Quick reminder that people like that don't view others as human beings. To them you are merely a drain on resources to be optimised.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Eurogamer: The human cost of Red Dead Redemption 2
- Thread starter antonz
- Start date
- Status
Would have assumed that requires some government intervention but I guess unions can just be created and managed by industries and the people with them? Anyway that as well, you're right.
That selective outrage/pearl clutching is a thing? Japanese work culture is just as if not more toxic than western work culture? Examples of this are found everywhere?
Don't get me wrong, Rockstar sounds like the kind of company I'd never work at, but I have different priorities than some people. I get hit up by recruiters all the time for better paying positions in my industry than I have right now, which I politely decline, because right now I've got a new born and a dying family member I need to attend to. Earlier this week we had to take the baby to the hospital because she had a fever and needed a bunch of tests. I told my boss I'd be online late the next day- she told me to take the whole day off and be with my family. I haven't been in the office all week and probably won't go in tomorrow because I can work remotely and don't have meetings.
Don't get me wrong, I've worked weekends before at this job to meet deadlines, but I know when push comes to shove they know family comes first and won't question me on that. That's worth more than an extra 20k a year or my name on a more prestigious product right now. I make a choice to take an industry average salary to maintain the work life balance that I need right now. If I wanted to move the sliders from quality of life to money or prestige I could, but I've done it in the past and hated my life. And part of my satisfaction now is having that past experience teaching me money isn't everything.
So if working in the Rockstar culture sucks for you, don't do it. I know that's easier said than done and that it's not easy to quit and move on, but that story about the new father is over 10 years old at this point. Anyone going into it now should know what kind of company it is and what kind of expectations there are. People have asked me if I'd be willing to do that kind of work in my industry for lots of money, and it's a hard pass every time
That's a really damning article. The idea of a boss intimating that it's probably best for you if you work as much as possible is properly shit. It's bullying.
EDIT: removed a stupidly obvious "sent from my iPhone" remark. I deserve that kind of mockery.
I'm not making a point, I'm just prattling. If I said R* is horrible for the way they treat their employees while rocking a RDR2 icon you'd say I was a hypocrite while most decent anime comes at the price of many Japanese lives at super low pay and Korean fill-in artists at an even lower/barely livable wage with madness inducing overtime and bloody fingers. I feel a little waifu icon is just as hypocritical as the R* logo or my Link icon. I'm just one of many dumb humans on ERA though so it's not as if my opinion carries any more weight than yours. I do sincerely feel that it's good and humane of people here to care about the workers at R*, no joke.
I have an acquaintance I first met in Kyoto when working there in late February of 2017, a bit before the Switch launch. He worked on the map and HUD systems for BotW, obviously lining up with my own ERA icon and user name. His wife said she didn't see him for 3 or 4 days at a time and that their then one year old child "didn't know his father until recently". Until recently meaning up until BotW was in a shippable state. This is par the course for almost all company life in this country. I'm sure there are nice exceptions, however.
And as I've posted here before I work through a Japanese entertainment company (pretty small) and often work 80+ hours a week. Yesterday was my first full day off in two months and I still worked in the morning a few hours. I guess I'm so used to it here I'm numb? I feel it's really sad anyone lives like that(the previously mentioned people, I actually love my work) to create entertainment for the masses but I'm also not going to jump on ERA and act like I haven't benefitted greatly over the years from these kinds of sacrifices just so I can be entertained or find life more convenient.
What you mentioned about post-launch crunch doesn't seem kosher at all, and I can certainly see how a Western company like R* is going to draw way more attention to itself and stick out more in the public mind than many of these Japanese game and anime studios that non-Japanese people don't really look at as closely and are less likely to have staff that would spill the beans on a public forum like Twitter.
You have to opt-out of the working time directive to work more than an average of 48 hours per week over a rolling 17 week period. So you could work basically just over 9 and a half hours Monday to Friday and still comply with European law . Since it's an average over a 17 week period some weeks you could work more than 48 hours. Lunches are not included in the hours. And the big gotcha neither is voluntary unpaid overtime (i.e staying in the office unpaid just to get something finished): it's the latter that a lot of unscrupulous employers will pressure folk on.
The opt-out is meant to be strictly optional and shouldn't affect your employment status. Your mileage may vary with that though.
I wish there was some way of getting back at these fucks. I'm not one to pirate, but really that's the only thing I can think of - and even then, I imagine that too will somehow end up hurting the employees
PS Skittles: I've seen that comic before and still made the same oblique reference in this last post. And I worked at Apple for half a decade! Good call out ;_;
Most of this overtime is pretty much "voluntary". I mean, laws might protect you but in fields where you are taught this is the way and there's a lot of loopholes it's easy to get by.
Working culture is the worst really.
I just said it's not new and not exclusive to Japanese game development or even games development. I know the Tomb Raider PS team had to work insane hours, The main programmer of Sonic X on the Saturn worked himself into Hospital, read the insane hours the AM#2 Shenmue team had to work. There are plenty of horror stories about hours staff work, not just in the games industry, but films (I love the THING and Rob Bottin worked himself in to Hospital on that film) music and sports industries
I think was seems different here, is the staff are expected to work such hours post crush period long after the game shipped and that can't be good for the staff of the industry really
Because they have enough money to add employees before the project even begins. Since they've been successful for so long they can 1) have the money to do so, and 2) have the foresight on roughly how long the project takes
I prefer the other answers people have given me (e.g you cant solve all problems by increasing employees, or that it is a solveable problem with no motivation to do so since there is no union). Brooke's law is too dependant on the idea of a late project.
This is really horrible to read through. The nastiest of things is that even though some of these practices are prohibited by UK law they make their employees sign a waiver of their rights. Like how is this shit even legal?
Work laws are full of loopholes that companies constantly use to have workers work as much as possible.
I haven't but I'm going to check it out thanks to your recommendation.
FUUUUUUUUUUUCK this company. Fuck them!
Why are the higher-ups even acting like this? They're one of the most profitable and financial secure gaming developers in the industry. GTA6 could be a fart in a paper bag and it'll still make billions of dollars. And yet this is how they treat their employees.
I shouldn't have bought RDR2, at least not brand new.
I actually didn't know about those other examples like the programmer for Sonic X. I appreciate that you mentioned those, thank you!
Unions and laws on working conditions that can't be wriggled out of.
There is no other way.
Even if we pressure rockstar to fix it there are a 1000 other companies where stuff like this goes on and they do not have the publicity to enable public pressure.
What the fuck does any of that have to do with anything? Especially having an avatar? Where in this thread was it ever implied that crazy crunch was a western exclusive thing or that it was game exclusive?
You don't solve problems by burying your head and yelling quit to everyone who cant take. By having discussions, bringing shit to light for the masses and having it be generally understood that "yo this is not nornal or okay and it needs to be addressed" that's how you solve problems.
You say this like because something is old its common knowledge. That's not the case.
It's not hypocritical to like something but also acknowledge the terrible conditions it was made in and want them to change. That's not how hypocracy works. And no one in this thread mentioned anything about Japanese industry being better. But the thread amd article is an investigation into Rockstar on the biggest game of the year so why the fuck wouldn't people be talking about Rockstar specifically in this thread.
My god.... reading the GTA4 one where the management knew the guy just had a newborn and literally fucks him over just because. Rockstar's main HQ is in New York right? They got be breaking some NY laws by doing this.
Why even work in such hellish environments? I get it, we all need a job to make money and pay our bills. But there have to be other jobs to take instead of doing that to yourself. I'd rather be unemployed and poor than working under those conditions. No way I would ever endure that shit.
Disgusting behaviour, and entirely unnecessary. These 'managers' should be fired. Unfortunately, it sounds like the Housers running the show are as rotten as the rest and couldn't give two shits about some code-monkey's newborn child if it could potentially affect their bottom line.
Wankers.
Wankers.
99% likelihood of it not affecting their bottom line either.
I'm pretty sure that if this employee had been able to see the new born his production at other times would have been greatly increased.
A lot of software companies work expecting burnout.
You make your workers burnout in two years and then replace them. Rinse and repeat.
Others make you work like hell for a period of time to get "higher up" with the expectation of money.
Others it's "passion" and "for the team".
The video-game industry has found itself suffering from all of three. It's a bad combination.
You make your workers burnout in two years and then replace them. Rinse and repeat.
Others make you work like hell for a period of time to get "higher up" with the expectation of money.
Others it's "passion" and "for the team".
The video-game industry has found itself suffering from all of three. It's a bad combination.
I mean, you're right, but I've met people like this before, the type who'd look at you incomprehensibly if you didn't give a swift affirmative to their request for 9 women to produce a baby for them in 1 month.
The bad PR is the best way to hit them very hard. Good on Kotaku and Eurogamer to bring this to the table.
I've already worked 64 hours this week and I have one more 12 hour shift
Will be doing 3 months of this lol
But it's not software engineering job or regular day job and I enjoy it very different
Will be doing 3 months of this lol
But it's not software engineering job or regular day job and I enjoy it very different
Yeah, I know that type.
We have a few of them at work that thinks throwing money/resources at a problem will solve anything and the more money they throw at something the faster it will happen. Then they are surprised when nothing has happened after a few months because the team of consultants they purchased have no plan or direction.
Yup, couldn't work more than 6 months at a call centre, that stuff was hell on earth. I remember this one dude who always pretended to be tough and all, cry in front of me and tell me the work was just stressing him too much.
But yea, it sucked really bad.
Still, gave me perspective. It's thanks to that job that i'm gonna be successful in other ways.
The worst part is that that genuinely used it as a point of pride and had no idea what's wrong with it. Management 101 like. What utter assholes.
As someone who just left a similar work environment recently in the video game industry, there's a couple of reasons:
1) You like the people you work with. When you are in the muck, all you think about sometimes is "if I leave these friends of mine will have to carry my workload" rather than putting yourself first.
2) Apathy. You are already used to being treated poorly, so you don't see just how bad it really is, and you even find yourself defending, making excuses and finding silver linings.
3) The job market can be scary. People can trick themselves into thinking that the job they have is all that they can get, especially if they don't have a strong work history or educational background. Their self worth is not where it should be, so they become susceptible to being taken advantage of.
4) Prestige. Companies trick employees with things like "Here is your new game room!" Or "Look at all these great articles people are writing about our game!" When in reality these things are mostly just smoke and mirrors designed to make you feel good and mask the bad.
5) Ruthless execution of dissent. A lot of video game companies will target "bad seeds", such as those that want to start unions or change the word conditions and ostracize them. Even worse, they've conditioned the rest of the work force to do it too, making things like unionizing them all a very tough uphill battle.
I'm so glad to be out of the company I used to work for, but I see many of my ex-co-workers exhibiting a lot of the signs some of these Rockstar employees are. "Well I don't know where else to get a job", "Well here I'm established already", "But the company lets me leave early for school one day if I do OT the other 4" when many companies do that these days, all illusions that are very hard to break. It's all preying on people that don't know their own value and underpaying them as much as possible while taking advantage of them. It helps when there's a huge line up of people that don't know better to take your place.
Everything I've read about this sounds absolutely appalling. How are unions in the US, is it possible for game developers to just gather up and go on strike?
I was on the verge of getting RDR2 by virtue of the reviews alone, even though I generally don't really click with Rockstars games on the whole. Not that my individual sale really matters to them, but they've lost it either way.
Games are not worth breaking people over. Damn sociopaths.
Games are not worth breaking people over. Damn sociopaths.
At least they made something everyone is excited for in the end. I do overtime to finish commercials noone wants to see anyway. :)
Damn...you are right about that one.
Work on GTA VI for PS5/Nextbox will be brutal.
Overtime isnt the issue...thats expected and part of many jobs.
The crunch culture and exploiting the employees to get them to put in those crazy overtime hours for such long time periods is crazy.
Doesnt really matter how many people enjoy the end product when you force a employee to choose between his newborn baby and his job...even though he gets his work done - just so you can prove a point.
This is also what I decided to do. Fuck Rockstar.
Thank you though to Kotaku and Eurogamer for being willing to do these stories and publish them (I'm sure they will get shit for it from Rockstar/2K) and the brave employees willing to speak up. Hopefully their words will make a difference.
I've been here 7 years and yeah I've learned a tonne about people, business and stress over that time. I'm finally transitioning to the accounts department and escaping the customer phone lines though.
Sadly they are many more, not least in the journalism industry too.
I'm reading the article and I've just read the part yuo quoted - so I came immediately here to quote it and comment about it.
This is something which goes beyond crunches. A person should be evaluated for what he actually did, not only because of his presence. If someone is able to complete his work in 12 hours, it's fine. But if someone is able to complete the same amount of work (or maybe more) in 8 hours, then why isn't fine? I have no words... I hope that this situations isn't the same for other important studios.
- Status