March 4th, 2010 @ Sway Bar, London
UK studios converge to battle over who's the cleverest - have you booked your place yet?
Thursday April 22nd, 2009 @ The Brewery, London
The countdown to the MCV Awards 2010 has begun – with date, venue and categories announced.
July 14th, 2010 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
98 per cent not paid official overtime despite average crunch of ten to 15 hours per week
Ninety-eight per cent of game developers across the world do not receive paid overtime, despite being frequently asked to work an extra ten to fifteen hours per week.
That’s according to over 350 industry professionals who had their say on working conditions through Develop’s Quality of Life in 2009 survey, the results of which have been published online today.
The survey was launched in part as a result of the controversy surrounding the International Game Developers Association and, in particular, Epic CEO Dr. Michael Capps, who suggested that Epic’s staff would be expected to work 60 hour weeks as part of the corporate culture.
The resulting argument split the IGDA membership between those that felt the organisation should be making a stand against such practices, and those who thought otherwise.
Similarly, our interview with Peter Molyneux highlighted the changes Lionhead had made in its corporate culture in order to - in his own words- “stop ruining people’s lives”.
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The survey aimed to get an overview as to the current work/life balance experienced by regular everyday game studio employees, and explore how game developers felt the industry had improved since the EA_spouse incident, now almost at its five year anniversary.
The results – which you can find here – show that, while the 46 working hours per week figure is similar to the UK average of 44 (2001 data), only two percent of respondents received official overtime pay, with a surprising 18 per cent receiving no bonuses whatsoever above their basic salary.
“It’s critical that the UK industry invests in its workforce,” said Tiga CEO Richard Wilson when presented with the results. “We don’t have tax breaks or government support to help the games industry in general, so game developers have to rely on the skills and experience of their employees. That’s a key competitive advantage for us, I think, because we do have a very skilled and very experienced workforce.”
“There is obviously a particularly intensive crunch period towards the end of projects, but one of the important things shown in this survey was that the problem was somewhat down to unrealistic scheduling in order to meet publisher demands."
"I suppose the response to that is that one would hope that over time developers in the UK will become more effective in dealing with publishers, and publishers will hopefully become more ameniable to the working needs of developers in order to make their schedules more reasonable. The trend towards self-publishing will also give developers more freedom to schedule their work, and would hopefully diminish the tendency towards crunch working.”
One of the other interesting outcomes of the survey is that the overwhelming majority of respondents felt that games industry bodies should monitor and potentially restrict working hours.
“That’s a very interesting outcome, actually,” said Wilson. “Tiga is a trade association for MDs and CEOs, but I think it’s important from our perspective to represent the games development industry as a whole. Ultimately it’s the CEOs and MDs of studios that pay for Tiga and keep it functioning, but I think they’d be surprised if we had such a narrow perspective that we didn’t cover the industry at large, and that of course covers the workforce.”
In fact, the organisation had already made efforts to tackle the quality of life problem that stops the industry from attracting talent it might otherwise.
“We recently set up an HR group for HR professionals in the industry, in order to share knowledge and develop best practice,” Wilson explained.
“It’s a small group at the moment, but we’ve had some leading companies involved and sharing information, so I hope that over the coming months ahead we will develop best practice procedures for the industry. It’s at an early stage, but we take the interests of the workforce very seriously, as do I think most of the MDs and CEOs.”
To check out the full results, click here.
I'm so glad I decided to move away from this stinkhole of an industry after my company was bullied into sale.
From my experience, many devs dont have the personal strength to tell their bosses that there being badly treated. Very badly treated, in fact. its a sad state of affairs,
I find it quite amusing that 13.4% don't do crunch time. No doubt that's the 13% that have the power to tell the other 87% that they are doing the crunch time.
[rant]What this industry needs is a union to protect the people doing the work for free. It would also help against those companies that try and make "opting out of the Working Time Directive" part of the contract. In any other industry, the attitude towards employees would be considered exploitation. I mean, how many devs have worked for a company that has tried the "if you make something at home, it's ours" clause in the contract?
The fact is that while gutless businessmen, who consider a developer's "spare time" as a valuable resource, continue to run the industry; the industry simply won't grow.
The current development cycle usually is...
1) Define a project of fixed length and agree with devs.
2) Get almost to the end of that period and then agree to whatever changes the publisher demands regardless of the extra time it will take.
3) Tell the devs they're crunching, so they can do all that extra work in the same time as originally agreed. This stage is usually accompanied by guilt trips, fake bonus promises etc... just to make them feel more obliged.[/rant]
Sorry, I love this industry, I wouldn't do any other job... but the industry stinks on a frequent basis and it needs cleaning.
Consider that we are a young industry, a little under four decades. There are issues that we might see resolved when our children are thinking of joining the industry.
The comments by Richard Wilson of TIGA, while some people might feel sceptical, represent an interesting start. Obviously, TIGA is unlikely to be for us what Equity is to actors or the WGA is to writers in the US, but they do have some sway with the CEOs and the management.
I think something needs to change, but the current economic 'crisis' makes employees reluctant to push and gives managers a little bit more 'justification' when they tell you that the bonuses are cancelled.
Was in the industry in the early 90's and saw this coming a mile away. When Microsoft ported SGI graphics down to the card level on pc's.... it was only a matter of time before the high priests of graphics would end up being graphics monkeys. There are some awesome parts of the industry, like mocap, design, etc. But I feel really sorry for the "grunts".
