Why Developers Shouldn't Lay Off Employees After Launch

[Greg Tito]

Why Developers Shouldn't Lay Off Employees After Launch

Having a team that works well together is better than simply decreasing costs.

We've seen it a hundred times before. A game, like the recent Kinect fiasco Fable: The Journey, ships to stores and suddenly there's an announcement that "typical" or "routine" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/120151-Lionhead-Hit-With-Layoffs] layoffs are a really, really bad idea.

"One of the most frustrating things about the games industry is that teams of people come together to make a game, and maybe they struggle and make mistakes along the way, but by the end of the game they've learned a lot - and this is usually when they are disbanded," Schafer said.

It's silly to reward finding out a team's best practices with a security guard escorting them out the door. "Instead of being allowed to apply all those lessons to a better, more efficiently produced second game, they are scattered to the winds and all that wisdom is lost," he said.

Schafer isn't just talking hypothetically. When he was faced with such a situation after his team shipped one of the most influential games of the last decade, he didn't pull the trigger on layoffs like he could have. "After Psychonauts, we could have laid off half our team so that we'd have more money and time to sign Brütal Legend," he said. "What message would that have sent to our employees? It would say that we're not loyal to them, and that we don't care.

"Which would make them wonder 'Why should we be loyal to this company?' If you're not loyal to your team you can get by for a while, but eventually you will need to rely on their loyalty to you and it just won't be there," he continued.

The worst part is that most developers engage in a practice called crunch to put the finishing touches on a game, asking employees to work up to 16 hour days with little to no time off to get it done. Instead of basking in the success of completing a project, these game developers and designers are asked to leave soon after they were just put through the ringer.

The whole process seems inhumane and just, well, wrong. Hopefully more developers - and publishers, honestly, but that's wishful thinking - will recognize it and change their hiring and firing ways.

Source: Wired [http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/10/lionhead-layoffs/]

Permalink

 

[LostintheWick]

I love Tim. This is so true. If you don't trust your management, you're gonna feel less inclined to give it your all.

Abuse your talent and then there will be nothing left. Who's gonna make you your millions? People aren't faceless numbers.

 

[Ishigami]

This practice is absolutely horrible and should be abolished.
The exploitation going on in the industry is just mind boggling at times. Imagine you had to look for new employer every 2 to 4 years or being ?forced? to work overtime for a prolonged time just to get laid off in the end all in sake of some short term revenue...

On this occasion I remember what my CEO once said about something different but still quite similar: ?You've chosen to work in this business so deal with it.?
Yea... she is an ***

 

[Fappy]

And this is exactly why I'm content never being directly involved in the development-side of the industry. It's crazy how employers can still get away with this on a consistent basis these days.

 

[LostintheWick]

On this occasion I remember what my CEO once said about something different but still quite similar: ?You've chosen to work in this business so deal with it.?
Yea... she is an ***

What I'd say to her, "I got into this industry because I'm passionate about the work, not the politics. My feelings on this matter are strong enough to suck it up while we root out the warts that taint this passion." Revolution!!! lol

 

[BrotherRool]

I don't think this is anything that many developers do by choice. Unless you're publisher owned in which case there's no excuse. But if your indie, well if Tim hadn't been able to find a publisher for Brutal Legend his studio would have shut down and everyone lost their jobs. If a studio is less lucky than him then I'm not sure if it's the better choice.

I mean a lot of indepedent studios have ended up closing, or letting themselves be bought out by a publiser. You can count the number of big independent studios on the fingers of one hand by now

 

[GenGenners]

Here here!
Goddamn corporation-based structure.....

 

[Zombie_Moogle]

Why isn't there a developer's union yet?
It's skilled labor, they're often not paid very well, not to mention they deal with the somewhere-between-unethical-and-antitrust practices of many publishers.
I know it's not a great time for it here in the states, what with the economic recession, but consider this: let's say the dev team a major AAA title is about to hit crunch time, & everyone just walks out. Deadlines get missed, costs of pushing the release date start to pile up; lot of pressure put on the publisher
I would like to hear from people working in the industry. What do you think?
Considering the massive investment publishers take in major titles, one would think that'd put the people responsible for their completion in a pretty powerful position, while leaving the publisher little room to argue.

Replies encouraged

 

[Baldr]

This is how productions go, I don't hear anyone work on a motion picture complain about this process. Most are happy about the job, there are hundreds of people willing to take their places. Same goes in the game industry.

 

[Baldr]

Why isn't there a developer's union yet?
It's skilled labor, they're often not paid very well, not to mention they deal with the somewhere-between-unethical-and-antitrust practices of many publishers.
I know it's not a great time for it here in the states, what with the economic recession, but consider this: let's say the dev team a major AAA title is about to hit crunch time, & everyone just walks out. Deadlines get missed, costs of pushing the release date start to pile up; lot of pressure put on the publisher
I would like to hear from people working in the industry. What do you think?
Considering the massive investment publishers take in major titles, one would think that'd put the people responsible for their completion in a pretty powerful position, while leaving the publisher little room to argue.

Replies encouraged

Yeah because studios are barely keeping reasons to stay where they are now. That why even the best have moved jobs out of the country. Business is business and if it is cheaper to move a company out of the country or a right-to-work state, they will do it.

 

[Therumancer]

Errr, well, in a general sense I am a big supporter of employee rights and oppose practices like this. The problem of course is that the nature of the gaming industry makes a lot of the usual arguements against this kind of thing null and void.

Your usual business is providing a good or service more or less constantly, a steel mill produces steel, a car company produces cars, etc... and it's problems tend to come from fluctuation in those markets. Layoff in such cases usually happen when bean counters at the top realize that during a slump they can lay people off and make as much, or more, money than usual, and simply hire more people when the slump is over. Another practice is of course realizing that even skilled labour can be replaced with a degree of ease given the huge pool of workers out there in countries like the USA. There is no reason from a financial perspective to take care of a worker for 20 years and let their pay and benefits increase when you can say hired a new guy every few years, keep the costs down, and pretty much get the same results. These kinds of things are what people like me oppose since it's simply about maximizing profit.

With the games industry things are a littler differant, despite how they present things. There are differant methods of funding, but for the most part what happens is the producer and developer come to an agreement as to how much a game is going to cost to make. Those millions of dollars the producer coughs up for the game to be developed are what the guys making the games are being paid during the dev cycle, it's their salary/wages/etc. Game development is not a business where developers move from one game to another, except in rare cases where they self-publish, they are mercenaries that accept money to create products for production companies to sell and hopefully make back more money than they cost.

The thing is that a developer doesn't nessicarly know what their next project(s) are going to be and how much they are going to be worth, and if it's going to have money to continue to pay people from a project that was just finished. A project only takes so many people so in cases of parallel projects finishing one doesn't mean that they can practically put everyone on the others that are ongoing, especially seeing as the amount of money they have is finite and putting unnessicary people on a project depletes the development budget even faster and can mean the people already there are going to have to take pay cuts and so on (which might not even be possible given the product).

As a result the staff depends entirely on what the project is, and how big the budget is. If you say hire the people to produce a 100 million dollar epic RPG, and your next project is a 20 million dollar parakeet simulator, your going to have to cut your staff by 80% assuming everyone gets paid the same thing, which in of itself is unlikely since people expect more money, the more seniority they have.

As a result developers have increasingly become a relatively small "core" team of guys who have the connections to get people to make games, as opposed to large groups of people who stick around and are hired out en-masse. Simply put, many developers simply can only keep as many people on staff as their current project allows them to, and the guys running the development studio of course want to make money off of it, not just pay out everything
from those budgets to the employees, it is a business.

There are exceptions of course, and the system does more or less blow chips, but at the same time, these things do happen for a reason. Unlike more consistant businesses that are always producing a pretty constant product, it's hard to really call game developers out because if they were forced to keep everyone on staff, they would all go out of business. They can't guarantee always having a contract of X level, and enough project slots availible for everyone, indefinatly.

Also corperate loyalty is a touchy subject. See, on the surface most regular people think that the companies should take care of them, and support them through thick and thin, but at the same time feel they should have the freedom to pursue whatever is in their best interests, and resent the idea of basically being "owned" by their employers (of which many horror and dark future stories have been written). Loyalty has to be a two way street, and in our society time has shown that when people are offered a better deal, they are going to take it. It's one thing to say that company loyalty breeds loyal employees, and another to practice it, in a practical sense the workers are just as mercenary as the companies are. If you argue that a company shouldn't be able to fire you or lay you off, it logically follows that since they need you, you shouldn't be able to leave them either.

I tend to simply things by being more of a general champion of worker's rights, and feel that a company shouldn't be allowed to engage in layoffs or anything unless it can prove it's nessicary to ensure it's survival as opposed to merely increasing it's profitability. I also think when fired or laid off, workers should have more in the way of recourse. In cases today where an unemployment hearing would find you "fired without cause" (which has happened to me) there should be more penelties to the companies. Right now a member of middle management can pretty much fire you for not liking the way you parted your hair this week, and get away with it, without any real penelty to him or the employer. Since people need to work to survive, I have some real issues with that. This is one of the areas I lean pretty far to the left on.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

"Why Developers Shouldn't Lay Off Employees".

But developer ARE the employees that are being laid off. Or am I misunderstanding something.

 

[fubaring0]

I was under the impression that they hire temporary employees during crunch on most games. So the people being laid off were not part of the core dev team at least with the larger studios. Yes it may seem terrible but I think there is a larger picture and not just evil practices that are just doing it for profit.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

Any team works better when chemistry is high.

"Why Developers Shouldn't Lay Off Employees".

But developer ARE the employees that are being laid off. Or am I misunderstanding something.

It should read "Why development studios shouldn't lay off employees".