Bugs are easier to fix later down the line (well most of the time anyway).
Ex-Naughty Dog animator: "ND's games success is due in large part to Sony's deep pocket funding delays rather than skill alone"
- Thread starter Lant_War
- Start date
Bugs are easier to fix later down the line (well most of the time anyway).
Oh I know, just thought I'd contribute to the conversation. Suppose I didn't really need to reply to you specifically.
I'm sorry but 46 hours a week is nowhere close to "crunch hours"
you're effectively putting 1 extra hour a day, which can just be working through lunch
those are more than manageable/reasonable work hours. Real crunch is putting 50-55+ hours a week over several months
If true, needs to be addressed, by the industry as a whole, but let's not pretend we don't have our share of responsibility, asking for news and announcements all day, then asking for bug free games at release or complaining or tinfoil hat theories when delays happen. And of course being selfish sometimes and wanting games for a fraction of their cost.
They should have been afforded more time but EA probably pushed it out the door. Obviously its better than overworking your employees, but the poster was using it as an example of a game that proves that you don't need to when its not the best example.
You mean the one out of context tweet that is literally the OP title? It would've hurt as much as it would have to choose a better tweet out of the thread to express the point. MY point wasn't meant to disparage the undeniable fact of horrible working conditions some of the employees are put under. My point was that saying they have deep enough pockets to fund delays but not pay more to keep better talent as if it wasn't a cutthroat competitive industry on top of saying it would have been delivered a year earlier (assuming with no crunch?) seems counterproductive to shining a spotlight on the problem.
Disney pushed* to ride The Mandalorian and SW movie buzz.
I used JFO because it is pretty recent and sold really well and Respawn said that they avoid Crunch as much as possible.
there's been too much smoke with regard to ND's labor practices. pretty confident i won't be buying any more of their games until they address this directly.
I find it really sad that some people care more about the brand behind their favorite games than the people actually making them.
Not even close, unfortunately. There are far worse places in this industry, but sadly people don't talk about them.
Well this is certainly disappointing. High calibre ex-employee coming out like this must mean that the workload/culture is need of some serious overhaul.
Not surprising why Developers feels like home under Sony. There must be relatively less pressure, more funding and time to explore what they wanna make.
I am not justifying crunch but who hasn't witnessed crunch in their jobs unrelated to the field of gaming or general artists.
I am not justifying crunch but who hasn't witnessed crunch in their jobs unrelated to the field of gaming or general artists.
The ''Naughty God'' defenders in this thread are a f*cking disgrace, you're literally trying to downplay the severity of their mismanagement & terrible work culture as if you know better. This guy is one of the most prolific animator in the industry and he is a honest, down to earth person. Who are you to ''disagree'' with him when he is pretty much just laying out the facts?
''Stop saying bad things about our based Naughty Gods please I want my Last of Us Twooooo who gives a shit about the animators''
Listen closely you pathetic denial pony. Naughty Dog is dying, slowly, they are losing tons of talents every year and those people will never come back, ever.
You really think the animations are still going to be the same quality without this guy?
You really think the creative direction are still going to be the same without Bruce & Amy?
The reason why they are delaying so much is because their team is struggling, the seniors are all gone and all they have is a bunch of new guys working their ass off to get the same results, and soon those people will leave as well. They can not retain any talent whatsoever.
''Stop saying bad things about our based Naughty Gods please I want my Last of Us Twooooo who gives a shit about the animators''
Listen closely you pathetic denial pony. Naughty Dog is dying, slowly, they are losing tons of talents every year and those people will never come back, ever.
You really think the animations are still going to be the same quality without this guy?
You really think the creative direction are still going to be the same without Bruce & Amy?
The reason why they are delaying so much is because their team is struggling, the seniors are all gone and all they have is a bunch of new guys working their ass off to get the same results, and soon those people will leave as well. They can not retain any talent whatsoever.
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Have you read what the guy wrote? It's as far away from "feeling like home" as possible.
Naughty Dog having to hire movie animators and inexperienced talent says otherwise.
Cooper said that they have a bad reputation in the LA area and no senior devs want to work for them and LA is very competitive.
They need to change the culture after TLOU 2, because I'm 100% sure that a lot of people will once again leave the studio.
I am glad so many people are quoting this because it is 100% accurate
Anything more than 37.5 hours (standard) is crunch. Believing otherwise is the mindset that lets corporations fuck everyone over.
Low experienced employee retention rate = Developers feel like home under Sony?
The Story animators seem fine, but gameplay animators are going through hell....Jonathan left ND and he is one of the best Game Animators in the industry.
Are you joking right now?
Because, usually when someone says somewhere feels like home....they dont want to leave.
Or am i taking the saying out of context
Or they could hire more talent and project managers
But that would cut into profits
The thing that surprised me most is the terrible reputation that ND seems to have in the industry, that's not good. The thing that surprised me the least are the posters in this thread going through this guys old tweets looking for something to discredit him
How many hours is the standar on US ?
8 hs at day for five days it's normal here where i live in almost every job
Such as? What kind of conditions one is suffering when it's a "far" worse condition that the ones depicted here?
This is not a good take, the end product is not worth the human sacrifice and should account that into the review score to send a message to other devs.
Yeah, 8x5=40.
5x30 mins break = 37.5 hours working. Anything more than that is ridiculous.
Apparently feeling at home = overworking employees to the point of hospitalization
Read the Twitter thread.
This about most senior people leaving the company due to terrible working conditions like being hospitalised through overwork on last year's gameplay demo.
The point being made is that senior game animators don't want contract work at Naughty Dog because they have a terrible reputation for overwork.
So they have to fill the ranks with juniors and people from film animation.
This means that the game takes longer.
And they straight up said this game could have come out a year earlier if they hadn't lost experienced people.
You completely missed the point.
There's also a lot of developers who in my opinion do far better games with smaller budget and less development time. Actually good, well thought out mechanics and inventive level design or good writing doesnt just come with throwing money and time at it.. you can polish something forever but If it doesnt do anything interesting at core then its still just extremely polished mediocre game. Naughty Dog has amazing presentation and their work IS extremely polished but the Uncharted games didn't do anything special when it comes to gameplay.
Many studios this gen have made projects that are bigger than the size of TLOU2.
None of us know the actual size of TLoU P2. What we've seen is but a fraction of the entire game according to Neil Druckmann, so let's just leave it at that and move onto the pertinent questions and opinions.
No?
No?
Yep, reading about the final paycheck has most definitely dampened my view of ND.
To the previous comments how Cooper is throwing his former co-workers under the bus, dismissing their talent etc.
Cooper isn't throwing his ex co-workers under the bus. It's the opposite, since he is willing to say this publicly without being anonymous and therefore giving further credibility how badly the studio is being managed. There are only few people who were thrown under the bus (and deservedly so): Druckmann, Welsh and maybe other senior employees who run the place/departments. I'm sure majority of the employees are relieved/glad that ND's awful work practices are reported and therefore put pressure to the management to change the work culture. Props to Cooper.
Cooper isn't throwing his ex co-workers under the bus. It's the opposite, since he is willing to say this publicly without being anonymous and therefore giving further credibility how badly the studio is being managed. There are only few people who were thrown under the bus (and deservedly so): Druckmann, Welsh and maybe other senior employees who run the place/departments. I'm sure majority of the employees are relieved/glad that ND's awful work practices are reported and therefore put pressure to the management to change the work culture. Props to Cooper.
On the one hand, I think this is indefensible. If they need greater capacity they need to employ more people simple as that, not force their employees to work over the odds.
On the other, this is the perspective of someone who has left the company on bad terms. so there is a degree of personal optics there. Having said that, Schreir's recent article seems back up nearly everything he said. I mean I am not someone who just goes on the devil I know - I know these kinds of practices are rife through the industry and from what I understand wouldnt consider this an anomoly. For instance, I know that Rockstar also crunch massively. However, this shit needs proper unionised period.
On the other, this is the perspective of someone who has left the company on bad terms. so there is a degree of personal optics there. Having said that, Schreir's recent article seems back up nearly everything he said. I mean I am not someone who just goes on the devil I know - I know these kinds of practices are rife through the industry and from what I understand wouldnt consider this an anomoly. For instance, I know that Rockstar also crunch massively. However, this shit needs proper unionised period.
50-55 hours a week is obviously ridiculous but that doesn't make 46h a week okay. I don't see why consistently doing 6h of overtime every week should be considered reasonable.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically since you're being reasonable, but this keeps coming up and I don't know what people are expecting. If the content of the Tweets are true, then I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where he left on good terms.
There doesn't need to be a secret petty reason he's upset and is playing things up to discredit them, when he's been pretty forthright about what his issues with ND have been.
I've had that happen to me at another studio. I also had a (now closed) studio lay me and another person in my department off, our company emails and key cards were deactivated minutes before we were even called into our leads' office, the leads gave us this speech about how much they hated to have to do this but all departments were having to cut down on staff to save money, and that they would help us find another studio for work with recommendations and stuff.
We were both escorted directly out of the building afterward, without getting to return to our desks, which felt incredibly at odds with the tone of the meeting. The other guy had to text another person in our department to bring him his car keys, before we managed to get someone from HR to just let us back in the building to collect our things.
When I got home I filed for unemployment, and the process took months because I told the unemployment office exactly what happened, and that there had been layoffs at the studio, but apparently the lead for our department was claiming that we were actually fired and that we were lying. Unemployment called me and asked what all I'd been told when I was let go, and I recounted it as best I could, and then the lead told them that I was a terrible worker with poor output, and that I was sleeping on the job. All of which was untrue, I'd just wrapped an entire project that I'd been asked to take over because I was the most knowledgeable on developing for the PSVita, and had just had an excellent performance and peer review. Eventually my unemployment benefits did get approved, but obviously the lead from that studio didn't do anything to help me land another job.
I'm not saying this kind of stuff is exclusive to the gaming industry but man even apart from my own first hand experience, I've had friends have equally bizarre and shady send offs.
That is absolutely fucking awful. I'm sorry you had to endure that.
Exactly my take as well. The comment about the game being linear and focus tested is irrelevant imo, it's just a high-level description of overall game and development process.
What person would leave a company on good terms with these working conditions? 🤔
Sounds like internal management issues to me. Does anyone know how bad crunch was for Santa Monica studios on God of war? I know Rockstar is another horror story when it comes to crunch/pressure.
The bit in Jason's article with work being scrapped after a year of development at a moments notice is troubling. Sounds like people who are in higher positions can't make up their mind in what they want. And that comes down to vision/story. And the people who have to do all of this work, artists, animators, coders, gameplay designers all get screwed over because they now have to work harder or worse start over.
Have a complete story/good proof of concept gameplay wise then execute. Marvel rarely makes last minute changes mid production and I bet there's crunch for a lot of production hands on sets/costumes/props VFX ect.
The bit in Jason's article with work being scrapped after a year of development at a moments notice is troubling. Sounds like people who are in higher positions can't make up their mind in what they want. And that comes down to vision/story. And the people who have to do all of this work, artists, animators, coders, gameplay designers all get screwed over because they now have to work harder or worse start over.
Have a complete story/good proof of concept gameplay wise then execute. Marvel rarely makes last minute changes mid production and I bet there's crunch for a lot of production hands on sets/costumes/props VFX ect.