Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"

Anything to do with games at all.
jawafour
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by jawafour » Wed Oct 17, 2018 4:32 pm

Rockstar are in the news again! Is *any* publicity good publicity?

BBC News wrote:The publisher of video game Grand Theft Auto V has been granted the right to search the homes of five people accused of making cheat software.

Source.

I know little about law... but is it often the case that a company is granted permission to search private properties for "evidence"? Isn't this something that the police would do if they suspect a law has been broken?

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Banjo
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Banjo » Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:27 pm

A follow-up to the question of 'how regular are these 100 hour weeks?'. I think it's fair to assume that they're not irregular occurences, given both GTAV and RDR2 have been delayed from their originally announced release date. Does that not indicate poor project management? In the case of RDR2, if you have to set back the release of the game by a full year and still talk about working such ridiculous hours, maybe there needs to be some re-evaluation of how they organise. But hey, them horse bollocks will make it all worthwhile.

_wheredoigonow_
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Rog
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Rog » Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:52 pm

jawafour wrote:Rockstar are in the news again! Is *any* publicity good publicity?

BBC News wrote:The publisher of video game Grand Theft Auto V has been granted the right to search the homes of five people accused of making cheat software.

Source.

I know little about law... but is it often the case that a company is granted permission to search private properties for "evidence"? Isn't this something that the police would do if they suspect a law has been broken?


To me that sounds like maybe they have somehow got a hold of source code?

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Dig Dug
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Dig Dug » Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:53 pm

I think a big enabler of this issue is in part due to the industry becoming a culture of making ambitious and games with a slack design.
Nintendo for example like to make their games have a tight design focus, during its initial years of development Super Mario Galaxy was worked on by a team no bigger than 50 people, it's only in the last few years of its development that they increased the team size and made it a full size project. This management style compliments Super Mario Galaxy's tight game design, the game is well balanced at an appropriate length and is varied while not having too many features.

Many game studios are doing the opposite of this when making open world games, they are dedicating a large amount of resource into giving games a bigger range of features, leading to a slack game design where the aims and goals of play are less focused because there's so much to do. Many people who play open world games probably never complete the game or see everything it has to offer (I still haven't found that last village in BotW and that game is tight by open world standards).

I think we need to stop trying to spoil ourselves with these big, long and open games. Everything included in a game ultimately needs to have purpose, the more features you put in, the more resources you put in and the more slack your design becomes. Slack isn't inherently bad but you don't want your game to be too tight (lacks variety) or too slack (over-featured). At least with tight design you won't drive people to overwork unless you make something slack and then work to tighten it without removing anything.

In short, the industry is so intent to push technical and artistic boundaries to legitimise itself and grow that it has created these employment nightmares for people who actually make the games. The industry really needs to slow down and scale back , it's pushing forward too much for its own good and making it a terrible place to work as a result.

7256930752

PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by 7256930752 » Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:53 pm

Banjo wrote:A follow-up to the question of 'how regular are these 100 hour weeks?'. I think it's fair to assume that they're not irregular occurences, given both GTAV and RDR2 have been delayed from their originally announced release date. Does that not indicate poor project management? In the case of RDR2, if you have to set back the release of the game by a full year and still talk about working such ridiculous hours, maybe there needs to be some re-evaluation of how they organise. But hey, them horse bollocks will make it all worthwhile.

Of course you can say that but you'd do well to find any major project that involves so much intricacy, difficulty and timing not resulting in things going wrong and ultimately some people having to do put it in extra work to get it through to completion or meet a deadline.

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Knoyleo
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Knoyleo » Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:54 pm

Can you imagine if R* delayed the release of the game? I'm sure it would be a sales disaster and their publisher would hang them out to dry.

pjbetman wrote:That's the stupidest thing ive ever read on here i think.
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Banjo
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Banjo » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:12 pm

Hime wrote:
Banjo wrote:A follow-up to the question of 'how regular are these 100 hour weeks?'. I think it's fair to assume that they're not irregular occurences, given both GTAV and RDR2 have been delayed from their originally announced release date. Does that not indicate poor project management? In the case of RDR2, if you have to set back the release of the game by a full year and still talk about working such ridiculous hours, maybe there needs to be some re-evaluation of how they organise. But hey, them horse bollocks will make it all worthwhile.

Of course you can say that but you'd do well to find any major project that involves so much intricacy, difficulty and timing not resulting in things going wrong and ultimately some people having to do put it in extra work to get it through to completion or meet a deadline.

Yes but in this instance both things are happening. The game has been delayed twice from it's original scheduled release, yet there's still extreme working hours and crunch. That reeks of poor project management.

_wheredoigonow_
7256930752

PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by 7256930752 » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:43 pm

Banjo wrote:
Hime wrote:
Banjo wrote:A follow-up to the question of 'how regular are these 100 hour weeks?'. I think it's fair to assume that they're not irregular occurences, given both GTAV and RDR2 have been delayed from their originally announced release date. Does that not indicate poor project management? In the case of RDR2, if you have to set back the release of the game by a full year and still talk about working such ridiculous hours, maybe there needs to be some re-evaluation of how they organise. But hey, them horse bollocks will make it all worthwhile.

Of course you can say that but you'd do well to find any major project that involves so much intricacy, difficulty and timing not resulting in things going wrong and ultimately some people having to do put it in extra work to get it through to completion or meet a deadline.

Yes but in this instance both things are happening. The game has been delayed twice from it's original scheduled release, yet there's still extreme working hours and crunch. That reeks of poor project management.

You just don't know, a member of staff could have done a really bad job, a contractor could have let them down, someone got ill, etc. As Jiggles said yesterday you often end up in a situation in that you need part B complete to allow other teams to complete parts C,D & E so people end up having to work extra to try and stop a large part of the workforce being unable to do anything.

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Lex-Man
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Lex-Man » Wed Oct 17, 2018 8:25 pm

Knoyleo wrote:
Moggy wrote:
Knoyleo wrote:I've read orange raccoon's post the total opposite way. A boycott isn't likely going to achieve significant numbers, so the game will still sell millions, and thus the market rewards gooseberry fool working conditions.


As opposed to no boycott at all which leads to no reward from the market for gooseberry fool working conditions?

Videogame boycotts work.jpg
Image


They did end up bringing back dedicated servers for later games though. There are going to be dedicated servers for Black Ops 4.

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work.
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Johnny Ryall
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Johnny Ryall » Wed Oct 17, 2018 9:11 pm

Gross simplification from a point of naïvety I'm sure but the company that makes bathtubs full of cash via GTA online can afford to reinvest that back into their people.

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Knoyleo
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Knoyleo » Wed Oct 17, 2018 9:27 pm

Johnny Ryall wrote:Gross simplification from a point of naïvety I'm sure but the company that makes bathtubs full of cash via GTA online can afford to reinvest that back into their people.

Just because they can doesn't mean they will.

pjbetman wrote:That's the stupidest thing ive ever read on here i think.
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Dig Dug
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Dig Dug » Thu Oct 18, 2018 9:00 am

I don't know exactly how hard Nintendo work their employees (Japanese companies are notorious for overwork) but I know the director of the smash bros series, Masahiro Sakurai, confessed that he didn't take a day off in 13 months when designing Super Smash bros Melee back in the day. I actually think a lot of this overwork problem could be circumvented by knowing what to include and leave out of your game projects.

Melee wouldn't have been any worse for it and Sakurai could have took days off if they removed these features:
The game has 6 clone characters (Dr Mario, Falco, Ganonndorf, Young Link, Roy and Pichu), out of those 6 they didn't need to make Roy, Dr Mario or young link (maybe pichu too but Pokemon was still a big deal), the game would have already been varied without them. The clone characters take significantly less time to make then the originals but it would have still be days, if not weeks saved on development.
Trophies, although a nice feature, the game didn't need those 290 collectable trophies. Trophies don't add anything to the core game and are just there for completion and fan service. This would have saved them time on making stages too (no pokefloats).

Sakurai's ridiculous work hours on the game were self-inflicted in a sense as he was the games director and likes to take full ownership of his projects. I just he didn't drag down his co-workers along with him.


I think over-ambition is the biggest cause of overwork in the industry. Publishers and/or producers/directors are getting too ambitious with what they want their games to be and are as a result are making their game design unnecessarily slack from putting too many features into the project. Open-world games are especially terrible for this because of they need to fill their worlds and are probably the most slack game genre out there. The value of tight design is becoming really overlooked outside of indies.

https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2014/nov ... mash-bros/

Gemini73

PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Gemini73 » Thu Oct 18, 2018 9:15 am

Knoyleo wrote:Can you imagine if R* delayed the release of the game? I'm sure it would be a sales disaster and their publisher would hang them out to dry.


That's because the only people that really matter are the shareholders.

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Peter Crisp
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Peter Crisp » Thu Oct 18, 2018 9:29 am

Banjo wrote:A follow-up to the question of 'how regular are these 100 hour weeks?'. I think it's fair to assume that they're not irregular occurences, given both GTAV and RDR2 have been delayed from their originally announced release date. Does that not indicate poor project management? In the case of RDR2, if you have to set back the release of the game by a full year and still talk about working such ridiculous hours, maybe there needs to be some re-evaluation of how they organise. But hey, them horse bollocks will make it all worthwhile.


I'd also think given the vast sums of money they have available they could also hire a few more developers to help out as well. This isn't a case of a tiny company with limited resources, they are choosing to flog staff to breaking point just to save a bit of extra profit.

Vermilion wrote:I'd rather live in Luton.
Gemini73

PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Gemini73 » Fri Oct 19, 2018 10:16 am


Gemini73

PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Gemini73 » Thu Oct 25, 2018 11:26 am

Well if anyone is going to have an opinion, it's Jim.


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Knoyleo
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Knoyleo » Thu Oct 25, 2018 2:48 pm

Interesting article asking devs how best to support them and the games they make, in an imperfect market that exploits labour.

twitter.com/patrickklepek/status/1055236749889363968


pjbetman wrote:That's the stupidest thing ive ever read on here i think.
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Dig Dug
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PostRe: Rockstar developers "working 100 hour weeks"
by Dig Dug » Thu Oct 25, 2018 4:13 pm

twitter.com/PateraQuetzaI/status/1054817801582469121



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