IGDA Investigating L.A. Noire Dev

[vansau]

IGDA Investigating L.A. Noire Dev

Recent accusations about terrible working conditions at Team Bondi aren't being taken lightly, and the IGDA is going to look into them.

It's kind of an accepted fact that working in the videogame industry means long hours, especially when a game is in crunch mode and deadlines are looming, but apparently things are really brutal over at Team Bondi (the developer behind <a href=http://www.amazon.com/L-Noire-Playstation-3/dp/B002I0J5UQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309286526&sr=8-1>L.A. Noire). How brutal, you ask? Brutal enough that the International Game Developers Association is investing reports of awful conditions at the studio.

Earlier this week, various outlets began reporting on a number of reports that had been surfacing from insiders at the studio. Accordingly, a huge number of damning reports were leveled against studio boss Brendan McNamara:

Brendan McNamara is accused by one of eleven anonymous insiders as "the angriest person I've ever met".

"It's one thing for him to be angry behind closed doors, but it was incredibly common for him to scream at whoever was pissing him off in the middle of the office," the person claimed.

Other accounts of life at the Sydney studio say McNamara was "required to sit isolated from everyone else" following a visit from a team-building company.

"But that just made it worse, since he would then pace back and forth all day, bothering people even more," said another anonymous studio source.

On top of this, it was also reported that lengthy crunch times involving incredibly long days (110-hour work weeks were apparently common) at the studio without overtime pay. Needless to say, the IGDA isn't happy to hear about any of this.

IGDA chair Brian Robbins, speaking to Develop, said that the organization is looking into the claims and would also like to hear from any studio employees who were affected by the conditions: "Certainly reports of 12-hour a day, lengthy crunch time, if true, are absolutely unacceptable and harmful to the individuals involved, the final product, and the industry as a whole."

McNamara himself reportedly offered no denial or apology when he was confronted with the <a href=http://www.develop-online.net/news/38113/Team-Bondi-interrogated-The-list-of-accusations>laundry list of accusations against him and his studio, which doesn't make him look too good in the eyes of the public.

Meanwhile, anyone who was affected by the conditions at Team Bondi can contact the IGDA via email at [email protected].

Source: <a href=http://www.develop-online.net/news/38125/Industry-outrage-at-brutal-Team-Bondi-crunch>Develop

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[TimeLord]

LA Noire: Terrible working conditions = good game.

Duke Nukem Forever: Doing whatever the fuck they wanted for a decade = bad game.

 

[Jamboxdotcom]

And yet without those brutal 110 hour work weeks, we'd have been screaming for their heads on platters for not delivering the game on time. Ahhhh, injustice, what would we do without it?

*edit* To be clear, i'm not diminishing the awfulness of this situation. These people have certainly been abused. What i am doing is pointing out that as a culture, we're partly responsible for that abuse. We can't demand quality games delivered on time at a low price point and then complain that the work force was abused.

 

[DannyBoy451]

I love how managers being abusive bullies is repeated across all industries.

 

[brunothepig]

And yet without those brutal 110 hour work weeks, we'd have been screaming for their heads on platters for not delivering the game on time. Ahhhh, injustice, what would we do without it?

This is kind of a different situation. Turning out a bad game is actually a preferable alternative really.
Besides, plenty of studios turn out brilliant games without having to force such brutal working conditions.

 

[TsunamiWombat]

Crunch time is an accepted part of the life for alot of these developers, the issue here is when extreme crunchtime is taken that much further, to the point it physically harms the health of the employee.

If 110 hr weeks is accurate thats more then 12 hours a day 7 days a week. Infact it's nearly 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, or an utterly impossible 22 hr days 5 days a week.

16 hour days means you work, go home, sleep for 5-6ish hours,wake up, go back to work, with no time for interaction with your family or eating in the middle.

 

[Woodsey]

LA Noire: Terrible working conditions = good game.

Duke Nukem Forever: Doing whatever the fuck they wanted for a decade = bad game.

Yeah, in between those two are: "people who go to work and do their jobs in good working conditions, and produce games far better than either of those."

Similarly, you getting a good game does not make up for what would essentially seem to be workplace bullying.

OT: If this proves to be true, this industry has a real issue. Shit working conditions (this is not the first studio to suffer these accusations), hideously misogynistic workplaces, payment based on a freaking metacritic score, etc.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Not that I've been there but everything I read about the game industry tells me it is run by squeezing the youthful enthusiasm our of fresh young devs. Then the burned out husks "retire" from gaming at 24-26 and get corporate or government jobs that pay better, are more stable, have better benefits, better hours, and better working conditions.

 

[draythefingerless]

And yet without those brutal 110 hour work weeks, we'd have been screaming for their heads on platters for not delivering the game on time. Ahhhh, injustice, what would we do without it?

Good management can avoid you any crunch time whatsoever, or make you do very very very lil of it.

Also hiring more than 50 FUCKING PEOPLE FOR A MOTION CAPTURED GAME THE SIZE OF NEBRASKA would hav helped. Seriously, 50 people to make this big of a game is irresponsible greed.

 

[Mister Benoit]

This is out of the Metroid Prime wiki:

"During the last nine months of development Retro's staff worked 80 to 100-hour weeks to reach the deadline imposed by Nintendo."

By all means this is kind of normal stuff for the games industry.

Where I currently work we're trying to get a big patch out and we've been working 16-20 hour days since last Thursday. We're all paid salary so we just get compensation time that's put on the side.

Unless the place was an absolute shit hole the only problem seems to be the manager. Which by all means, they've been working on the game for 7 YEARS. I'm pretty sure none of us could imagine how that guy was feeling and what he was going through. He was just cracking at the seams.

 

[Jumplion]

And yet without those brutal 110 hour work weeks, we'd have been screaming for their heads on platters for not delivering the game on time. Ahhhh, injustice, what would we do without it?

The thing is, though, from said report the direction was all over the place, not just insane work weeks. Read this [http://m.ign.com/articles/1178844] as well, highlights many of the problems. Unfocused direction, constantly firing and hiring employees, long hours going into 16+ hour days, every day, including weekends, no vacation, the list is long. McNamara seems like a confident and dedicated guy, and to an extent I respect that, but he doesn't seem to realize how much of a dick he's been and his lack of true managerial expertise.

Really, the whole practice of constant crunch time and other deplorable working conditions is something that this industry really needs to get over. When you've got, say, a month or two deadline for an essential part of the game, sure, crunch time may be needed. But the whole development going into crunch time for 6 to 8 months at a time, just for general working, is just madness.

 

[Jumplion]

This is out of the Metroid Prime wiki:

"During the last nine months of development Retro's staff worked 80 to 100-hour weeks to reach the deadline imposed by Nintendo."

By all means this is kind of normal stuff for the games industry.

Where I currently work we're trying to get a big patch out and we've been working 16-20 hour days since last Thursday. We're all paid salary so we just get compensation time that's put on the side.

Unless the place was an absolute shit hole the only problem seems to be the manager. Which by all means, they've been working on the game for 7 YEARS. I'm pretty sure none of us could imagine how that guy was feeling and what he was going through. He was just cracking at the seams.

And really, this should not be the case at all. Just because it's a widespread thing does not make it the right thing to do. The investigative article [http://m.ign.com/articles/1178844] on the whole thing points out many more flaws in Noire's development, and it's not just the deplorable working conditions. A few weeks of crunch time to get a patch going, like you, sure. Months on end of nothing up 20+ hour work days is just ridiculous.

Like I said, this industry really needs to get over this whole "crunch time" thing. It is not as effective as they may believe, and it leads to so many problems like younger developers being burned out and having early retirement. Hell, we've still got 70+ year old actors, directors, and others working in the film industry, yet the retirement age for video games seem to be around mid-40s. There's something wrong here, and we need to fix it.

 

[bakan]

Corporate greed and heavy deadlines at its best?

 

[Veloxe]

Corporate greed and heavy deadlines at its best?

Seems more like a case of incompetent management at it's best to me.

 

[gunner1905]

This "video game dev works people like dogs" thing keeps coming up, doesn't it?

And in every thread someone says that they're just whining.

Because many escapist readers wants to work in the industry and they don't want their imagination of how it is to be a developer ruined.

 

[Sparrow]

Damn, this was a real deal with Red Dead Redemption too wasn't it? The thing is, LA Noire and RDR are probably two of my favourite games. Makes me wonder if the conditions are in any way justified for the quality us gamers recieve.

The whole bit about working overtime and not getting overtime pay is a huge dick move, though.

 

[mjc0961]

One of my favorite things I heard about this is some guy who said he was yelled at for coming in at 9:15 AM which was 15 minutes late, despite the fact that he had only ended his last shift at 3:15 AM that same exact day.

And by favorite, I mean it absolutely disgusts me. Hopefully the IGDA will do something to make things better for those employees.