Are There Any Verified Game Companies That Treat Their Workers Well?

EA and Blizzard
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-12-06-blizzard-ea-among-glassdoors-best-places-to-work


And a lot of UK studios, Creative Assembly, Playground Games, Criterion etc...

I remember reading something about MM having no crunch at all, and also they look pretty chill given the type of games they make, but i can't find it atm.

What was that company that everyone had the same salary ?

Was the Fury dudes ?

I've heard good things from Iron Galaxy, supposedly.

SOLDIER said:

I want to naively believe a company like Nintendo knows how to treat their workers well while still turning out some of the greatest games of all time, but if actual confirmation exists then I'd like to know about it.

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The work culture in Japan doesn't bode well with your hopes here. No way Nintendo have good working environment for making their big games. No way.

It's not just the game industry. The whole work culture in Japan is bad.

Apparently, Iron Galaxy does well with this.

https://twitter.com/JosephJBroni/status/1044076948220084224

Monolith Soft's Takahashi Says His Top Priority is That His Employees Aren't Overworked

This mentality should be shared among all leaders, not only in Japan but other places as well.

Insomniac has won awards for this, no? https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/insomniac-wins-workplace-award

SOLDIER said:

.....are you sure?

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Yes...?
Read employees reviews, it's all written there.

Jim_Cacher said:

Monolith Soft's Takahashi Says His Top Priority is That His Employees Aren't Overworked

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Impressive for a Japanese developer

Just sayin.

Here's a list of games that were made without "crunch" -

Agent Decker (physical card game)
Airships: Conquer the Skies
Barbearian
Battlestar Galactica
Beat The Art Breaker
Bleed 1
Bleed 2
Broken Age
Chicken Jump
Cultist Simulator
Domiverse
Dreams
Dungeon of the Endless
Edge of Eternity
Endless Legend
Endless Space 2
Florence
Frobisher Says
Ghostman
Guacamelee 2
Gunslugs 3
Hohokum
Krunch
Lieve Oma
Loot Rascals
Minit
Operator Overload
Out of the Park Baseball
Panoramical
Path Out
Phase Drift
Pizza Ultra Titan
Regency Solitaire
Reunited
Rogue Aces
Save One More
Slamoids
Sound of my Town
Spitkiss
Star Crossed
Sunless Sea
Surge Deluxe
Thunder Kid
Tiny Trax
Tormentor X Punisher
Tower Fortress
Velocity
Velocity 2X
Wandersong

Let me know if any of these were memorable enough.

Nintendo said:

The work culture in Japan doesn't bode well with your hopes here. No way Nintendo have good working environment for making their big games. No way.

It's not just the game industry. The whole work culture in Japan is bad.

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So you're saying this based on nothing. Ok.

We literally had Takahashi saying Monolith Soft changed their work culture after the Nintendo buyout.

SOLDIER said:

.....are you sure?

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-_-

SOLDIER said:

.....are you sure?

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Are you sure that the article and glasssdoor aren't in cahoots and infact EA and Actiblizzare are both evil demon businesses that not only release yearly franchise updates but also put their employees through a living hell?

Heartskips said:

So you're saying this based on nothing. Ok.

We literally had Takahashi saying Monolith Soft changed their work culture after the Nintendo buyout.

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So you haven't read my post. Ok.

SOLDIER said:

.....are you sure?

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Raging Spaniard elenarie Septimus Prime

Can confirm or deny.

Nintendo said:

The work culture in Japan doesn't bode well with your hopes here. No way Nintendo have good working environment for making their big games. No way.

It's not just the game industry. The whole work culture in Japan is bad.

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Come back when you have worked in a Japanese game company, because I know my company treats its workers pretty well.

Heartskips said:

So you're saying this based on nothing. Ok.

We literally had Takahashi saying Monolith Soft changed their work culture after the Nintendo buyout.

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What he's saying is that the entire culture of work in Japan is unhealthy compared to western countries , not even limited to games companies.
A Japanese games developer saying they don't want to overworked staff means very little relative to the country.
He could be suggesting he doesn't want to overwork staff by having them work 100 hour weeks .... 80 is plenty enough

EvilBoris said:

Are you sure that the article and glasssdoor aren't in cahoots and infact EA and Actiblizzare are both evil demon businesses that not only release yearly franchise updates but also put their employees through a living hell?

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Exactly what I was going to say.

The bias against certain companies is very strong here.

Pingal Pratyush said:

Just sayin.

Here's a list of games that were made without "crunch" -

Agent Decker (physical card game)
Airships: Conquer the Skies
Barbearian
Battlestar Galactica
Beat The Art Breaker
Bleed 1
Bleed 2
Broken Age
Chicken Jump
Cultist Simulator
Domiverse
Dreams
Dungeon of the Endless
Edge of Eternity
Endless Legend
Endless Space 2
Florence
Frobisher Says
Ghostman
Guacamelee 2
Gunslugs 3
Hohokum
Krunch
Lieve Oma
Loot Rascals
Minit
Operator Overload
Out of the Park Baseball
Panoramical
Path Out
Phase Drift
Pizza Ultra Titan
Regency Solitaire
Reunited
Rogue Aces
Save One More
Slamoids
Sound of my Town
Spitkiss
Star Crossed
Sunless Sea
Surge Deluxe
Thunder Kid
Tiny Trax
Tormentor X Punisher
Tower Fortress
Velocity
Velocity 2X
Wandersong

Let me know if any of these were memorable enough.

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In all fairness, that many games just came out today. And some in that list are repeat devs.

My best guess is that the same rule applies to gaming that does to most "higher demand than supply" jobs:

The more popular a job is, the more exploitative the employers can be.

Obviously some companies are better, while others are worse.
But just like in music, film or arts, there is really no reason for employers to be "nice". If one person quits, another person can be hired quickly.

The fun & prestige associated with making games is simply that much greater than designing SAP web frontends or administrating cisco switches.

I contracted for EA for 7 years. QA didn't get that treatment that's for sure. Laid us off for 3 months every 12 to avoid giving us any benefits. Pay was barely above minimum wage for the first few years until they finally raised to $9 an hour. While promotion to a full position was possible, it wasn't likely, and you'd generally be strung along with the hopes of it endlessly while being put back to the bottom of the ladder every contract. A lot of the teams (Madden) generally treated QA like garbage too. Though The Sims team was great.

On the upside, the hours weren't bad even during crunch. Just 48-56 hours. Usually we'd have Sundays off. Though my friend who is a Project Manager consistently pulls 60 hour weeks.
We also usually got a free copy of whatever game we worked on and got 20% off all new EA games.
Also free coffee.

Not exactly great. Not the living hell I see reported from other companies though.

EvilBoris said:

What he's saying is that the entire culture of work in Japan is unhealthy compared to western countries , not even limited to games companies.
A Japanese games developer saying they don't want to overworked staff means very little relative to the country.
He could be suggesting he doesn't want to overwork staff by having them work 100 hour weeks .... 80 is plenty enough

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While Japan has an overworking problem, this doesn't mean you can assume every company is doing that to these absurd hours. Nintendo has good job security and devs stay there for a long time, unlike other japanese game companies; we also had positive comments from Takahashi comparing their work culture with Bamco/SE.

The company I work for is pretty good. Very little crunch, very good healthcare and other advantages. It is a mobile game company though, so probably not for the taste of most people here. :P
It's Ludia. We recently released Jurasic World Alive and previously made Jurasic World Builder.

My first thought was Insomniac. Still remember that Pin Ballz music recruitment video. Looks like a awesome place. They had some awards for the work environment too iirc.

EvilBoris said:

What he's saying is that the entire culture of work in Japan is unhealthy compared to western countries , not even limited to games companies.
A Japanese games developer saying they don't want to overworked staff means very little relative to the country.
He could be suggesting he doesn't want to overwork staff by having them work 100 hour weeks .... 80 is plenty enough

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is not the 80s anymore, i'm sure is not great but Japan has reduced their average working hours per year to the point is comparable to western countries (lower than the us for example).

Nintendo said:

So you haven't read my post. Ok.

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??? Why are u making a generalization based on nothing? There is a reason why employee turn over is low in Nintendo. They often put huge focus on its employee there.

This is old, I hope it hasn't changed, but I became an even bigger fan of Klei after reading this article a few years ago:

https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/5/29/4362838/the-birth-and-re-birth-of-klei

EA, Ubisoft. BGS Maryland seems to have a great work culture as a great deal of their staff has been there for over 20 years now.

SOLDIER said:

Much as I hate to think it, I'm pretty sure Square Enix is one of those ultra-crunch studios.

Pretty sure I read that Tabata had to work three years straight without a single weekend when developing FFXV. And Yoshi-P (of FFXIV) looks like he's literally fighting to stay alive most of the time.

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It would be nice if they did not have to redo some of their games. They showed up at Pax to present on both FF14 and FF15 and you could see the effort and stress on all that work. FF14 ARR must have been crunch all the time. I'm glad it paid off in the end for both games.

Rodjer said:

Raging Spaniard elenarie Septimus Prime

Can confirm or deny.

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EA is a fantastic place to work. I cant speak for every studio because I dont have that kind of reach but it has made tremendous strides to improve the health of its employees. Big fan.

From Blizzard, as far as hours, it depends on the team but they offer fantastic benefits and the camaraderie and support systems at play are there to help you become a world class developer. They truly invest in the person and are committed to your growth.

Insomniac is amazing, from what I hear

Jam City is really great to work for

I hear really good things about Ubisoft in Canada

Gameloft was pretty bad

SOLDIER said:

Maybe loot boxes are really easy to program.

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Come on, thats reductive.

Making videogames is -not- easy. None of it is and everything is time consuming. The mistake lies in the thought that "Working more hours = things get done faster" That is absolutely NOT true and has been proven time and time again. I can get more done in a 40 hour week if Im well rested than I can in an exhausting, draining 60+ hour week. When you do longer hours you lose focus, you dont work as intensely, you create more bugs which have to be fixed by others, your temper suffers, your health worsens and you eventually dont get as much done as you think you are.

Its not always about "just" crunch, if you read some reviews youll find that some companies acknowledge how fucked crunch is and make up for it as best they can with vacation, benefits such as extra daycare or working from home days. The R* issue is that they crunched like crazy and theyre not treated well enough to compensate for it. Sony Santa Monica also does insane crunch but its employer base seems a lot healthier

Most game development is unseen, most game companies are making games you never heard of, or that you see on the app store for a week. Most games in dev get cancelled and never come out, some people even spend the majority of their careers having never shipped a game. Any game or company you hear about on a big forum like Era is actually the minority, so keep that in mind when asking yourself if theres any worker friendly game companies, theres plenty!

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...-best-places-to-work-in-the-uk-games-industry

The Best Places To Work in the UK video games industry are:

Creative Assembly, Criterion, Double Eleven, Frontier, Ghost Games UK, Hutch Games, Lockwood Publishing, Lucid Games, Mojiworks, NaturalMotion, Playground Games, PlayStation London Studio, Rocksteady, Sega Hardlight, Space Ape Games, Studio Gobo, Unity, Ustwo and Wish Studios.

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At this rate, game companies are gonna have to start putting some kind of "Now Crunch Free!" label on their games.

Well, only last weekend my beloved Double Eleven here in the UK, for the 2nd year running was voted as one of the best developers to work for in the UK 8).

I don't know about verified, but from watching just about every video/documentary that Double Fine has released it definitely seems like there is a very positive work environment.

Motion Twin

You cant generalize huge companies like EA or Activision. Each Studio/Team have their own work culture and environment.

Namyu said:

Impressive for a Japanese developer

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There has been a general trend for Japanese managers to push the importance of a work-life balance, especially after multiple people have been found dead in their offices.

Sega recently bragged that they have cut 80% of long overtime hours, which they count as people who work more than an extra 100 hours a month. That's still a lot of hours you can work and not count.

It's getting better, but the big cultural change that needs to happen, not just in Japan but everywhere, is the idea that it's heroic to work more than your 40 hours a week. People see it as noble, that you're doing it for something you believe in.

Nintendo said:

The work culture in Japan doesn't bode well with your hopes here. No way Nintendo have good working environment for making their big games. No way.

It's not just the game industry. The whole work culture in Japan is bad.

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Nintendo has an excellent reputation in Japan for being perhaps the best video game company to work for. The base salaries are very high/bonuses are also good, you can actually take all your paid leave off (big deal in Japan), and overtime is incredibly low compared to the industry average. If you want to have a good work-life balance at a video game company in Japan, Nintendo is the best choice.The only negatives that I have personally heard about working at Nintendo in Japan is that the work culture is a little too conservative (fairly top-down structure still), they can be too slow to entrust important tasks to their new employees, and that training could be better.

At Colossal Order, the developer of Cities: Skylines (and a bunch of other games), the employees aren't allowed to work overtime.

From interviews, I get the feeling that Nintendo doesn't really have problems with "crunch time" per se—where everyone is forced to work long hours because of mismanaged deadlines—but that says nothing about Nintendo's normal working hours.

Here's a good interview, for example. During the development of Breath of the Wild, they would occasionally halt development and force the entire staff to play the current build of the game from beginning to end in order to get everyone on the same page.

Fujisawa:
Wow. Did everybody play it together?

Aonuma:
Yes. In the early stage of development, it took about a day to play it, but at the end, it took about a week to see the whole image. When that happens, you want to just eliminate the process, but you can't. The rule was that everybody plays it and we stuck to it till the end.

――Well, it sounds ridiculous to me, but you're saying it as if it's nothing. How many people were there on the development team?

Aonuma:
Let's see. Programmers, designers, sound effects team……I guess at the end, there were 300 people playing the game.

――300 playing for a week. That must have cost you a lot of money. Not only that, you played it how many times…?

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This doesn't sound like the actions of a development team that's pressed for time. It makes sense—Nintendo is the most experienced game developer in the world, so if any company is capable of good project management they ought to be one of them.

Of course, we still don't know anything about what Nintendo's normal working hours are like. Could be good, could not be.

Imran said:

It's getting better, but the big cultural change that needs to happen, not just in Japan but everywhere, is the idea that it's heroic to work more than your 40 hours a week. People see it as noble, that you're doing it for something you believe in.

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Right.

Edit:

guru-guru said:

Nintendo has an excellent reputation in Japan for being perhaps the best video game company to work for. The base salaries are very high/bonuses are also good, you can actually take all your paid leave off (big deal in Japan), and overtime is incredibly low compared to the industry average. If you want to have a good work-life balance at a video game company in Japan, Nintendo is the best choice.The only negatives that I have personally heard about working at Nintendo in Japan is that the work culture is a little too conservative (fairly top-down structure still), they can be too slow to entrust important tasks to their new employees, and that training could be better.

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Ah! Good to hear.

Rockstar, Naughty Dog and CDPR are the "Big 3" in terms of terrible work conditions

they also tend to be the most beloved of developers, which is somewhat interesting for another discussion

Media Molecule. They don't do crunch time.

That's probably why Dreams is still in the making since before the launch of the PS4 :)