound like seriously hard workers. The world would be a better place is everyone work like them. Makes me want to buy this game even more to support their herculean effort. Well done guys. Can't wait to see what you do next.

The world would be worse since everyone would have a mental breakdown sooner or later.

What do you do for a living?



GoOnKid on 29 October 2018
fatslob-:O said:
GoOnKid said:

I don't believe that. This is no golden rule. Companies should change their methods and management in order to become more efficient. Shrugging your shoulders and putting it off as something that nobody can ever change is too easy of an excuse. Everything can become better if the people involved really want to.

In the article there are some things that the Rockstar employees themselves suggested as improvements, I remember better communication is one of those things. There are solutions to everything, you just have to work on them.

@Bold Easy for you to say and the main bottleneck is not studio communication, it's very clearly man power since game production is asset generation intensive ... 

1) When the Rockstar employees are off hours and we're the ones on working hour offering goods or services is it OK that we screw them out of value for the money they are getting for when we suggested them to cut corners for their labour like we would for our own ? Is it somehow productive that all parties are providing less value for the money ? 

2) People need to realize that productivity/value is a function of labour and it becomes dysfunctional when no value is offered ... 

3) Human sacrifice is necessary and money is the contract between the producer and the consumer.

 4) The idea of pro-consumerism is not compatible with employee welfare since the former is about getting most value out of the latter rather than vice versa and this is something every social democrat needs to ponder about instead of showing duplicity about it ... 

1) I probably could have worded it better. Rockstar should change the way they work, not simply work less. There are more ways to maintain a high level of productivity without simply throwing in more work hours.

2) This only works only in Economy 101 where we try to emulate the real world through models, but the real world is much too complex, so models (as well as graphs, functions and mathematical formulae used within these models) need to make sacrifices of accuracy. If someone tried to emulate the real world with its entire complexity, the result would be the real world again. So, a function of labour can only measure something within its range, or scope. Your labor function ignores every social aspect of labor (how much do you like what you do?), but also every physical, like workers getting tired and exhausted.  So no, productivity is not simply measured by working hours. Labor efficiency plays a major role in the real world.

3) This mindset belongs to the century before the last one. We have long since moved on.

4) It's neither a trade-off nor a zero-sum game. We can have both, we just need to work on it. Of course it takes time and it's hard - but it's worth the effort.



Cerebralbore101 on 29 October 2018
potato_hamster said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

I was talking about a job in Japan. Japanese companies hire for life over there. It's part of their corporate culture. 

Yeah, that's not true either. Nintendo of Japan has also done its fair share of firing/laying off people over the years. And I can also give plenty of examples of other Japanese video game companies lay off people and/or high up employees jumping ship (Kojima says hello!)

Perhaps you should stop with the generalizations.

Yeah you've just got one real example there with Kojima. And that was him jumping ship, not him getting laid off. If you could provide multiple examples of Nintendo of Japan laying off their corporate Japanese workers, I'd be inclined to agree with you. And keep in mind we are talking about employees of Nintendo, not of another company. So don't go pointing to some contractors that Nintendo hired for TGS or something like that. 



KLAMarine on 29 October 2018
0D0 said:
KLAMarine said:

I almost got a job in tech sector. What am I missing?

It's just a job you're missing.

I mean, people think that the sector job is like this:

 

 

Happy employees, having fun all the time, free coffee, free cokes, everybody's always happy, beautiful offices, video game time on Fridays.

Truth is, nah, it's just a job with tight deadlines, weirdly obsessed bosses, 12h of work p/day and the list goes on. Tech sector jobs are tough, software engineers and designers work on repetitive and tiresome tasks all the time.

Of course, I'm not saying that it's always like this, I'm just saying that tech is not as fun as most think. It's just a job and it usually comes with long hours and nutty deadlines.

People get out from college dreaming about working on Sylicon valley, google, face, twitter, some game dev company, whatever.. well, it's not the dream job people think. Lots of well payed engineers quit from those companies to get back to reasonable life balance again.

I may have dodged a bullet then.