Game devs, how do you keep the motivation despite the circumstances?

I did the majority of certification work for Thief on 360 and XB1, and genuinely got a lot done and helped improve some aspects of the game along the way, and I'm proud of the good work I did and how I contributed to making the game better than it would have been without me. Regardless of the mixed reception, nothing really touches the pride I feel in relation to the work I've done on games. I've been fortunate enough to work on a lot of great games as well, but as far as big public misses go, I think Thief was the biggest one that I know I had an impact on.

I hate the hysteria I see on YouTube and even here sometimes.

I'm glad this thread was made and devs can speak out. Will keep reading.

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I feel bad for DICE developers. You can tell they love working on the battlefield series. Their games are always top notch and their games are so ambitious. It's like they push the envelope so hard and I cant imagine some of the technical issues they have to overcome. It's fot to be so hard looking for usefully community feedback where there's so much trash to trove through.

If your employees in the game industry I have mad respect for you.

because I've loved video games my entire life. I couldn't imagine doing much else

Try to live healthy outside of gamedev. Learn to space out your work sessions, and never crunch more than a week every 3 months or so.

It is super tempting to go all in without a life when you're still young and energetic. But it can bite you hard in the ass very fast, especially in the health department (mental and body).

Basically my recommendation is: don't destroy your health for it. It's not worth that much sacrifices.
Motivation will come by itself and remain more steady if you don't burn yourself out.

I just don't give a shit. I'm self motivated and some entitled fuckers on the internet mean zero to me. I know when I did my job well and I know what could be done better/improved.

I work with 3d art. If I was a game designer my perspective could be different.

There is always positives comments as well as negatives. Catch the positives to give you strength to move forward and use the negatives to improve.

For me it was quite hard to read the YouTube comments when my game was featured on the official Playstation channel. But you cannot let it get to you if you want to continue working with gamedev. Seinfeld was once asked if he would stop stand-up if his first show was a failure he answered that he would not have stopped since he was doing what he wanted to do.

I've been working on a casual game for Facebook for the last 6 month. Last week the higher ups decided there is not enough growth potential on the platform so our project has been put to a sudden stop and my team of 4 is getting disbanded and each one of us getting reassigned somewhere else.

It's no AAA game for sure and some could even call it derivative, but to cut us loose just weeks before release has been painful. It took us a while before our small team bonded and can freely throw ideas and criticisms at each other and we were pretty driven to make this game a hit. Now that I'm getting reassigned to another bigger team where I'm required to work remotely from I'm not sure if I can find the same chemistry in the new team. Also less sense of ownership of the work I'll be doing as it will be building on what is already there instead of working on something that I built from the ground-up myself.

I mean, I'm sure I'll find my motivation, having a family to feed and all, but at the end of the day I fear it'll be work that I don't love 100% and won't feel compelled to put in my 100%.

elenarie said:

Hey, I work at EA DICE on Battlefield. Just open YouTube and you can immediately see how much hate there is for what we do. :) We are a pretty disliked studio that is part of an even more disliked international corporation. So we get vile and vulgar shit thrown at us all the time, sometimes even harassed online. Even here on this forum people are incredibly vile and seem happy to forget that behind everything is another person that is just trying to do their best in the situation that they are with the knowledge and resources that they have.

How I keep up my positivity? I have moved countries thanks to video games. I have traveled the world thanks to video games. I have supported my family thanks to video games. Everything I have is thanks to working on video games. All the hate, all the junk online is just random noise. Noise that I can easily ignore, because in the end, how I and my team feel about the project that we're working on is what matters the most. I wake up every morning, feel inspired and motivated to go to work and work on Battlefield with my current team. Wouldn't trade this for anything else. :)

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Man gamenerds are the worst. But i dont need to tell you that those vile people are jobless manchildren living in their moms basement.

Most people love the Battlefield franchise, as the numbers tell. Keep up the good work man.

I respect our audience and I'm thankful for our players but at the same time I need to have enough confidence in myself, what I do and what our studio does that I cant let outside opinions of our performance affect me too much.

Plus, 95% of the time, all the fan theories about why our games do "x" or "y" are so completely off base that you cant really let them affect you personally. You have to remember that online fans that post on forums tend to be a vocal minority and that the dev has more information about a games performance and metrics than whatever fans perceive the situation is.

Theres a ton of positives to latch onto. We have great jobs, great coworkers, a successful game that does very well, an exciting IP to work with, a big company that cares about its employees (regardless of what the internet thinks lol)

So when I go online and I hear something about what we do that is extremely off base, I chuckle and move on. If I see something that is right on and I can use it to improve our game, cool!

Think about how your sense of touch basically ignores most stimuli so that you dont go crazy with being able to feel everything around you. You dont "feel" the clothes on your skin, you're not aware of every breath you take, your brain just picks the right things to worry about. Being in gamedev and responding to feedback is similar, you cant let everything get to you, you have to be aware of what shapes the destiny of your game and what doesnt

Regarding studio leadership being involved in controversy, I havent really had to deal with that, so Ive been lucky there. It must be very awkward for the people at Riot right now.

Honestly, it's those E-mails and Twitter comments I get from people who enjoyed the game. Sure, there will always be angry people. But their lives weren't made worse for your game existing. The ones who care enough to send you something...their lives were genuinely made better.

Focus on those, and drown out the noise.

Every now and again you'll talk to someone and they'll legit say "That is/was my favourite game" and it's really like nothing else.

The weirdest one was where I was in a chippy waiting for a my food while wearing a Getaway 2 jacket and this kid who couldn't have been more than 12 lost his fucking mind that I worked on it.

As to OP's original question, in my case it's because I'm intensely curious about how things work, and this curiosity is largely independent of any evaluation or impression of a game. Growing up playing games I always wondered how they were made, and every step of my career has basically been about understanding on a deeper and deeper technical level how they're put together, to the point now where I spend a lot of my time talking to the hardware vendors about the construction of their CPUs, GPUs, I/O subsystems, etc. The only thing I haven't really done myself at this point is design an actual game console. But there's still time!

That said, when I saw my first console game out in the wild it gave me a panic attack because I was sure it was going to crash and oh god oh god oh god please don't crash. That's the frequent reality of engineering, you spend 1-3 years looking at something sub-performant or non-functional most of the time, and it only gels in that last few months to something stable and fast.

elenarie said:

I wake up every morning, feel inspired and motivated to go to work and work on Battlefield with my current team. Wouldn't trade this for anything else. :)

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Best feeling. You are working to give us joy playing videogames, and even if sometimes there are issues there is also lots of genuine feedback coming from your fans. Don't read Youtube videos if you don't want to feel dumb later. Youtube comments to controversy videos are 99% trash and people writing them don't deserve to be taken in consideration.

AdaWong said:

Absolutely valid, and I would love to try that but even the thought is so scary because the grudges/distaste is already there and it's way bigger than I could ever handle. It's kind of like playing PR and doing damage control when you're not even responsible for that damage, you know? I don't know how to explain it. It's the reality of things, and I guess it's a good metaphor for life: not everything is going to turn out pretty, even if the intentions are as pure as can be. Just soak it in and gotta keep moving forward I guess, but what do I know lol.

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I am not doing PR when I do it, as I mostly stay in broad terms and examples throughout the industry.
Of course, some people will dismiss your knowledge and tell you "you are full of shit" when you explain to them how it works and call for "proof" of your position, but that's when I draw the line personnaly: I already went out of my way to answer your question/concerns in a learned manner, you have no right to ask me for proof because you think I am telling bullshit about the industry I work in (and provided outside articles showing what I was talking about).

Going head on in threads that begin with "lazy devs" and other "this dev is trash because X" is also a thing not to do most of the time, unless you just want to vent. Those people have already made most of their mind, and unless you were in front of them to slap your argument through their face, would not listen.

If you know the product is bad, you can't really defend it, but it you believe some of it (or all of it) is way better than what they are talking about, if you want to defend it, do it with your knowledge. And if it's about a game not released yet, just post that they should play it before taking conclusions. The people who'll tell you they don't need to to make a "this is garbage" opinion don't deserve your time and you can just move on ^^.

But changing the view of someone on the industry or how something is done is great. I explained a few months back why some big projects need hundreds of people and was thanked for it multiple times, even if I expected to be told "this is still no reason". A few people read me and told me that it was enlighting and that made my day. So sometimes, it's worth it :)

Once I was walking down the street and some kid stopped me. I thought he was gonna ask me for directions or something but then I noticed he had some weird smile on his face. And then with the most awkward and nervous talk he told me he loved my game and was waiting for the sequel.
It was unexpected, it was weird, it was wonderful. We talked about some of the characters and plot and how he liked this and that. We said goodbye and that was it.

It never happened again since and I don't think it will happen so soon again (if ever, Portuguese ppl don't do this normally) but it was great.

I've played videogames since I was six and have been making them for almost 20 years. Wouldn't trade this for anything else.

I have a mortgage to pay!

Seriously though, its just because I love what I do. I don't really mind if people don't like the end result. Sure, its disheartening and I want them to enjoy the games I work on, but the self satisfaction I get from creating things is worth far more to me than praise from others. If they don't like it, so be it and I'll try again!

That said, it feels really damn good to see people smiling and laughing when they play something I've made!