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Kotaku R* QA Studio With Hardest Crunch Told Today That Supposed Mandatory Overtime Is Optional
- Thread starter Dinobot
- Start date
Or they could manage the project better so 100 hour weeks aren't needed, or they could hire more staff to deal with it. If they have to delay then sure, I would forgo my fun for a few weeks/months so the people making the game have actual healthy working conditions.
Red Dead 2 is GAAS game, I doubt that the crunch will end at launch.
Just to clarify, now that the game is finished we want you to know that all overtime is optional.
What the fuck is this take?
Yeah, people wanna get into the industry via QA, but the stigma QA gets is because they're clearly not respected in game companies that see the job as low effort because they're not seen as valuable which is bullshit. People who wanna play games all day dont just get accepted into QA and that stereotype is a harmful perception.
Yeah, good QA is not easy to come by, but good lord, your posts are just displaying so little respect for an entire profession.
Like you said, good QA is hard to come by. I can only speak from my own personal experience and just about everything I've seen online, but video game QA is full of mostly young people who like the idea of playing games for a job, go at it super hardcore for a while and burnout. The churn is insane. I'm honestly surprised I'm seeing so many people come out calling me an idiot for my posts, because it flies in the face of everything I've taken for granted in terms of the video game QA industry up until know. Definitely been enlightening to see so many people view it as a respectable career (outside of more leadership and management positions).
I can only speak as a programmer but we are taught to crunch since we step foot in college. It's just how it is.
Most of the time is implicit but a lot of companies just tell you upfront "you will crunch". Fortunately my job is good with that but it's rare altought some people absolutely work more than 8 hours a day and nobody bats an eye. I even did it for a while until I realized that I was helping people set up bad deadlines. It's just engrained in us.
We can talk about it, I think it's important, but video games are very closely tied with the tech industry and it's not something that you simply unionize and a lot of the workers are just taught that crunching is how you do things.
Video games have the advantage that consumers care about the creators so I hope that we can make some noise to improve things but the part that comes from the tech side will always be tied to this culture.
The only optional things are what you pay for, if it's a job optional means you do it or you will be replaced by someone who does.
There's a wide variety of QA in the industry, and a good chunk of it is not entry-level position type work. There are certainly those even within the industry that take it for granted, but they'll usually be relieved of that kind of ignorance the first time they royally fuck up certification. Expensive mistakes get made.
To be fair while Spiderman without a doubt is a big game, I don't think you can really compare it to a rockstar game, very few companies are making games the way rockstar is making them, they're just on a different scale. In my opinion Blizzard is the only juggernaut that competes in the same league as Rockstar in term of scope of game development, and they're the ones I'm the most interested about when it comes to crunch and how they handle it, but sadly I haven't heard much information coming from them in this whole situation.
I worked for a third party (outsourced) QA company for 4 years. Most QA people are just trying to get their foot into the door of the larger industry, working absolute minimum wage for companies that largely treat them like crap.
One of the only ways to stand out from the hoards of other people at your meat grinder of a company is to throw yourself at projects for more than 40 hours a week, because at some of these companies just getting on a 40 hours a week project is difficult enough.
I sacrificed myself to crazy OT (at one point doing 80 hours a week for a AAA game close to release) and it did pay off at my company by allowing me to scale the corporate ladder (as I was seen as someone who would make "sacrifices") but there was a massive sacrifice that came with it.
Even with all that OT, you are still talking about a minimum wage job, so the OT really just helps you have a bit of savings, nevermind anything else. You don't get a pension, you often don't get a RRSP, and as mentioned in this thread, a lot of devs often have a combative relationship with you, to the point where each project generally has a handbook (often off the record) of "how" to speak to the devs. For example, on one project, you weren't allowed to describe an expected game behaviour with "should" because the devs had gotten really catty about that and respond with "Well are you a dev?" to someone who used that phrase.
These are the same devs that can tell your team lead or company, at any point, that they no longer want you on the project for any reason and your company will happily comply in order to not lose business. And I have seen it happen to many people, regardless of how good they are at finding bugs.
QA is an absolutely thankless job, and it's where most of the abused work force is in the video game industry. If any sect of the game industry needs unionization, it's QA.
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Can't wait for them to grant permission to their minions employees so they can be post here and prove how wrong you guys are.
Shame on you
Shame on you
Sure. And it's not inaccurate in many cases.
But QA is still dev work whether coders and designers want to acknowledge that fact or not.
I still contend that no one (well, no one outside of QA) thinks of testers when they hear "developer" or "game dev."
This was similar to my experiences in entry level QA contracts as well. You're super disposable and its very common for most of the QA dept to be let go after most of the big holiday releases pass cert, or pass cert in general if nothing else is available to test. Also I saw a trend of programmers being snarky dicks to testers and treating them as lessers in responses to various bug reports. QA is absolutely treated as lower rung in certain studios, and especially in the tester mill places that do contracts for various companies at once.
People do. And those that don't obviously need to be educated on how software development actually works. If a coder's response to a bug against their code is to scowl at the QA that had the audacity to report the bug, that's a personality issue with that coder.
Crunch takes many forms at many companies.
I worked in QA at Visual Concepts for four years. Overtime was requested at specific times leading up to milestones, but there were enough of us testing that there was never a hint that you'd lose your job for not writing overtime. I rarely worked overtime during crunch, but was reliable when needed and worked hard, and made senior before I left. We had crunch, like most studios do, but it was well managed. In most industries the people who put in the most work will be noticed for promotion. This isn't specifically a game dev industry problem.
Some of the criticism here about management taking a tally of people working OT might be founded, but from my experience our manager needed to verify that we would have enough people to work through the test plans. If there weren't enough test hours scheduled, there would be risk of bugs not noticed, and he had to calculate for that in risk assessment getting sent to the producer.
I'm not suggesting things were the same at Rockstar. I didn't work there. I'd just state that there was at least one AAA developer who didn't force overtime.
I worked in QA at Visual Concepts for four years. Overtime was requested at specific times leading up to milestones, but there were enough of us testing that there was never a hint that you'd lose your job for not writing overtime. I rarely worked overtime during crunch, but was reliable when needed and worked hard, and made senior before I left. We had crunch, like most studios do, but it was well managed. In most industries the people who put in the most work will be noticed for promotion. This isn't specifically a game dev industry problem.
Some of the criticism here about management taking a tally of people working OT might be founded, but from my experience our manager needed to verify that we would have enough people to work through the test plans. If there weren't enough test hours scheduled, there would be risk of bugs not noticed, and he had to calculate for that in risk assessment getting sent to the producer.
I'm not suggesting things were the same at Rockstar. I didn't work there. I'd just state that there was at least one AAA developer who didn't force overtime.
I don't have a strong stance any way or the other but I can understand where those people are coming from. When people think of developers they think of people creating something, and QA doesn't really do that, it checks for mistakes in other people's work. It's still vital for the health and success of the game of course but they're not really seen as a full part of the creative process, kinda of like community managers in a way actually.
Yup
Even with using the third party contractor as a way to move blame away from the main publisher or dev if word of awful QA conditions is leaked out
QA is part of the development cycle though. Community managers work more as "after sales" or the go-between the customer and the company. They are different.
Hey, just wanted to jump in and defend QA. QA is development because it's baked into the process, and development tasks aren't considered done until they are tested for quality.
The attitude I'm seeing in this thread towards QA is why we get games like Bethesda bug fests (eventually fixed by mods, not the devs) and 50GB day one patches.
Also goes to show that video games are not really critical to anyone no matter how passionate everyone is about it. In the industry I work for if the QA and regression testing is not done right we are going to be dumping an entire production line on the next SW upgrade and the CEO will be flying to our customer site to apologize and taking a SW team to fix it asap. So our QA folks are well and good devs, not throw away people that are easily replaced.
Also goes to show that video games are not really critical to anyone no matter how passionate everyone is about it. In the industry I work for if the QA and regression testing is not done right we are going to be dumping an entire production line on the next SW upgrade and the CEO will be flying to our customer site to apologize and taking a SW team to fix it asap. So our QA folks are well and good devs, not throw away people that are easily replaced.
yeah I agree that they are part of the development cycle, I said that they are vital in fact in my post, but not being part of the actual creative part of development does carry a certain stigma both in the public and in the company's mind i would imagine. And yeah community managers wasn't the best example, Proof readers for things like books/magazines/comics are probably a better one, you usually don't associate those kind of "spot the mistakes" jobs as part of the "real deal".
There is still the online to come plus all the additional content and any bugs that are found by the players. Is the change too late? Sure, but it's a start.
In the UK you have to show that you tried to remedy the situation before you resigned and decided to claim CD. That usually means using the statutory grievance process that companies have to adhere to; if you don't agree with the outcome of that process you can still go to tribunal. You have to have a very good reason if you decide not to avail yourself of that process.
From my experience, overtime is usually contractually optional. As in, you can do overtime, but there is a limit to how much overtime you can do and you usually need written consent from a supervisor to do it, as is written in the contract.
In practice however, written consent and working within the hours stated in the labour laws literally never happens and it's more like "come in for overtime or you'll be reprimanded in such a way that makes it look like I'm not directly punishing you"
In practice however, written consent and working within the hours stated in the labour laws literally never happens and it's more like "come in for overtime or you'll be reprimanded in such a way that makes it look like I'm not directly punishing you"
As an "actual dev" by this forums standards I have to disagree, any company doing QA properly absolutely has them in design / engineering meetings to feedback on systems and help make them more friendly to the player. I've seen design for whole systems changed based on the feedback from QA, they absolutely are as essential as the other disciplines.
Sure, it's optional. If you don't like having a job. :^)
I've run into a large number of these "totally optional but not really" things. Don't buy it for a minute.
I've run into a large number of these "totally optional but not really" things. Don't buy it for a minute.
As a rule Naughty Dog doesn't hire producers or project managers. It's something they've touted as being proud of.
Why would you make this pedantic distinction that ultimately has no bearing on the fact that people shouldn't be overworked.
Oh wait, there it is:
Bitch all you want about other posters, the reality is that your earlier bad faith argument about "QA isn't dev work" was just to defend an entertainment product.
Fucking gamers.
It isn't. You can opt out of the EU regulation. I work in the healthcare sector and have worked in Germany and Austria. In 2015 they capped the weekly hours at 48 to comply with EU regulation but I don't know a single person who did not waive this and I still do 60+ hours a week most of the time.
I've always hated that, if the work culture pushes for it, if you are looked down on if you don't and it affects your performance reviews, impacts co-workers etc. Then it's not really "optional"
It's almost like that is one of a few reasons why gaming budgets and development blow out of proportion. Hmm, wonder what would stop that.
