Bad things are going down in the Australasian games industry. Overworked and underpaid appears to be the ongoing pattern. Not only have we had ex-employees come forward from Team Bondi in Sydney, but now other developers have come out of the woodwork. One such disgruntled employee comes from a relatively new Gameloft studio, based in our very own city of Auckland. Some weeks ex-employee Glenn Watson would be working 100-120 hours in a never-ending crunch mode. He even cites an instance where a junior programmer worked for 24-hours straight.
Read the Games On Net article where former Head Studio Programmer, Glenn Watson describes his harrowing experience working for Gameloft Auckland, and why he decided to leave. It’s a sad state of affairs for the games industry that’s for sure. Let’s hope that by informing the public and bringing these issues to light, game producers will finally begin to clean up their acts.
Gaming Studios are the new Nike Sweatshops!
Gaming Studios are the new Nike Sweatshops!
Makes you wonder what the working conditions are like at our biggest dev, Sidhe. I guess Newsy would have some views on this, but most contracts talk about not bringing the Employer into disrepute, so he probably wouldn’t really be able to tell us anything!!
It’s like that “EA Spouse” one from a couple of years ago, it’s just now coming to light that many developers are similar in terms of workload expectations of staff. Not good really.
Makes you wonder what the working conditions are like at our biggest dev, Sidhe. I guess Newsy would have some views on this, but most contracts talk about not bringing the Employer into disrepute, so he probably wouldn’t really be able to tell us anything!!
It’s like that “EA Spouse” one from a couple of years ago, it’s just now coming to light that many developers are similar in terms of workload expectations of staff. Not good really.
Productivity plummets during crunches. Unfortunately management have no firsthand experience and therefore do no understand the damage they are doing to their underlings and to the production.
In my career in motion graphics/video editing, I was all too familiar with this. You can enter a trance-like state abd simple tasks that would take 10 minutes when you are fresh can blowout into an hour. That all adds up and is compounded more and more as the crunch goes on.
Productivity plummets during crunches. Unfortunately management have no firsthand experience and therefore do no understand the damage they are doing to their underlings and to the production.
In my career in motion graphics/video editing, I was all too familiar with this. You can enter a trance-like state abd simple tasks that would take 10 minutes when you are fresh can blowout into an hour. That all adds up and is compounded more and more as the crunch goes on.