It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4. Hidetaka Miyazaki was the mind behind Souls / Elden Ring. Shigeru Miyamoto was the mind behind Mario. And it's because these people really care about the product they are making. They have PASSION.
When it comes to a game like 76, which was clearly mandated by some greedy executives who don't play games, the lack of passion permeates the whole game. From what the article describes it seems like nobody wanted to work on this thing - not the QA, not the devs, not the managers. The end result is no surprise. Nobody cared.
If I was a games exec, I would do everything to empower the great minds that produce great games to pursue the projects they are passionate about. Unfortunately there are a lot of very successful companies out there that do the exact opposite of that, but the tide seems to be turning.
EDIT: I want to clarify that part and parcel with being a talented passionate game director is the ability to build a great team and keep the team motivated. Obviously passion isn't the only ingredient to make a great game. As with any other massive undertaking, teams of humans are what get the job done. I simply observe that these singular figures have the two-part gift of understanding what makes a great game, and also being able to attract others who can help execute that vision.
> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people.
I can assure you from working inside said industry that this is not often the case, if ever.
Edit to add: great results are driven by great teams.
I agree. Producers and designers that frontline a successful project get the visibility but they have to be backed by highly effective teams of equally gifted folks that collaborate effectively. I don’t think this is different for any complex human endeavor. Often times the front liner isn’t the one who built the team - there’s often an anchor person more in the middle of the project that attracts talent and creates the atmosphere of collegial collaboration. Smart front liners bring those folks along to the next projects. From the article it sounds like that was Starfield, not 76, which is probably why it was so miserable.
As soon as a project is known internally as the one the B team was assigned to because all the “favorite” people went to the “better” project, it’s basically doomed. This has happened so many times, the game industry has enough people who should know better, and yet…
That's a totally fair point, and I completely agree. I should have clarified this in my original post. If you're passionate about games, but nobody wants to work with you, then that passion won't permeate throughout the development team. All these gaming visionaries tend to have the gift of extreme charisma and strong passion for games - you need both IMO to make a great result. You may have a great idea, but you need to get people fired up about it too and articulate it in a way that can be understood.
Even still this isn’t correct, even building a great team isn’t the work of one person and plenty of great games are built by teams lead by people who don’t get press as visionaries. You’re falling for marketing, both personal (where extreme charisma does help) and company lead where wheeling out a famous name sells units. Which isn’t to say famous people are all rubbish but that the hype and the reality are very different to one another.
This sounds just like the great man theory in history [1].
I think we should be wary when a lot is attributed to a single person whatever the context may be: there are always people "behind the stage" as it were, without whom the show doesn't start.
> Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4.
If your example of a great game is Fallout 4, then you've already lost the argument.
It pales in comparison to Fallout NV, Fallout 2 and even 3 in many regards. It's an extremely dumbed-down RPG experience, plagued by a lot of the same issues that are present in 76, including lack of passion and generic, tropey NPCs and environments.
I think it would be more fair to say that most studios and game designers have their masterpieces, and then most of their other work is mediocre, simply because it trends towards the mean.
Some great studios and designers can replicate their initial success once or twice more, but those are extremely rare.
Haha, that's fair. I certainly didn't like it the first time I played it. However, I recently tried again on survival mode after a friend's recommendation, and it feels totally different. No fast travel and saving only at beds changes the game completely. Suddenly vertibirds are useful, settlements are mandatory, and the world feels absolutely gigantic rather than a sandbox separated by loading screens. Highly recommend checking it out (although it still won't scratch your RPG itch).
I loved Fallout 4, I'm sorry. Every second. I think a lot of people see the older games through nostalgia lenses when their lives were better/minds were younger/they were first experiencing an engrossing RPG. I played NV after 4 and NV was good too. Fallout 3 I keep giving up on and I'm not a quitter. It just doesn't draw me in like the other ones. It seems crude and simple comparatively, due to its age I guess.
It's not just nostalgia, go play Fallout 2, GoG has a copy that should work. It holds up extremely well, because it's just a much better game than the Bethesda versions. The writing, the humor, the world building, it feels a lot more alive and real than the much more technically advanced iterations. Fallout 1 is less polished, but also great. Fallout 3+ always felt like a reskinned Elder Scrolls to me.
I did exactly that. Multiple times, including before Fallout 3 came out, after, and also pretty recently. IMHO, Fallout 2 sucks in comparison with anything F3+. Worldbuilding might be there, but the gameplay simply isn't.
There's nothing wrong with being "a reskinned Elder Scrolls". Elder Scrolls is a great game (series). It is up there in the hall of masterpieces along with GTA and CS.
I think most of F and ES games are pretty boring, and the chart is about as compelling as cable ratings the Big Bang theory is a great show. It has mass appeal. It’s a very successful game. But they seem dull to me. The newer ones at least.
> I think a lot of people see the older games through nostalgia lenses when their lives were better/minds were younger/they were first experiencing an engrossing RPG.
Yes, they do. But it is absolutely not the case here, sorry. F4 is just a worse game.
It's not the worst game in the series or the genre, but it is utterly mediocre and not at all an example of a resounding success in Bethesda's history as a game company. Metacritic's 5.6/10 User score agrees with me.
Doesn't mean you have to stop liking the game. There are plenty of bad games we all play as guilty pleasures.
Also, just FYI, I think Fallout 1, the first game in the series is a pretty awful game. It's extremely short, the side quests are all boring fetch/kill quests, the open world is mostly dead. F2 was a huge improvement upon it.
I thought Fallout 1 was incredible. I remember getting the trailer literally on VHS tape and being so hyped for it, and it totally lived up to it. It was unlike anything else at the time.
Fallout 2 felt kind of watered down by comparison. The whole idea to move the series back by 80 or so years was terrible. The enclave was a terrible idea. The first Fallout made sense 80 years after the war. Everything looks basically the same. People still live in bombed out buildings. Nothing makes sense. The second and later Fallouts were all set way too late.
I was a fan of all of them but 4 just felt really dumbed down as far as the story and rpg elements.. I grew up on 1-3 and didn't play NV until last year when I was 36, and I really loved it. It seems to really focus on the crafting and base building and for me that part was not so fun, even though I like the idea
I first played Morrowind two or three years ago, a few years after I first played Fallout 4. No nostalgia glasses for me, I had negative interest in games like Morrowind when Morrowind was new.
But playing Morrowind made me realize just how crap Fallout 4 is as an RPG. Fallout 4 has almost no choices to make and all the characters worship you as a messiah five minutes after meeting you. Morrowind is very rough around the edges, the roll-based combat system was a very hard swallow. But despite the rough/exploitable mechanics and the bad graphics, Morrowind still manages to be a much more immersive world because the people in it actually make sense. They have their own agendas and biases and they don't care about you until you give them a reason to care. In Morrowind you join a faction and are given orders by some regional flunky, or worse, that regional flunky tells you to buzz off and do shitty odd jobs for another apprentice in the faction. In Fallout 4 you approach a faction and immediately meet the faction leader who tells you that you're Howard's own gift to humanity.
I think FO76 is better than 4- nearly all of the RPG systems (dialogue, perks, crafting) have been improved, the world design is much more interesting, and the map has a ton of hidden corners to poke around in.
The main story was weak, and the side content varies, but the game is sprawling and full of ‘hidden’ gems. In what other game could you eavesdrop on raiders discussing Henry David Thoreau in their lair at a former gift shop at Walden Pond? A gift shop at Walden Pond is itself ironically and darkly humorous.
Hero worship is bad in games development because it can lead to just as tortuous experiences for those working under a supposed visionary who takes the praise and becomes a megalomaniac.
> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4
There are also many great results that are a team effort.
And according to this article Todd Howard was also part of the problem. For example:
"[A]lmost none of the Bethesda designers wanted the game to launch without NPCs. The design teams at both Rockville and Austin wanted NPCs to fill out the world of Fallout 76, but they say executive producer Todd Howard was not willing to budge all the way up ‘til launch."
Yeah, its my bad for not articulating this in the post. Obviously, any giant product like a modern movie or game is made by teams. I think one hallmark of a great director is the ability to build a great team around you, which is just as important as being passionate and understanding the medium.
I’ve never once experienced the “face” of a game doing all the hiring, or even being involved in too many interviews (except for marketing purposes, of course, but I mean hiring interviews). It’s quite a full time and important job to do the PR.
the vision of fallout 76 was the issue. They took out all the interaction with characters and left in the junk collecting and base building, which for many players were the least interesting parts of fallout 4. The vision sabotaged the product.
Maybe Todd was trying to just ship the dang thing to satisfy Zenimax. Build the games-as-service sandbox, let it fail, parent company head honchos leave you alone and your teams get to go back to working on the kind of games they actually want to build.
I worked in the video game industry for a long time. This is a story you’re being sold - it’s the teams who build great games, not some singular great passionate mind. It’s a way for marketing teams to build a brand, not much more than that.
I don't think it comes down to a singular person, but I'm pretty sure it is about passion. Modern large game studios have removed all the passion and turned game development into an assembly line of 100s or more people working on it. Creating a very large game and also having it be good seems more like an exception at this point.
Games with small teams probably have a much easier time creating a game they are passionate about even if the scope of the game has to be smaller.
I find the presence of the "auteur" is valuable because it's a signal to people.
When there's a single leader who's highly motivated to do critically acclaimed work, it signals to talent that this is a project aimed at critically acclaimed work.
Now, said auteur also makes great margin calls and leadership decisions.
But keep in mind it's not just "great man syndrome."
Games and films are both an exercise in project management.
Films are an exercise in getting everything you need in your 70 or so days of filming. The days you've rented the exorbitantly expensive cameras, trailers, lights, etc.
Games are similar, except over a few years.
Only the auteur leadership model is able to make those project management tradeoffs quickly, under a lot of stress, and well, to deliver high quality output.
More like it is a good signal because someone was willing to risk or build his reputation by putting his name on it.
The Civ games have been around for a while, then it became "Sid Meier's Civilization". Not because he went back in time and did more work on Civ, but because he built his rep and wanted to use it to sell a couple of more copies.
It's not about passion at all. Plenty of passionate work themselves to the breaking point and end up with crappy games or failing to release at all.
It's that making ambitious games is hard, and if your organization doesn't have good engineering practices, good project management, a clear achievable vision, a realistic timeline, and capable team members, you will have difficulty succeeding.
And even with less ambitious games, studios fail all the time for the same reasons. It's not just the AAA games.
Clearly a smaller team with a smaller scope has an easier time because as you increase headcount, communication overhead increases exponentially, and bigger teams are usually trying more technically difficult things than a smaller team would try to tackle.
Fallout 76 was deeply flawed as a concept. The concept of "remove the characters and story from the game and let them collect it with junk to basebuild" made the whole game deeply unenjoyable compared to a regular fallout game.
Fallout 76 had problems with development and testing as well, but the problems with it began at its core concept - which they've since said 'oops' and put back into the game.
The initial question of fallout 76 seems to be "how can we turn fallout 4 into a game with constant income" and every mistake started there.
>It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4.
Pretty sure this attitude is what led to Daikatana. Cults of personality are universally bad.
Firstly as other people have pointed out, teams build great products, not some individual with a messianic vision. That's just marketing.
Secondly, Todd Howard is the greedy executive who pushed out Fallout 76 and keeps rereleasing skyrim year after year after year. He has passion yes, but it's for raking in the benjamins. Making great games is strictly secondary.
Thirdly FO76 was such a total fiasco that people seem to have forgotten that Fallout 4 was insanely buggy at launch and even when they got through that was mediocre at best. In Fallout New Vegas there are interesting puzzles to solve and different ways to progress through the quest. In Fallout 4 you go places and then shoot people. Occasionally you get presented with 4 dialog options which are "yes", "yes", "no, but actually yes", and "close this dialog for now and be forced to come back later and be presented by the same choices".
> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people.
Nah. What actually happens is you have one [or more] driven people and a team of others helping guide them and restrain their excesses. After a few commercial successes, the rest of the team gets forgotten or left behind eventually and the single celebrity creator, now unrestrained (and ego inflated by fans), starts producing crap.
>Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4
He was one of the mindS behind TES, and probably the dumbest of the bunch. Since companies exist for profit, and the most profit exists in the lowest common denominator, he was eventually the only one left, which is how you get modern Bethesda.
I had some hope that Microsoft's purchase would somehow change things (not that Microsoft is necessarily more benevolent, but maybe could realign the team's priorities and politics), but the (pure) speculation suggests "no":
> Bethesda officially became a part of Xbox Game Studios on March 9, 2021, which placed Fallout 76 under Microsoft’s stewardship. When asked whether or not the acquisition had improved the internal work culture within Bethesda, several sources offered lukewarm responses.
> One source suggested that Microsoft’s emphasis on a “hands-off” culture toward its studios meant that the new owners trusted Bethesda to take care of its own problems. Sources at Undead Labs also mentioned that Microsoft had a “hands-off” policy, which they claimed had “allowed dysfunction to fester” at their studio.
No quality of game could justify the senseless anti-human mentality and processes described. But the fact that Fallout 76 was just such an abysmal and hated release just increases my contempt for Bethesda. Not seeing the moral value in treating their employees ethically is bad enough; not even having the cold business sense to see how it obviously affects their bottom line is just pathetic:
> Some sources noted that the project drove an exodus of senior developers who had worked on some of Bethesda’s most prolific titles. Many developers developed physical health issues, such as tinnitus and back pain. One source said it “wasn’t uncommon” for artists to have wrist braces. Senior staff who’d remained loyal to the company for 20 years finally found their reason to quit. Some had been around since Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Fallout 76 was their final breaking point.
This is sick. What does anyone learn doing by working like this? Is anyone gaining experience from this? It just feels like people are ground down so they can't physically work anymore.
The people running the show see no benefit from their team members "learning" or "gaining experience". If they ship the game and are so ground down they're burned out and ineffective, that's a problem for the next guy; the manager who got the game shipped by burning out the team got a huge bonus and has leveraged it into a shiny position somewhere else by the time any of the consequences rear their heads. IME this type of short-term thinking inevitably infects most companies, unless there is a very strong culture to combat it.
Microsoft didn't even reign in 343 Industries when they were fucking up their flagship Halo franchise. I don't think anyone at the mothership wants to actively manage their acquisitions. Let's see if they do something about Blizzard...
isn't this literally supposed to be why screenwriters, actors and others are unionized in the hollywood system? and all the behind the camera IATSE members.
+1 for "incredible passion from consumers". I've never seen a mass of customers so easy to fool as gamers are. Imagine a washing machine company releasing broken products, and the average joe going "yup, I really want another washing machine from this company after seeing this ad which showed something I like, even though the last time I bought some they were barely working and only half washed my clothes, please take my money".
If bethesda/microsoft announced Fallout New Vegas 2, everyone would lose their shit and preorder instantly.
Also it disgusts me how happy everyone seems when a company announces that they won't do microtransactions. If the company has a history of keeping promises and releasing games without mtx, sure, it's warranted. But otherwise? Are you an idiot? They'll update the game half a year after you and the other fools bought the game and introduce microtransactions then. I wish there were laws that clearly defined what monetization in a game means and forbade developers from changing monetization schemes during the lifetime of a game, I just can't trust cloud-enabled games nowadays that promise a non-mtx non-p2w experience. It's worthless promises if you can change your mind down the line after I invested time and maybe money in your game. First get the money from the gamers who think they're really smart for "supporting games with fair monetization schemes", then when they're exhausted introduce mtx and go after the whales for the big bucks.
Fuck this industry, you don't even know what kind of product you're buying anymore. People waiting for "a full review of Diablo Immor(t)al to figure out how much money you need to spend to get a good build" - what's the point? By the time the review is out blizzard probably already changed the sliders and everything's different. Although from what I hear about the game, the only way they could change them at this point would make the game better, so there's that. $100k (that's one.hundred.thousand.dollars.) to get a fully equipped build. Jesus christ. Go back in time to when Diablo 2 is released and tell the gamers that soon they'll have to pay one hundred. thousand. dollars. to get a fully equipped build in the latest Diablo. They'll just cry and jump out the window. An even sadder thing is if you told them the latest Diablo will be a mobile game, they'd think "what? you can play Diablo anywhere like with a Gameboy? That's freaking amazing dude!" ugh. But you need to tell them this before telling them about having to choose between a nice house and a cool armor for their barbarian, burst that bubble properly.
I hate this. My comment here is the incredible passion from consumers, you can see it live now, you're welcome.
The incredible passion from developers is also me still being interested and working on gamedev crap even though I wish I could just turn back time instead.
Why must players have a “fully equipped build” to enjoy the game? If a player only cares about skins and other bling, are they playing a game or are they building a showcase to display to their friends?
Geez man, we got to the point where if you’re poor in real life you’re also poor in
the game, and you’re fine with that I guess. When the opposite could so easily be true if not for greed.
You can not care if you want, I think it’s just a lame thing in general to do so.
A lot of the Asian MMOs are pay-to-win, and it wouldn't surprise me that more Western game companies are moving in that direction... it is very profitable.
At the end of the day basically all jobs little kids dream about (actor, doctor, astronaut, making video games) are either really hard to get into (like doctor) or pay very poorly for the majority of people (like actor and making video games).
Video game devs aren’t paid ‘very poorly’, they’re still comfortably above a countries median, they’re just lower than roles requiring a similar skill. My friend is a game dev at Epic and loves it, FWIW. He doesn’t give a shit about money if he can pay his mortgage, cover his wife and child, splash on toys, and save a bit.
IMO this is true for every field that has a similar draw. Working on anything that's perceived as "fun" or for the greater good will allow for lower comp and worse working conditions. I believe that that's also a factor why teachers in the US can be so underpaid and treated badly and why Musk gets away with some of the rougher working conditions at Tesla and SpaceX (at least the pay seems good at those companies though).
> You can run them ragged and then replace as needed.
Until you can't. A good case study is Dice Stockholm, perhaps best known for their stewardship of the Battlefield franchise. They butchered the launch of two titles in a row and lost much of their senior staff.
FWIW BFV became a good game. But the churn BFV (+Firestorm Battle Royale mode) caused has taken BF 2042 to a new low.
There's so much hype and expectation compared other software that it hits harder when bad software design appears in gaming. Bad software/project design still exists for regular software but users are more understandable when deadlines change.
Well, paying 100s of employees for years without certitude to get your money back is a big risk, that's why lot of them move to recurring revenue. ( subscription, game pass, store, MTX etc ... )
It's also the reason why you don't see major new IPs, the risk is huge, it can lead to mass layoff / studio closure.
I'm waiting to see how this "metaverse" thing works out, as it moves from the dreams and bullshit stage to the actual implementation stage. Big, high-quality shared virtual worlds are hard. There really are no off the shelf solutions that Just Work. Epic is spending US$2 billion on this. Roblox has 90 dev teams. The NFT crowd has announced lots of stuff, and shipped only very basic worlds such as Decentraland.
Bored Ape Yacht Club's "Otherside" supposedly launches in mid-July, with very ambitious goals. We'll see.
Presumably, the stuff you develop in metaverse would allow you to monetarily benefit from it as well, and that should be good enough of a motivation for a lot of devs to enter the space.
For a rather primitive example: look at Roblox (the closest functional approximation of a proto-metaverse) and see how much money some Roblox games can make. In 2020, Roblox devs generated about $328mil in revenue, with 32 of them getting paid over a $1mil. And that's not even mentioning that a lot of them were made by one person.
It is an absolute cash cow around three million usd a month: http://www.gridsurvey.com/ (website works it's just painfully slow). Able to run on server hardware from the early 2000s. (There are also other major sources of income related to currency exchanges between Lindens and USD, and non-landtier subscriptions).
Personally I see it as a reason why the current metaverse schemes are a scam, since there are numbers right there that profit is from selling what are essentially indirect server rentals (that becomes more profitable as time goes on as server prices drop). Rather than a one time 'crypto' purchase silliness, that scammers have essentially set their sites on.
But the only ways to give money for VRChat is the subscription for extra avatar bookmarks and a fancy nameplate. And from what I understand, the deeper into it people get, the more likely they are to stick to one avatar.
This is a pretty good deal for the users, but it's not going to pay for a Meta quantity of developers.
Yet if they put in all the mobile money extraction mechanisms into it, why would people choose Meta's product over VRChat?
Honestly, the whole metaverse thing has always felt to me like a bunch of baloney. Why exactly would anyone want to join metaverse? What purpose does it serve?
I view it as something that is inevitably happening in spite of all these large companies who are tying to own it. They are to the metaverse what AOL was to the worldwide web.
effectively, yes, but don't tell the MBAs. We'll continue to go down the route of individual, centralized "meta-spaces" in the sense that people will hang out on discord like they always have, except now with a VR avatar.
I still can't believe that Facebook trademarked a prefix.
(I'm not surprised they tried; but surely they should have failed.)
The metaverse will succeed if it breaks free of the walled gardens; a federated distributed internet - controlled by the users.
Otherwise the users will continue to be the product, eating an illusion of freedom that only ever tells them what they want to hear and think they already know.
If anyone looking for a career in the tech industry says they love games and game development, please tell them not to work for a gaming company. I suppose they're not all horrible, but the percentage of horrible companies in the gaming industry is too damn high.
Tell them to work in robotics instead. A lot of the technical challenges you find in games can be found in the computer vision and robot simulation spaces.
Embedded usually pays worse than equivalent jobs writing "big iron" software. Is robotics any different? What would you recommend as an entry point to the field?
Robotics is great, you can make bank and it’s not a saturated job market. I would say get started at one of the driverless car startups, they are at the forefront of the robotics industry now as it would relate to gaming. Things like industrial robotics and control heavy systems (think Boston Dynamics) might not appeal to game devs.
I had great experiences in the tech industry for over 25 years with very little overwork, great pay, and though I have some skills, really nothing special. My way to win was getting along in teams, and being vigilant on behalf of customers/company. I have a high school diploma. This was easy money for me.
Demanding is hauling 50lb concreate blocks or stocking store shelves all day, or something maybe less physically strenuous, but..distasteful, like working with sewage or garbage)
I went to several Universities to interview undergraduates for a paid summer internship for our small SAAS startup (I was barely out of college myself). A huge percentage of technical students were hoping for internships at video game companies, many hoping to start with testing. So no wonder video games companies feel grinding through QA engineers it’s a viable strategy.
All we can really do is warn the younger generation to steer clear of the video games industry even if video games are a passion. You’d think with such a terrible reputation they’d be struggling for hires, but there’s always fresh blood to grind into the ground.
If we assume that indeed games are art, it really checks out: artists being paid on the free market is an anomaly of the recent times, the norm before was patronages and commissions paid in advance.
I’ve heard so many horror stories in the game industry about being underpaid and sleeping under desks.
I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home.
Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.
I let this sentiment keep me in the games industry for 20 years. Since I left I’ve had no trouble finding challenging and fun work, for better pay and no overtime. Wish I had left sooner
Your soul can be crushed in any industry, though, and every type of job can burn you out and make you lose your creativity. It's up to each of us to watch out for ourselves.
I think you have this precisely backwards. Soulless crunch work in the video game industry as a code monkey given no creative control over the game is more likely to kill your interest in playing video games. If regular boring non-videogame office work killed people's interest in games, there would hardly be a market for videogames at all; who would buy them?
> And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!
Facts. One of the main motivators for me to NEVER become a game devs is simply my love for gaming. Anything I’ve ever worked on professionally has become so demystified that the things I once loved become unappealing.
"Find the thing you love and do that for a living, and you'll never work a day in your life," is such bullshit. Has anyone over 35 - with half a brain - ever said that? If so, then shame on them. Maybe find the thing you love second most, and risk resenting that. Maybe.
Importantly, other people are going to exploit your love to take advantage of you, getting you to sacrifice some of yourself for these ideals you hold, and then not share the rewards with you. To you it's your identity. To them it's words that save them money.
Anecdotal, but everyone that I can recall from my uni's CS cohort who used video games as motivation to learn CS were ultimately bad or middling programmers, who were basically only employable by these game companies that pay crummy wages with bad work culture.
It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.
I think that would be a bad generalization. Maybe people obsessed enough with video games that you find out that's why they are learning CS are bad coders?
The impression I get from video game hackers (eg. finding glitches for speedrunning) are that they are quite talented, and console hackers as well (finding that PS5 jailbreak definitely requires skill) so I'm not sure if it's the best generalization.
console hackers and game programmers have little overlap, though. If you've spent the time to understand VR/ED you probably want to do that, in which case you're not programming.
Hacking savefiles and similar stuff (yourself, not just copying things on the web) help teach the key work habits of day to day programming. Problem solving, sticking to a problem, visualizing, decoding, basic computer architecture, tech docs, self starting, debugging, etc.
Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.
Huh, I guess I always found the exact opposite to be true. But I finished university in 2012, prior to the gold rush. CS department cohort stereotypes have probably drifted somewhat.
Also anecdotal, but the best self-taught programmers I know (or knew, at this point) came from the demoscene and often made their careers in game development.
The people you mention made a common mistake. They went to a university to study X, and not because they were interested in X but because they wanted to do Y and believed that X would be useful in it. That's a mistake, because academic education does not work like that. Mastering the curriculum does not make you an expert in the field. The curriculum is only a scaffold. You are always expected to learn more, both because you should find the topic interesting and because learning more makes sense.
It's not quite like the old days, but games and game engines frequently require far more math and algorithms than the usual programmer just moving bits between database and screens.
I basically bombed out of the math sequence at linear algebra, at least I gleaned enough to do basic rotations and other matrix math on polygons so I could understand the techniques used by the apis and big boys.
They also need to do performance tuning, and in consoles with uniform hardware, get to optimize code to the hardware to ridiculous degrees. The war stories of games dev in the Atari 2600 up to the playstation 1 are amazing.
How would they know? They spent the last 10 years playing video games, they literally worship those companies. It's still not widespread enough as knowledge that those employers are literally all shit. And if that's your first job, how would you know it's better somewhere else? Got to learn the hard way.
> Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.
This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage. If possible, they'd offer free off-brand animal crackers to everyone crunching.
Facebook managers have used sushi to motivate employees to complete the internal employee sentiment survey routinely every half for the last n years (something between the novelty and properties you describe) makes it attractive to folks
Kind of shows the difference in worlds between plain old tech (sushi as motivation for a half hour survey) vs gaming (food as incentive/etc. for ridiculous hours)
Naively, yes. But if they gave you the $X to spend however you want, you'd have to pay income taxes out of it and then sales taxes to buy for yourself. When the workplace does it, they don't -- and it's an expense for them! Plus, they get the bulk price.
> This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage.
That's not all of it, though. It's also one of those meals that are logistically east, because most people are OK with pizza. "[S]omething more tasty, healthy, and costly" is also the kind of thing that will likely require separate individualized orders for each person.
...and the, well - we could go on like this forever. If it's creative work, people will endure all kinds of sh!t in order to work on the stuff they love.
most people don't have an objective view of the whole market of things they can exchange for, its a compromise of what we are exposed to and what makes enough money
then there is a slight gradient containing people that don't care for a variety of reasons, such as some passive income or other financial security
Unfortunately, many of the schools that offer people creative degrees are also more than happy to charge them exorbitant sums of money for tuition - more so for the graduate degrees. I have a feeling that there are plenty of creative artists in the movie / gaming / etc. industry that are sitting on $100k-$200k in student debt, making $50k/year in some high cost-of-living area while being worked to the bone.
Hard to know what you really like or hate, before working with it full time.
I feel like these are crazy different magnitudes though. Buying a team of 10 the most expensive pizza in town is like $150. Giving that same team noticeably better healthcare costs…
* $3000/mo to cover employee paid premiums.
* $5k-$30k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual deductible.
* $5k-$100k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual oopm
* $36k/yr to fully find everyone’s HSA.
I think there’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit that makes people happy like pizza, beer, snack, and soda and it’s not like the choice is one or the other.
Pizza parties and healthcare are different ends of the spectrum. Bad healthcare is simply declining an offer, it's part of the compensation package being presented. A pizza party is fine for showing appreciation (better than cheap swag), I would run from a company that adds this in their compensation package though.
I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids. I thought, this place infantilises its employees, I will never work here.
This comes about because companies see 'culture' as a means of manipulating their employees. It works because long-childhood tokens are a status symbol - poor people need to grow up quickly and demonstrate that they are compliant by wearing suits or other uniforms, middle class show that they can afford long education by retaining the signifiers of childhood. But no-one does this consciously, so people are susceptable to being 'rewarded' by these cheap signifiers instead of real value
> I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids
This sort of thing seems to happen quite a bit. Somebody in HR goes baby crazy and starts treating people in the office as their surrogate children. You can't say shit about it, because it's HR.
First off sleeping under desks is a project management failure and not representative of the games industry. Heaps of people making games that haven't worked a day of overtime for years and years.
But as you say, boring business logic is boring, so no surprise that people would be interested in games for that reason alone, but more than that, game programming isn't the same sort of work as other programming. Are there jobs for graphics programmers working on some business spreadsheet software company? If you want to do graphics programming you need to work in an industry that needs graphics programmers.
Doesn't really matter that you're not the Miyamoto. There's lots of programmers in leadership roles solving hard and interesting problems that don't exist in other sorts of business software.
I went through the game dev -> business dev career path.
The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. To my eyes it looked like a choice between making things fly and explode (which was cool and relevant to my peers) and being some "database accountant" writing boring stuff I did not care about.
I was a broke student in my first real job. I didn't even consider being underpaid, because I was making more money than I've ever seen. I took a while before I've learned that my manager was paid literally 3x more than I was.
From the inside, crunch felt like being a hero and shipping on time. I enjoyed coding and was in good health, so it didn't seem problematic to me.
I did not realize how fucked-up game dev business was until I had 3 studios in a row die before releasing their second game.
> The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev.
Every now and then someone creates new piece of software that just changes things. Twitter as example (I remember saying to myself as I signed up for the bet, "well, that's gonna be not useful at all - who the f needs SMS on the internets?). Another example, in a more software related bubble one could say rails (ruby on rails) was very influential for web development overall.
The reporters are. I haven't visited twitter in a couple of years, but I see plenty of news articles that start Musk, Trump, or somebody tweeted something. It seems to be a pretty good press release pipeline.
Also on the other less cynical version of that, reporters are there - always. If there's something happening on the ground, you can get an unfiltered / unedited feed of what's happening around the world. For example I've got a list of 20 or so reporters from different countries on the ground in Ukraine, covering the situation every day. I find it much better than reading the published summaries.
It can be useful when all your infrastructure is down, to get the word out. It’s a decent second channel. But I’ll agree I think most tweets seem like shouting at a cloud.
I'm a prolific follower and follow several thousand accounts making it my primary source for getting a heads-up on what people all over the place in those fields that interest me are thinking and doing (IT, politics, gaming, art, business, etc).
That said, I really miss the good old days before 'social media' when there used to be actual forums and blogs and IRC channels for everything under the sun. Thank heavens we still have HN.
One problem with companies buying pizza is they always buy it from whatever pizza shop has the best reputation for reliably filling large catering orders, which is never the pizza shop that makes the best pizza.
I like pizza, but I only want pizza some of the time. And when I want it, I want to buy it myself and get what I want, not get something mediocre.
> I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home.
Because they're passionate, and passion can and is exploited because it's irrational.
I think a lot about the emotional abuse the Overwatch team has faced over the years. They created a once in a generation experience which outperformed every reasonable expectation (OWL was not a reasonable expectation unless you are on shrooms).
It's really a testament to how soul crushingly boring working in non-games tech is that people keep eagerly volunteering to be abused exploited and disrespected like this (at not even one of the very best game companies, just a mid-high tier one!) rather than work a Series C startup making 2-3x with good WLB
I guess this relates to another current thread [1].
The games industry is it's own weird universe of madness at quite
another level.
I once had business with a large AAA house in Cambridge England, in a
big glass corporate headquarters. When I visited I was greeted by an
attractive, kind of gothy/emo young lady who had visible self-harm
marks. A senior person turned up and there was a really weird
dynamic. She was obviously not supposed to have met me. The guy gave
her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic
violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on
that really threw me off balance. This was at least 5 or 10 years
before the gamergate and metoo stuff.
> When I visited I was greeted by an attractive, kind of gothy/emo young lady who had visible self-harm marks.
> The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance.
That's probably someone who based her whole self-worth around impressing people making the games she loved.
I'm all for the unionization of labor in this industry. But this article absolutely has a spin on the whole thing. They're painting QA in a light where by they're underappreciated despite their deep talent comparable to engineering and art. Am I wrong in thinking that, indeed, while their skills are important, they're easily replaceable as compared to developers or artists?
Everyone in my company is interviewing and we hire very few of the applicants because few are qualified. Having to spend 2 hours of every single employee's time a week and each employee is being paid close to 1/3rd of a million dollars or more is difficulty in hiring. Oh, and when you do find someone qualified they have 5 other offers.
"Press Reset" by Jason Schreier has many examples of this cycle: crunch, layoff, repeat at next company (or go indie, or exit the industry). In many cases, the people responsible for the decisions are insulated from the fallout (no pun intended).
Sad. 76 is one of my favorite things. I didn't bother to play it until they added NPC's though. Fallout with no NPC's is like a Hershey's bar with no chocolate.
I thought the game was much better without NPCs- it was creepy and sad with unexpected outbreaks of violence. I still love it, though- I play maybe once a week with my brother and we just wander the map looking at messed up stuff, collecting junk and hunting for cryptids. I think we were exactly the audience the game was intended for- but unfortunately that is not the audience the gamer press caters to. Those people are still on /r/fo76 simultaneously bragging about grinding out 50 levels over a weekend and complaining that there's not enough end game content.
Video game QA (really any qa) seems like an absolutely terrible job. If you are young and reading this, don't choose professions that require 0 qualifications and have a massive line out the door of willing applicants.
Many state that game devs and qa make less money. How much less? The article rambles on about working extra hours at a deadline (for which almost all companies require at times) and receiving overtime pay (which few tech companies pay), but I read no actual numbers.
Why are megaprojects so reliably running into these protracted fucked launches? What are the actual managerial processes like? How are basic failures of planning and scope and quality so constant for the biggest players in the industry?
Megaprojects are difficult to execute without a clear vision and a core group of individuals (less than 5) driving that vision to fruition. Every other style of management results in failure to deliver a product, either through feature creep, death by a thousand cuts, or misaligned incentives.
This is a Kotaku article, and given the quality of the reporting there, for all I know every developer save 1 on Fallout 76 loved working on it, and it was the project that drew engineers to Bethesda!
I don't trust this source. It sounds like something close to accurate based on previous game industry insights, but again, I don't trust Kotaku for telling me if it is currently raining while we're standing outside.
>Effective multiplayer design requires precise mathematical knowledge of how long it will take for players to clear encounters
This sounds interesting, but I don’t really understand what it means. Why would they time encounters in a multi-player game? Wouldn't those have to be run in a separate instance if they are timing sensitive, especially if you don't want other players to interrupt the event?
But I have 0 knowledge in game design and I'm pretty sure they are probably talking about something completely different! :')
I don't know the exact issue they are referencing, but if I had to guess... these sorts of multiplayer games typically have respawning enemies that are shared with everyone in the world. If you respawn them too slowly, then you will have tons of people standing around waiting for an enemy to respawn. A quest might require you to kill 10 of those enemies. You can see how this might be a problem. Smart games do this dynamically based on current populations.
While I've always understood overtime for startups, or to solve an unexpected problem, I simply do not understand why people put up with systemic overtime for large companies making large amount of money. They are simply abusing your time, you should refuse. They are saving money by not hiring enough people. It's management saving money, or being incompetent, but then it's management's problem, not yours. Of course, during difficult times one may have no other choice, but I'd just run asap.
The games industry seems to be massively overrated. People who think non-game software is devoid of interesting problems to solve have blinders on. We hear so many more problems about bad working conditions at game companies than any other type of software.
All this BS about siloing QA off is ridiculous. The celebrity worship of project managers/game designers/executives at game companies is way out of context. The whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a game and then selling each copy for $50-60 and having to rely on millions of fickle gamers to buy it is hugely problematic and inferior to other types of businesses. The whole adjacency to the entertainment industry is problematic. The vast # of creatives/artists & non-technical employees doing "toil" is problematic.
I have been working 22 years.. if you asked me when I was 13 or 18 I would have said I wanted to build games. By the time I was 21 I already knew it was a bad industry. All my friends who did go into the games industry left within a few years. Everyone is vastly more happy now that they went to work on commercial/enterprise stuff.
Are there any good examples of single player -> MMO that were successful?
I loved Fallout and Elder Scrolls but absolutely hated ES:O and FO:76. I loved those games for having my own little world that was my own. Lack of multiplayer was a feature itself, not something I wanted to be implemented.
As with most MMO's I feel like I wanted to play an MMO I'd just mainline WoW, not some crappy imitation reusing IP.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadWhen it comes to a game like 76, which was clearly mandated by some greedy executives who don't play games, the lack of passion permeates the whole game. From what the article describes it seems like nobody wanted to work on this thing - not the QA, not the devs, not the managers. The end result is no surprise. Nobody cared.
If I was a games exec, I would do everything to empower the great minds that produce great games to pursue the projects they are passionate about. Unfortunately there are a lot of very successful companies out there that do the exact opposite of that, but the tide seems to be turning.
EDIT: I want to clarify that part and parcel with being a talented passionate game director is the ability to build a great team and keep the team motivated. Obviously passion isn't the only ingredient to make a great game. As with any other massive undertaking, teams of humans are what get the job done. I simply observe that these singular figures have the two-part gift of understanding what makes a great game, and also being able to attract others who can help execute that vision.
I can assure you from working inside said industry that this is not often the case, if ever.
Edit to add: great results are driven by great teams.
I think we should be wary when a lot is attributed to a single person whatever the context may be: there are always people "behind the stage" as it were, without whom the show doesn't start.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
If your example of a great game is Fallout 4, then you've already lost the argument.
It pales in comparison to Fallout NV, Fallout 2 and even 3 in many regards. It's an extremely dumbed-down RPG experience, plagued by a lot of the same issues that are present in 76, including lack of passion and generic, tropey NPCs and environments.
I think it would be more fair to say that most studios and game designers have their masterpieces, and then most of their other work is mediocre, simply because it trends towards the mean.
Some great studios and designers can replicate their initial success once or twice more, but those are extremely rare.
There's nothing wrong with being "a reskinned Elder Scrolls". Elder Scrolls is a great game (series). It is up there in the hall of masterpieces along with GTA and CS.
If you don't believe my word, look at Steam stats: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Like many here I also believed F3 and NV had better storytelling. But many hours of playing later, I see that I actually prefer F4.
Yes, they do. But it is absolutely not the case here, sorry. F4 is just a worse game.
It's not the worst game in the series or the genre, but it is utterly mediocre and not at all an example of a resounding success in Bethesda's history as a game company. Metacritic's 5.6/10 User score agrees with me.
Doesn't mean you have to stop liking the game. There are plenty of bad games we all play as guilty pleasures.
Also, just FYI, I think Fallout 1, the first game in the series is a pretty awful game. It's extremely short, the side quests are all boring fetch/kill quests, the open world is mostly dead. F2 was a huge improvement upon it.
I thought Fallout 1 was incredible. I remember getting the trailer literally on VHS tape and being so hyped for it, and it totally lived up to it. It was unlike anything else at the time.
Fallout 2 felt kind of watered down by comparison. The whole idea to move the series back by 80 or so years was terrible. The enclave was a terrible idea. The first Fallout made sense 80 years after the war. Everything looks basically the same. People still live in bombed out buildings. Nothing makes sense. The second and later Fallouts were all set way too late.
But playing Morrowind made me realize just how crap Fallout 4 is as an RPG. Fallout 4 has almost no choices to make and all the characters worship you as a messiah five minutes after meeting you. Morrowind is very rough around the edges, the roll-based combat system was a very hard swallow. But despite the rough/exploitable mechanics and the bad graphics, Morrowind still manages to be a much more immersive world because the people in it actually make sense. They have their own agendas and biases and they don't care about you until you give them a reason to care. In Morrowind you join a faction and are given orders by some regional flunky, or worse, that regional flunky tells you to buzz off and do shitty odd jobs for another apprentice in the faction. In Fallout 4 you approach a faction and immediately meet the faction leader who tells you that you're Howard's own gift to humanity.
The main story was weak, and the side content varies, but the game is sprawling and full of ‘hidden’ gems. In what other game could you eavesdrop on raiders discussing Henry David Thoreau in their lair at a former gift shop at Walden Pond? A gift shop at Walden Pond is itself ironically and darkly humorous.
There are also many great results that are a team effort.
And according to this article Todd Howard was also part of the problem. For example:
"[A]lmost none of the Bethesda designers wanted the game to launch without NPCs. The design teams at both Rockville and Austin wanted NPCs to fill out the world of Fallout 76, but they say executive producer Todd Howard was not willing to budge all the way up ‘til launch."
Games with small teams probably have a much easier time creating a game they are passionate about even if the scope of the game has to be smaller.
When there's a single leader who's highly motivated to do critically acclaimed work, it signals to talent that this is a project aimed at critically acclaimed work.
Now, said auteur also makes great margin calls and leadership decisions.
But keep in mind it's not just "great man syndrome."
The film industry has learnt through many trials and errors it has to happen this way.
Software hasn't.
Films are an exercise in getting everything you need in your 70 or so days of filming. The days you've rented the exorbitantly expensive cameras, trailers, lights, etc.
Games are similar, except over a few years.
Only the auteur leadership model is able to make those project management tradeoffs quickly, under a lot of stress, and well, to deliver high quality output.
The Civ games have been around for a while, then it became "Sid Meier's Civilization". Not because he went back in time and did more work on Civ, but because he built his rep and wanted to use it to sell a couple of more copies.
It's that making ambitious games is hard, and if your organization doesn't have good engineering practices, good project management, a clear achievable vision, a realistic timeline, and capable team members, you will have difficulty succeeding.
And even with less ambitious games, studios fail all the time for the same reasons. It's not just the AAA games.
Clearly a smaller team with a smaller scope has an easier time because as you increase headcount, communication overhead increases exponentially, and bigger teams are usually trying more technically difficult things than a smaller team would try to tackle.
Fallout 76 seems to be a classic case of unrealistic development and testing deadlines.
Fallout 76 had problems with development and testing as well, but the problems with it began at its core concept - which they've since said 'oops' and put back into the game.
The initial question of fallout 76 seems to be "how can we turn fallout 4 into a game with constant income" and every mistake started there.
Pretty sure this attitude is what led to Daikatana. Cults of personality are universally bad.
Secondly, Todd Howard is the greedy executive who pushed out Fallout 76 and keeps rereleasing skyrim year after year after year. He has passion yes, but it's for raking in the benjamins. Making great games is strictly secondary.
Thirdly FO76 was such a total fiasco that people seem to have forgotten that Fallout 4 was insanely buggy at launch and even when they got through that was mediocre at best. In Fallout New Vegas there are interesting puzzles to solve and different ways to progress through the quest. In Fallout 4 you go places and then shoot people. Occasionally you get presented with 4 dialog options which are "yes", "yes", "no, but actually yes", and "close this dialog for now and be forced to come back later and be presented by the same choices".
Nah. What actually happens is you have one [or more] driven people and a team of others helping guide them and restrain their excesses. After a few commercial successes, the rest of the team gets forgotten or left behind eventually and the single celebrity creator, now unrestrained (and ego inflated by fans), starts producing crap.
Hideo Kojima, I'm looking at you.
He was one of the mindS behind TES, and probably the dumbest of the bunch. Since companies exist for profit, and the most profit exists in the lowest common denominator, he was eventually the only one left, which is how you get modern Bethesda.
> Bethesda officially became a part of Xbox Game Studios on March 9, 2021, which placed Fallout 76 under Microsoft’s stewardship. When asked whether or not the acquisition had improved the internal work culture within Bethesda, several sources offered lukewarm responses.
> One source suggested that Microsoft’s emphasis on a “hands-off” culture toward its studios meant that the new owners trusted Bethesda to take care of its own problems. Sources at Undead Labs also mentioned that Microsoft had a “hands-off” policy, which they claimed had “allowed dysfunction to fester” at their studio.
No quality of game could justify the senseless anti-human mentality and processes described. But the fact that Fallout 76 was just such an abysmal and hated release just increases my contempt for Bethesda. Not seeing the moral value in treating their employees ethically is bad enough; not even having the cold business sense to see how it obviously affects their bottom line is just pathetic:
> Some sources noted that the project drove an exodus of senior developers who had worked on some of Bethesda’s most prolific titles. Many developers developed physical health issues, such as tinnitus and back pain. One source said it “wasn’t uncommon” for artists to have wrist braces. Senior staff who’d remained loyal to the company for 20 years finally found their reason to quit. Some had been around since Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Fallout 76 was their final breaking point.
* incredible passion making the workforce exploitable and more tolerant of abuse
* explosive revenue growth bringing in scammers, hucksters, and MBAs
* incredible passion from consumers who will buy the same game over and over
* the advent of gambling in the form of microtransactions
* the consolidation of the industry to a handful of big publishers
* incredible technical complexity
* exclusive rights on media like star wars or sports like basketball giving some publishers a complete monopoly in some cases
Unions work.
If bethesda/microsoft announced Fallout New Vegas 2, everyone would lose their shit and preorder instantly.
Also it disgusts me how happy everyone seems when a company announces that they won't do microtransactions. If the company has a history of keeping promises and releasing games without mtx, sure, it's warranted. But otherwise? Are you an idiot? They'll update the game half a year after you and the other fools bought the game and introduce microtransactions then. I wish there were laws that clearly defined what monetization in a game means and forbade developers from changing monetization schemes during the lifetime of a game, I just can't trust cloud-enabled games nowadays that promise a non-mtx non-p2w experience. It's worthless promises if you can change your mind down the line after I invested time and maybe money in your game. First get the money from the gamers who think they're really smart for "supporting games with fair monetization schemes", then when they're exhausted introduce mtx and go after the whales for the big bucks.
Fuck this industry, you don't even know what kind of product you're buying anymore. People waiting for "a full review of Diablo Immor(t)al to figure out how much money you need to spend to get a good build" - what's the point? By the time the review is out blizzard probably already changed the sliders and everything's different. Although from what I hear about the game, the only way they could change them at this point would make the game better, so there's that. $100k (that's one.hundred.thousand.dollars.) to get a fully equipped build. Jesus christ. Go back in time to when Diablo 2 is released and tell the gamers that soon they'll have to pay one hundred. thousand. dollars. to get a fully equipped build in the latest Diablo. They'll just cry and jump out the window. An even sadder thing is if you told them the latest Diablo will be a mobile game, they'd think "what? you can play Diablo anywhere like with a Gameboy? That's freaking amazing dude!" ugh. But you need to tell them this before telling them about having to choose between a nice house and a cool armor for their barbarian, burst that bubble properly.
I hate this. My comment here is the incredible passion from consumers, you can see it live now, you're welcome.
The incredible passion from developers is also me still being interested and working on gamedev crap even though I wish I could just turn back time instead.
You can not care if you want, I think it’s just a lame thing in general to do so.
Until you can't. A good case study is Dice Stockholm, perhaps best known for their stewardship of the Battlefield franchise. They butchered the launch of two titles in a row and lost much of their senior staff.
FWIW BFV became a good game. But the churn BFV (+Firestorm Battle Royale mode) caused has taken BF 2042 to a new low.
It's also the reason why you don't see major new IPs, the risk is huge, it can lead to mass layoff / studio closure.
Making AAA game is risky and expensive.
I'm waiting to see how this "metaverse" thing works out, as it moves from the dreams and bullshit stage to the actual implementation stage. Big, high-quality shared virtual worlds are hard. There really are no off the shelf solutions that Just Work. Epic is spending US$2 billion on this. Roblox has 90 dev teams. The NFT crowd has announced lots of stuff, and shipped only very basic worlds such as Decentraland.
Bored Ape Yacht Club's "Otherside" supposedly launches in mid-July, with very ambitious goals. We'll see.
Not looking too good. Especially since the interest rate hike (the free money faucet was tightened), but the timing might be coincidence.
https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...
Turns out that no advertising, rent land, sell memberships works.
For a rather primitive example: look at Roblox (the closest functional approximation of a proto-metaverse) and see how much money some Roblox games can make. In 2020, Roblox devs generated about $328mil in revenue, with 32 of them getting paid over a $1mil. And that's not even mentioning that a lot of them were made by one person.
Personally I see it as a reason why the current metaverse schemes are a scam, since there are numbers right there that profit is from selling what are essentially indirect server rentals (that becomes more profitable as time goes on as server prices drop). Rather than a one time 'crypto' purchase silliness, that scammers have essentially set their sites on.
This is a pretty good deal for the users, but it's not going to pay for a Meta quantity of developers.
Yet if they put in all the mobile money extraction mechanisms into it, why would people choose Meta's product over VRChat?
Seems a bit much.
Own what, exactly? Is "metaverse" just a new word for "cyberspace"?
Rinse and repeat for everything else done online.
(I'm not surprised they tried; but surely they should have failed.)
The metaverse will succeed if it breaks free of the walled gardens; a federated distributed internet - controlled by the users.
Otherwise the users will continue to be the product, eating an illusion of freedom that only ever tells them what they want to hear and think they already know.
Jobs are generally; Demanding, Requiring Skill, Well Compensated… pick 2
Demanding is hauling 50lb concreate blocks or stocking store shelves all day, or something maybe less physically strenuous, but..distasteful, like working with sewage or garbage)
All we can really do is warn the younger generation to steer clear of the video games industry even if video games are a passion. You’d think with such a terrible reputation they’d be struggling for hires, but there’s always fresh blood to grind into the ground.
I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home.
Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.
And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!
Facts. One of the main motivators for me to NEVER become a game devs is simply my love for gaming. Anything I’ve ever worked on professionally has become so demystified that the things I once loved become unappealing.
Importantly, other people are going to exploit your love to take advantage of you, getting you to sacrifice some of yourself for these ideals you hold, and then not share the rewards with you. To you it's your identity. To them it's words that save them money.
It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.
Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.
I've seen many extraordinarily talented people who got into this field originally because of the dream.
The people you mention made a common mistake. They went to a university to study X, and not because they were interested in X but because they wanted to do Y and believed that X would be useful in it. That's a mistake, because academic education does not work like that. Mastering the curriculum does not make you an expert in the field. The curriculum is only a scaffold. You are always expected to learn more, both because you should find the topic interesting and because learning more makes sense.
I basically bombed out of the math sequence at linear algebra, at least I gleaned enough to do basic rotations and other matrix math on polygons so I could understand the techniques used by the apis and big boys.
They also need to do performance tuning, and in consoles with uniform hardware, get to optimize code to the hardware to ridiculous degrees. The war stories of games dev in the Atari 2600 up to the playstation 1 are amazing.
This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage. If possible, they'd offer free off-brand animal crackers to everyone crunching.
Kind of shows the difference in worlds between plain old tech (sushi as motivation for a half hour survey) vs gaming (food as incentive/etc. for ridiculous hours)
If there's no food at the office I'd start worrying about the company not being able to secure funding.
That's not all of it, though. It's also one of those meals that are logistically east, because most people are OK with pizza. "[S]omething more tasty, healthy, and costly" is also the kind of thing that will likely require separate individualized orders for each person.
...and the movie industry
...and the music industry
...and the, well - we could go on like this forever. If it's creative work, people will endure all kinds of sh!t in order to work on the stuff they love.
most people don't have an objective view of the whole market of things they can exchange for, its a compromise of what we are exposed to and what makes enough money
then there is a slight gradient containing people that don't care for a variety of reasons, such as some passive income or other financial security
Hard to know what you really like or hate, before working with it full time.
Yes! Give me better healthcare! I don't care about snacks and coffee. If I was healthy I could afford these things myself.
Even worse, using it as bait to return to office. "We're having a pizza party in the office today!" (Now a Waffle Party I might come in for)
* $3000/mo to cover employee paid premiums.
* $5k-$30k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual deductible.
* $5k-$100k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual oopm
* $36k/yr to fully find everyone’s HSA.
I think there’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit that makes people happy like pizza, beer, snack, and soda and it’s not like the choice is one or the other.
This comes about because companies see 'culture' as a means of manipulating their employees. It works because long-childhood tokens are a status symbol - poor people need to grow up quickly and demonstrate that they are compliant by wearing suits or other uniforms, middle class show that they can afford long education by retaining the signifiers of childhood. But no-one does this consciously, so people are susceptable to being 'rewarded' by these cheap signifiers instead of real value
This sort of thing seems to happen quite a bit. Somebody in HR goes baby crazy and starts treating people in the office as their surrogate children. You can't say shit about it, because it's HR.
Someone's therapist is getting a new boat soon.
But as you say, boring business logic is boring, so no surprise that people would be interested in games for that reason alone, but more than that, game programming isn't the same sort of work as other programming. Are there jobs for graphics programmers working on some business spreadsheet software company? If you want to do graphics programming you need to work in an industry that needs graphics programmers.
Doesn't really matter that you're not the Miyamoto. There's lots of programmers in leadership roles solving hard and interesting problems that don't exist in other sorts of business software.
The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. To my eyes it looked like a choice between making things fly and explode (which was cool and relevant to my peers) and being some "database accountant" writing boring stuff I did not care about.
I was a broke student in my first real job. I didn't even consider being underpaid, because I was making more money than I've ever seen. I took a while before I've learned that my manager was paid literally 3x more than I was.
From the inside, crunch felt like being a hero and shipping on time. I enjoyed coding and was in good health, so it didn't seem problematic to me.
I did not realize how fucked-up game dev business was until I had 3 studios in a row die before releasing their second game.
Every now and then someone creates new piece of software that just changes things. Twitter as example (I remember saying to myself as I signed up for the bet, "well, that's gonna be not useful at all - who the f needs SMS on the internets?). Another example, in a more software related bubble one could say rails (ruby on rails) was very influential for web development overall.
I find thinking out of the box very challenging.
That said, I really miss the good old days before 'social media' when there used to be actual forums and blogs and IRC channels for everything under the sun. Thank heavens we still have HN.
I got more insight into game dev and I think that I'm good but you only need a handful of things which are really interesting.
Like the game engine or the ai part or whatever.
Those people are just better than I am due to just being smarter etc.
So do I want to be a normal paid tool developer or dialog system biluilder or do I want a proper carrier and earn money?
I earn a good amount of money and I do not work in game dev.
I don't regret it and can imagine doing full time private game development when I'm 50 and stoped working.
I like pizza, but I only want pizza some of the time. And when I want it, I want to buy it myself and get what I want, not get something mediocre.
You do. I think it's a major appeal of making games. Miyamoto is not designing every level, art asset, every shader and every post effect.
Because they're passionate, and passion can and is exploited because it's irrational.
They don't understand the franchise's message or the lore, they can't write very well, and they also really struggle with technology apparently.
The games industry is it's own weird universe of madness at quite another level.
I once had business with a large AAA house in Cambridge England, in a big glass corporate headquarters. When I visited I was greeted by an attractive, kind of gothy/emo young lady who had visible self-harm marks. A senior person turned up and there was a really weird dynamic. She was obviously not supposed to have met me. The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance. This was at least 5 or 10 years before the gamergate and metoo stuff.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31664203
> The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance.
That's probably someone who based her whole self-worth around impressing people making the games she loved.
more expensive maybe, but that's not the same as difficult.
hard to replace is when there are no interviews a week.
I realize capitalism rewards scarcity here, but imo this is a piece explicitly about the tolls that tends to bring
You-must-do-overtime is a management fail and a strong indicator for bad leading.
What actual ingredients are missing?
I don't trust this source. It sounds like something close to accurate based on previous game industry insights, but again, I don't trust Kotaku for telling me if it is currently raining while we're standing outside.
This sounds interesting, but I don’t really understand what it means. Why would they time encounters in a multi-player game? Wouldn't those have to be run in a separate instance if they are timing sensitive, especially if you don't want other players to interrupt the event?
But I have 0 knowledge in game design and I'm pretty sure they are probably talking about something completely different! :')
All this BS about siloing QA off is ridiculous. The celebrity worship of project managers/game designers/executives at game companies is way out of context. The whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a game and then selling each copy for $50-60 and having to rely on millions of fickle gamers to buy it is hugely problematic and inferior to other types of businesses. The whole adjacency to the entertainment industry is problematic. The vast # of creatives/artists & non-technical employees doing "toil" is problematic.
I have been working 22 years.. if you asked me when I was 13 or 18 I would have said I wanted to build games. By the time I was 21 I already knew it was a bad industry. All my friends who did go into the games industry left within a few years. Everyone is vastly more happy now that they went to work on commercial/enterprise stuff.
I loved Fallout and Elder Scrolls but absolutely hated ES:O and FO:76. I loved those games for having my own little world that was my own. Lack of multiplayer was a feature itself, not something I wanted to be implemented.
As with most MMO's I feel like I wanted to play an MMO I'd just mainline WoW, not some crappy imitation reusing IP.
An the job isn't that good even.
Can somebody explain all the kids that scripting an off the shelf 3d engine is not really fun?