IGDA Investigating L.A. Noire Dev

[EvilPicnic]

110 hour weeks are 'apparently common'?? Really? That's like 16-hour days with 7-day working, or 22 hour days of 5 day working. That's just insane (if true).

That's worse than sweatshop labour hours.

 

[Zing]

Working crazy hours is one thing, but not being paid overtime is against the law in Australia. Don't these people have unions?

 

[rapidoud]

Old news. IGN had an article (because they're Australian so...) about this weeks ago.

 

[SouthpawFencer]

As somebody whose only interaction with the gaming industry is playing the games and some very low-level programming from college, I don't know how the programmers are managed in these companies. Does anybody know the following:

How well do managers keep their programmers focused and working, even during the early stages? Do they utilize remote desktop software to periodically check screens to ensure that the programmers are programming rather than web-surfing (well, except at noon EST, when new content is posted to the Escapist website... let's be reasonable here...)? Do the managers have enough experience as programmers to know whether the delays are caused by incompetence, laziness, or due to completely unreasonable expectations set by somebody who can't even get his home entertainment center to stop flashing "12:00"?

Does crunchtime occur because work has been slow up until the stage of "Oh my God, we're never going to make the release date unless we double our output!", or does it occur because all the various, separate elements of the game are all completed by their respective deadlines, but, once they get brought together, a trillion bugs bugs are found that could not be detected until the various products of the dev teams were combined - sort of like a Voltron of run-time errors?

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Salaried employment is the biggest scam going in corporate America. You say that magic word ("salary...", with a soft whisper for effect) and people forget everything they learned in 1st grade math.

Take your starting salary at most corporate entities (let's say $40,000/year) and divide it by the 60 hours/week you'll actually be working. Hey, guess who's making less than $14/hour before taxes? High-pressure field with deadlines? Creative field with high satisfaction quotient? You might be looking at 80-100 hour weeks, which is not only completely unsustainable/unhealthy but also sends your hourly take spiraling down to near minimum wage levels.

When you're taking that much money out of your people, and generating enormous profits from their labors, that excess production doesn't just vanish. It ends up somewhere. You really only need to look at CEO salaries/benefits to find out what happened to all the money.

Regarding this thread: I was curious about L.A. Noire. I thought I might give it a shot at some point. Now I am specifically not purchasing the game. If you treat your employees like shit and I find out about it, I'm taking my business elsewhere. Being a gargantuan greedy asshole should have consequences, and I try to do my part to enforce them.

 

[hotsauceman]

Hmm now i'm wondering whether or not to get the game. I cant buy this game knowing this could have happened. Maybe not. I can live not playing this game.
But if i do its used so they wont see a dime of my money.

 

[teebeeohh]

well i finally have i reason why i didn't pick up LA noire yet.
No, i was not just waiting for the pc version.

 

[neonsword13-ops]

You can't prove that! You don't have the guts, buster!

 

[Ghengis John]

To all the people saying "that's just the games industry."

When a representative from a team-building company decides you absolutely, positively are not team material I think you might have a legitimate problem.

 

[chiefohara]

Pathetic.

I can empathise with these people having worked in hostile, crap, rubbish work enviroments myself, but of all the different jobs i've done nothing makes it worse than incompentent and vindictive management. A hard job is a hard job and you sign up for that, but a bully that makes shit of the work atmosphere making everyone work under conditions of fear just makes it unbearable. You kill creativity, you ruin people's appetite for the work, and make life a living misery for people who should be just as vested in the project as you are. Its counter productive and retarded.

Kudos to the people who walked, and like others on this thread i wont be pruchasing this game or anything by team bondi again.

 

[chinangel]

maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a growing number of these in the news as of late.

 

[LostintheWick]

Salaried employment is the biggest scam going in corporate America. You say that magic word ("salary...", with a soft whisper for effect) and people forget everything they learned in 1st grade math.

Take your starting salary at most corporate entities (let's say $40,000/year) and divide it by the 60 hours/week you'll actually be working. Hey, guess who's making less than $14/hour before taxes? High-pressure field with deadlines? Creative field with high satisfaction quotient? You might be looking at 80-100 hour weeks, which is not only completely unsustainable/unhealthy but also sends your hourly take spiraling down to near minimum wage levels.

When you're taking that much money out of your people, and generating enormous profits from their labors, that excess production doesn't just vanish. It ends up somewhere. You really only need to look at CEO salaries/benefits to find out what happened to all the money.

This seems so obvious and common sense, that it is enraging to see this can still go on and people don't notice! I think it would make sense for profits to be divided proportionately according to contribution and effort. But what am I saying?! I have a hard time seeing the honcho's giving up their EXTRA spending cash. Would anybody else? (a small few I sure)

 

[TokenRupee]

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.

But I'll bet Retro's staff got paid for overtime where as Team Bondi's didn't/