Crunch you do because you're passionate and driven is very different from the crunch you do because it's been mandated by management and you have a deadline to meet.
You're assuming that these things aren't connected though. It could be both mandated and something you're passionate about. And the reason it may be mandated is because without it your studio shuts down and you don't have a job. Not every game development studio is EA or Ubisoft who can keep paying their employees indefinitely.
@@TorQueMoDdefinitely a lot of complexity. The issue is one of freely given informed consent, which is a murky issue in today's world. I believe games are an art form and turning an art form into an industry always requires grinding up some artists. Just because artists often grind themselves up doesn't make it ok. Of course, the needs of staying in business and keeping a job add another layer. All these things are applying continuously at an individual level for each person involved. What a mess. I haven't even watched the video yet
They are and they aren't. Crunch on projects in many industries is necessary but especially when you work in a creative industry. Some times you'll be on board and passionate and sometimes you'll roll your eyes and want to go home, but you do it either way. The difference is we're entering an era where people just don't have the get it done attitude anymore and that'll end up being a very serious problem for our culture.
@@SpartanArmy117 you're right about the first part, but the problem is that crunch is expected as a norm rather than a necessary evil. The AAA industry is unsustainable and burns out creatives
The problem is in a corporate environment a corporation will always use the best and most committed person as a required baseline and expect others to emulate it. This is when passionate individual is essentially working against a team. If someone can operate on 4 hours sleep and stay at work 6 days a week and not be paid any extra than the person who works the agreed hours and does what is expected of them. The corporation will expect others to emulate the former and use that as their marker for future performance reviews. Likewise if someone can do the job of 2 or 3 people then there is no reason to hire 2 or 3 people just stick with the one overworked person who isn't complaining and then when that person leaves or is poached away complain they have to hire 2 or 3 new people to replace them. Creativity and passion can't be planned for like you say but it sure as shit can be exploited by those with no qualms about doing so, I think that is why there is such a bigger push it's to save the passionate overworkers from themselves and save others from being measured beside them.
It's strange because that sounds exactly like how his own experience was working at Interplay, all while getting grossly underpaid. I love Tim, but I'd be more curious to hear from his own past employees at Troika who **seemingly** crunched for years.
@@Shotzeethegamer I'd argue that those passionate people get used, and almost anything special they would add to a project will be smoothed over in favour of stuff that sells, It's why we're like 95% of the time only finding those special games in the indie sector, where it's a small team who run themselves, and aren't administrated by executives who only work with statistics, 10-50 people teams, I've seen maybe 3 games from mainstream developers in the last 5 years, that could be called special, while, almost every year a special indie game comes out. To reiterate, passionate people in a corporate setting are exploited, and, usually, anything special is removed to sell better, while in a community setting, like at an indie company or a very good company like Valve, they add their passion, make a product special, without harming their normal colleagues. The best, most reliable, way to avoid this across the industry, is mass unionisation, one union for game developers, that would allow the workers to set rules to stop execs from exploiting them, while ensuring passionate people can do their thing without allowing the execs to use their exceptional work as the base line for normal workers.
@@Shotzeethegamer But the dispassionate execs are usually the ones funding that company, deciding it's direction, and don't forget shareholders, they can get a say too... Just look at what happpened to No Man's Sky, their whole marketing effort was screwed up due to Sony execs having more of a say in essential parts of development than the actual developers, and it's not a singular case, it happens all the time, the publisher will fuck up a developer's work, like Look at the The Thingf prequel, it was completely ruined by a no-nothing exec who insisted on replacing the incredible practical effects with cheap CGI, cause it would "sell better".
I'm a game designer. Obviously, I don't have that big of experience as you, Tim, but I still need to add something from my own experiences. You, dear young developer reading that, should only crunch from passion when it's your game, your project. Don't be too passionate about other people projects, don't let it ruin your life. Crunch from passion, when you feel it will give you something real - be it money, some special kind of experience, knowledge. This is the rule I live by and it's not related only to work stuff. What Tim maybe is not seeing, is that he's a well known game developer, a person with huge successes, a legend of the industry basically. I'm bringing that out to tell you guys who are not yet in the industry - not everyone of you will ever achieve position that Tim holds. This is a harsh truth, but most of you won't be great game developers. You hard work won't pay off as you would expect. You most probably will be good employees, make some fun games, but eventually there's a high chance crunching will quite literally burn your passion, your private life, and you'll feel miserable. Be passionate - for your own projects. Don't sell your soul to other people, and don't normalize crunch for yourself, it's not worth it.
He probably wouldn't have gained his position if he hadn't worked his butt off though. It didn't just come to him magically. You have to work hard to reap the rewards.
This is so well said. I have learned this lesson in my own life and I have very rigid boundaries when it comes to work. I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of the ‘passion’ element in work, but what I’ve given up in enjoying in a career I’ve gained 2x over with meaning in my life. I’m looking forward to raising kids some day and being a present father who has the time and energy to give my child what they need.
This is what I think is missing from the video. It's fine to slave away for a creative venture that can actually be yours: to control, to profit from, to be credited for. You should absolutely never allow that pressure to be put on you in order to enrich someone else. Ever. At the end, he says that if you do, you'll have a great home life but a resume of mediocre games. Great! Work is work. Life is what exists in all the other hours. Lead a fulfilling life.
Hi Tim! I really love the videos, as someone who is relatively new to game dev (started my own company a year ago). I think the issue with the word "passion" is that lot of bosses have used that as an excuse to take advantage of their workers. They will ask their employees to put in more time, do sacrifices, instead of doing any themselves. We're a small team, I want my employees to care, I want them to feel passionate and that this is their game. However, like you said, I want them to have a life outside of this. If we arent achieving what we need, then I'm going to hire more people or I'm going to cut scope. I want us all to be passionate, but not sacrifice our lives for it. In the same stead, I agree that it isn't just a dichtomy. Our hours are flexible, sometimes we put in 12 hour days, but in return ill ask them to work less the next day. I think it's just the system of taking advantage of employees who live on passion and want to make games that has people so against it (and rightfully so imo). Also the employees get nothing for their "passion" when the bosses get all the reward for their labor, but thats the socialists in me talking haha ❤❤ thanks for reading
I agree with you on this, all this talk of overwork and crunch and so on, might not even be a thing if the rewards for that work was balanced more fairly, ie less bonuses for the people on top and more to the people actually putting in the hours.
Heh. The problem in that example is not the word '' passion '' or the concept of '' passion ''. It's the boss. As tim said. passion good, work-life balance good. If it swings too far in favor of one, it's usually not an optimal solution. That's taboo, but the counter-point is that some employees can use the work-life balance thing to put 0 passion into the game. And it does happen, yes. Everywhere, every job, every day. And I'm just an employee.
@@mcashed i mean thats exactly it. A lot of time studios will ask people to crunch out of "passion" and barely pay overtime. So they exploit those employees, and dont reward them for all their hard work on top of crunch, especially for an extended time, being horrible for your health.
I like the way Leonard put it in your first talk, when talking about Fallout's development team: "We exploited ourselves". It's one thing to forego life-work balance and work feverishly on a project that you believe in, of your own free will... it's another when it's imposed on you from above. *Insert AAA company here*
It's very complicated because do you impose it on yourself? Or is it subconscious? Is it peer pressure? And how, as a boss, do you handle promotions in the future? How do you, consciously or not, not favor the devs who visibly worked much longer, and maybe got more experience out of it? How can you measure the burnout potential they might have, compared to other employees? Letting individuals decide, in a larger organization, doesn't really work. Not crunching has to be enforced.
Very interesting video but I disagree on a few points, or think they might be overlooked - Work life balance doesn't necessarily means 9 to 5. Creative people can and should have flexible hours, but they should have reasonable deliverables, the kind that roughly average a normal work week, with highs and lows. If one person isn't enough to provide that and you're in a company, it's the manager's job to provide additional manpower, not that person's job to crunch themselves to death. - Your level of investment should be proportional to the stake you have. Big companies ask of their devs to crunch themselves for games where they have no creative input on and for which they'll probably get fired at the end. I love Witcher 3, but I would have been fine with it being smaller if it meant less devs quit in disgust at the end because they were so overworked. These people should demand through unions normal workloads, even if they feel strongly for the games. Conversely it's normal for indies to go all in on their games, because it's THEIR GAME. - Most people have a set amount they can produce for creative endeavours per day. Crunching occasionally is doable, but doing in the medium to long run has drastically diminishing returns.
My socialist friends don't want to hear it, but unions are relatively toothless in the present environment. They can still try to negotitate on the part of their members for better pay or hours or benefits, etc., but I hear even game dev work is being outsourced to financially poor communitites to save on development costs in the "global economy." There's still some hope, however. As Ursula LeGuin put it, "it's power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."
I would push back against the idea that great, artful games come at the cost of work-life balance. The problem is that it's always in the companies' interests to exploit employee passion. They will insist that the nature of game development as art simply requires that you abandon work-life balance, that you make great personal sacrifices, because that aligns with their financial interests. The current games industry simultaneously contains terrible amounts of crunch AND mediocre "games as products", and honestly, to hear someone suggest things like "well, maybe devs these days just don't have enough passion, they aren't willing to put in the hours", feels pretty anti-worker to me (even though you agree that workers should demand WLB from their employers). I think the same forces and incentives that are making games more mediocre and monetization-focused are also responsible for preventing better working conditions in the industry, and we shouldn't be so easily turned against each other to defend corporate interests. The same goes for other creative careers you mentioned (writing, acting, etc.). The problem is not necessarily that they have passion and work long hours, but that those choices are made FOR them, for the sole benefit of their employers, who will happily wax poetic about the self-sacrifice demanded by great art while they pocket the spoils.
What you had in Troika - that shelter for kids - was great. More companies should implement it, although even better is remote working. Now you can communicate easily remotely so many jobs shouldn't require live presence.
It's great because it allows those with children to be able to use their passion to create. Without proper childcare many have to choose between neglecting their children or scaling back how much they can work. It is so prohibitively expensive in my country (the UK) that for many they will be giving nearly their entire wage to cover it. We do have some good rules once a child gets to three but before that people are hanging in at work so as not to lose a position whilst earning nothing. If there's one thing that changes your opinion on work life balance it's having kids. Before you have them or if you choose not to (I appreciate im missing out those that want them but can't) you don't realize how it changes absolutely everything about your life. I know that sounds trite but it's true. As for things like microtransactions I doubt it's developers that want it, it's publishers pushing them to do it, and it's killing the industry. As for Unions, everyone should join one.
Agreed, remote work is genuinely great most of the time, but problems arise when project leads don't become aware of problems. Having coders or artists debating something offline can lead to a lot of wasted time, in an office environment you'd hear them talking and be able to offer a solution and insight they might not have noticed due to fixation.
The main issue is Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation; it’s ok if you regularly want to work 14 hr days to finish a project, because you feel you need to do it; it’s NOT OK to work those hours because the company is forcing you or enticing you to work like that; if you’re doing it for your own reasons, it’s fine; if your only doing it because THEY say you have to, it’s a problem…
There's a pendulum that doesn't receive much attention. Some great books have been written about that dynamic lately, e.g. Ian McGilchrist's 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World'. Jill Bolte-Taylor wrote a book and gave a TED talk after her stroke, titled 'My Stroke of Insight,' about "the divided brain" as well. Both neuroscientists by profession, their research and experience is highly insightful of the present human condition. Recommend. (More great ideas for outstanding video games studios might like to explore as well.)
Even if you are personally motivated to work those kinds of hours it's still unhealthy and ultimately unproductive in the long term, because if you don't have some balance you WILL burn out sooner or later and then you won't be creating _anything_ for a long while until you recover. Small bursts of long hours can be useful, but it still has to be done in moderation or it's just bad... There's also the problem of peer pressure, even if you personally can take some longer hours and don't have other responsibilities, by doing those hours you are putting pressure on your colleagues to do the same and bad managers will exploit that and take it as the norm. A *good* manager will tell you to go home and get some rest, and pace yourself.
Some careers just work differently, if you're a firefighter you work weird hours, because it's needed, sometimes you're just working 10+ hours a day until a situation has been solved. It comes with the job. I think the worst problem is executives/shareholders that see their workers as a resource that can be used up to gain another resource (profits), leaving burnt out wrecks of people in its wake.
Yeah, nowadays it's billion dollar companies crunching their employees. It's not about passion anymore, its about doing unpaid overwork, it's about exploitation of that passion.
And then they will invoke "bad market or industry conditions" when they can't hire, or staff with passionate competent personnel. Like what has been happening for over a year. Well no shit executive, you spent the last 30 years burning people up, making some of the best one flee to others industries, and literally sucking the life of the rest who don't have time to recharge, to do others things that will feed their creativity. Or they just don't want to work for you. Like the infamous example of Naughty Dog, where a whole animation department left, and the studio had such a horrible reputation they were forced to hire right out of unis and very junior people from the film industry, where their reputation was unknown.
@@deantjewie Exactly, I think I said elsewhere that as long as compensations were commensurate with the amount of effort/work being put in people wouldn't be as angry about it, but currently the lions share of profits goes up top to people who most certainly shouldn't be getting as much as they are.
Resonating with this. I've found I emotionally don't want work-life balance but physically need it (at least while I'm still getting back to baseline after burnout in '21). This means I can happily do a little extra for a milestone but have to be sensitive to the signs that I'm reaching my limit. That may be the most important thing for passionate devs to learn, when to take a breather.
i'm a design and development engineer in the auto industry for one of the Big 3 OEMs. our job isn't 9-5 either. it ebbs and flows though. during launch, its all hands on deck. plants run 24 hours a day 6-7 days a week. we need to be there too. in my opinion, the major issue is lack of appreciation at the VP level, and lack of overtime pay. thankfully that's changing. companies are starting to provide overtime pay, and acknowledge work/life balance, and show appreciation for folks working their asses off. its amazing how even a small amount of appreciation can go a long way
Tim has provided an incredible amount of value and knowledge with these videos, I look forward to watching them every day. Thank you for giving us your time and energy with these videos Tim, they have helped me immensely.
I feel like if someone describes someone else as "too passionate" they're just being polite and mean some word other than "passionate". But what Tim is saying is effectively correct. When you're passionate about your job then you don't mind going the extra mile, and it won't feel like "unpaid overtime" - the problem is far too much of every industry wants you to be "passionate" about your job without ever providing you a source of passion, but they still want you to act and be motivated like you're passionate. It's difficult to say how I would act in the situations that Tim's been in because I've never been in those situations myself.
Tim seems to have failed to understand that nowadays "passion" often is a buzzword corporations use to exploit the workers. "You don't want to work 12 hours a day for pennies? You don't have a passion". It's especially funny to demand passion when AAA game design is handled down from business and marketing departments and is focused on making the blandest product possible to appeal to the biggest number of people.
It's sadly the lie of "Do what you love." Convincing people that the joy they get, or the joy they want to convince you of, is worth low pay, little to no benefits, and long, awful hours. There's a reason we're seeing a resurgence in unionization. It always boils down to exploitation. Art is now content, IPs, and product. There's a reason we're seeing a rush towards AI, but I don't think it's to replace people, as much as to devalue people for better exploitation. "Get to work, serf, or we'll have an AI do it for nothing!"
By the way, what they said is not caricature. That has been the literal Blizzard playbook for 15+ years. They pay less and demand more, "for the passion" and "for the prestige of working a Blizzard". They weren't even hiding it.
It doesn't help that many, if not most, gamers blame "the devs" for everything that's wrong with modern gaming. Some CEOs are pretty obviously doing the same because they keep calling on "the devs" to "take one for the team" and "come through for the company." There must be a short circuit somewhere in the global brain preventing us from seeing that the real culprit is institutionalized greed. None of the ailments touched on the past few days are restricted to the gaming industry. It's pretty obviously a systemic issue and we're literally not conscious of it for the most part. I'd hazard to guess, routine and habit have made it largely unconscious to us. "It's just the way things are" and "there is no alternative." Or so we hear. Now, all our chickens have come home to roost. In every field we look, there's a crisis of one kind or another. (Seriously. Just Google 'Crisis' of this or that field.) All those crises share a common root. Personally, I think those who say it's a 500-year old worldview and paradigm in need of subsumation to its proper place are correct. As Albert Einstein is often paraphrased as putting it, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." And, yet, world leaders keep trying to do just that.
I once did 100-110 hours of work a week for a month in July I was physically mentally tired and was literally sick and tired enjoyed it a lot it was like being a solider on a mission or something did 80-90 hours of work a week all year until July will get back on regular schedule after Christmas or in January sometimes you only have a finite amount of time to make something There is value in never doubting your ability
I agree with you. In the past few years I started feeling this sentiment from young people especially where anyone saying that they are passionate or that they want to go extra mile are put down because of all the usual reasons, you are exploited, capitalism bad, whatever. Sure people do get exploited at times but now it got to a point where people are shamed for being passionate and doing extra. Your pendulum analogy is very apt here. I personally believe that most people are just lazy (perhaps its a dark view) and they just hate when someone is doing extra because it puts them in a bad light so they just want to put down anyone who rises above. Easier to put down someone than to be truly passionate or work hard.
Tim, you're clearly coming at this from an honest place of caring about the craft and having worked some crazy hours at times to make some amazing games (big fan of VTMB), but you cannot ignore the very deliberate exploitation that takes place across this industry in the name of "passion" when talking about this contentious topic. THAT'S why people talk about it as an either/or thing. As a worker you have to put your foot down and know when to say NO, not just to your boss but also to yourself if you're prone to overworking. Yes, you can be passionate about your craft and sometimes you have to push yourself to achieve something special, and certainly it's true creativity can be unpredictable, but you have to take care of yourself and keep a healthy balance AND be wary of those who would seek to exploit your hard work for profit and little to no compensation, with no regard for the long term well-being of yourself and your colleagues.
Excellent treatment of this topic, Tim. I'm not advocating 100 hour work weeks either... but passion unrestrained by "welp, its quittin time!" is a precondition for great work. The greatest artists and scientists of all time overworked themselves voluntarily. It's perfectly okay NOT to do that!!! It's clearly unhealthy in many ways TO do that!!! but all the same. if you and another guy are equally talented and fortunate, and the other guy is willing to work twice as hard as you... The other guy will soar higher.
"Fallout wouldn't have been possible working 9 to 5" is, I think, a miscommunication, a slip of the tongue. Because literally it means that without crunch, the game couldn't have been made. What I think you wanted to say was, if that same team at that time didn't crunch, the game wouldn't have been made. Which is different, because crunch is a failure of management. With more experienced managers and producers, with more budget to have a larger team and/or a longer production, the game would have been made. But mistakes were made, and short term profits were favored, hence crunch. Thing is, as is almost always the case, the people who made those mistakes were the ones who benefited from it. No manager or exec was fired because of this, nor saw multiple years of bonuses disappear to cover the increased health cost of the crunched team (not to mention the inane amount of overtime they should have gotten). "There is too much work life balance". Not possible, by definition it is a balance. Your balance point might be different than others, but something can't be too balanced. 4:41 you equate discoveries and innovation with risk, then oppose that risk to work life balance. Why is that in opposition? Risk in production should be for the entity financing it (because they are the one benefiting from it). If you want to do a large unknown feature, it's a risk to production. That should have been accounted for, with some buffer made in prod budget and time. But going outside the buffer should be a risk for the studio boss or the publisher: do they accept the risk of increasing the budget of the production for that innovation? Why should the basic gamedev in their cubicle being the ones paying for that with crunch, which is very rarely fully financially covered. "actors don't work 9 to 5" is frankly beyond disingenuous, and entering the disgusting territory. This is a totally false analogy, because TV and movie set have very strict union rules, and actors are not paid 9 to 5 hourly rate either. Did you force your employees to be unionized before you hired them? Did you pay them SAG rates? I very much think not. Actors work in burst, not unlike fishermen and other specialist jobs do, with long hours for some time, and a lot of downtime after that. And to not be exploited by the production, there are strict limits to what is accepted. As for writers, the ones you are probably referring too are their own bosses, and therefore will profit from what they do. There is a difference working 70h week to enrich yourself, and doing that to enrich someone else. Professionals writers as a regular jobs, like journalists, are not doing this. Because like gamedevs they are not their own bosses. "you can't design a car working 9 to 5". Not only you absolutely can, but it's actually how it's done. Nevermind cars, that's usually how planes and tanks and rocketship are designed. And of course there is overtime here and there, fires to put out. THat happen. But there is a huge difference between fully paid, with multiplier, overtime here and there. And crunch. I like Mike Darrah definition of it, I'll paraphrase as: a damaging sustain effort. Literally damaging, as in will harm your health, physical or mental. Everyone has a different threshold of course, and that can change with age and other factors. But nobody is saying you should never work more than 32, 35, or 40h a week. If you can balance it, work as much as you can. Just work that extra time on your own things. Write a book, develop your garden, help at a soup kitchen, learn a new skill or language, work to stay in shape, hell do a second job if you really want to. But allowing, or even worse pushing people to work very long hours, harming themselves in the process, to enrich other people, is just plain wrong to me. And saying it's opposed to passion, is also very wrong. People can be passionate, and work hard, without being exploited or working insane long hours. Working hard and working long are not the same thing. As to schedule, I agree creative work is not possible on a strict 9 to 5. Which is why it should be normal, and ok, for people to come in Monday morning to drop the work they spend their week end on, stay an hour to see if a fire need them, then go back home for two days (or whatever variation on that). Creatives need flexibility, but flexibility goes both ways.
As a construction worker I have throught out my career worked on several Microsoft buildings. I was always interested to see how they built their offices and the additonal ammenities they offered in order to keep people on the job as long as possible. To a construction worker that looks like Paradise but, I know the grass is not always greener on the other side. The same goes for 'Office Space' where they show some kind of idealized version of construction work. I did eventually (kind of) get to scratch my interest in Game Dev by being a high level backer on the game Shadowrun:Hong Kong...I got to visit the studio of HBS and it was definately different then Microsoft but, what you could tell there is you had a bunch of people who were very passionate about the games they were making. Even without all the bells and whistles offered on a Microsoft campus.
Spoken like someone that's been in management/director roles. Saying sometimes you gotta sacrifice the life part in work/life balance.....but never saying sometimes you gotta sacrifice the work part in work/life balance. Life comes before work always...every..single...time.
Wonderful perspective on the subject. I think a lot of the modern conversation around work-life balance in the games industry is a conversation being had in response to crunch on games that are more in line with products. Devs are getting crunched on games that launch incomplete, parts missing, but with monetization. That multiplayer Halo game is a good example and what happened with OverWatch 2's PvE & Progression content. I think the pendulum analogy is a very good one (especially as someone who still loves zombie stories). Work-life balance matters more to me when I'm working a grueling gig that wants more and more for me and that leaves me with less and less. I think it was super useful to have you deconstruct the false dichotomy -specifically- as it relates to games. If I felt that doing more would yield a better, more faithful expression of my intent, I think I could make that investment and see it less as a sacrifice. I appreciate that you strove for nuance. Question; Do you think it makes sense for devs to want to make games as a 9-5 thing with how many games there are being made as products? Is that a logical response to the climate?
My perception from people who talk about work life balance and passion is not that they think of passion as a dirty word or something to reign in. It’s moreso that the passion of developers can often be used against them and exploited in order to work excessive hours to meet deadlines that may be unrealistic for the goals of the studio. The labor conditions in game studios can be very unhealthy, which is largely dependent on the studio, but I recognize this gets really complicated since making games is a creative activity. It’s not predictable and many people want to make the best game they can, but if unchecked or actively exploited, the work conditions can get way out of hand and end up hurting those involved. It’s a complex issue, and I think it gets harder to control the larger a studio gets and the more ambitious the projects are.
John Carmack has an interesting take on Work-Life balance, "Work-Life balance versus your life's work." He sees his work as his life's work, and that's great. It makes sense, he mentioned he's always been able to work on things that he personally finds interesting. However, one person's life's work shouldn't necessarily dictate other people's life's work, which is where i think a lot of the modern discourse of Work-Life balance stems from. People should be able to choose their own work to life balance.
I think you have a reasonable take here Tim, and I agree with a lot of it - I do think however that it's (obviously) coming from the place of someone who grew up with the massive growth/transformation of the games industry through the 80s-00s. I think that the experience for younger people getting into at least the AAA industry will be profoundly different than the experience you had in your youth. Most of the people I know who entered the gaming industry when we graduated (around the 2010 mark) have at least left the AAA/Big Studio/Big Publisher sphere, many of them cited burnout and ludicrous expectations on their hours/time. The demands were almost always dressed up as needing "passion" (see also "commitment", "pride in our work" etc.) for their current product, even for people at the lowest position on the totem pole in games whose development teams were in the hundreds (and so were a very small part of the game, a far cry from the responsibility, creative input, kudos and financial rewards of more senior people at the studio). The issues as I see them from those friends were: 1.) The weaponization of "passion" against work-life balance as well as pay/benefits. It wasn't just the 9-5 aspect, which I think oversimplifies the complaints that I've at least heard. Childcare was a big one, as well as the desire to start a family being impossible because the lengths crunch reached, not being able to make or schedule time for friends, family, partners etc. Because of being made to feel on call (I specifically recall a friend who worked in QA who would get called in at all sorts of hours at the last minute because a new build had been delivered and the company he worked for promising ridiculously short turnaround times). Some of this weaponization is, as other people have already said, been done at the publisher level or from those far above the trenches but some of it has come from long-time developers (who have become leads, studio execs etc). who think that because they put in ludicrous hours when they were younger, that this is normal and to be expected now (and part of this is related to 2. below). I am not, of course, saying you believe or practice this, but without naming names some of your contemporaries (for lack of a better word) who took a similar path into executive positions in studios definitely have, and I think this is likely a part of why people have taken prior comments in a bad light - they've seen similar talk used to, in all honesty, exploit their time and real passion for game development. Honestly I think that most people in game development demonstrates passion just by staying there, when many could take their skills to other industries and earn a lot more scratch with the same skills. 2.) When it come to passion for game development (and similar creative endeavours) size matters. There's a very big difference between the small studio working overtime on a project they've all come together to make (so the indie scene these days, less so in the 90s, 80s when small teams were more normal) and being one small cog in a massive publishing/development machine like Ubisoft. You mentioned writers as one example of a profession that doesn't have to follow a 9-5 schedule, but this is also generally a profession where the author(s) will either be one in a small or singular author, writing to a small number of publisher deadlines. That's a far cry from the bad end of the trench in video game developers of people churning out assets or code week after week that make up only a small part of the game they're working on. Obviously everyone gets that internal feeling of recognition "I made that", but the scales are very different depending on the size of the project and it's unfair to lean on passion or pride to get more work out of someone who, ultimately, is contributing a small part of the whole and has little to no say in the direction of the game their making (and often very little reward for their time, either at face value or what they could get in parallel professions). You remarked in a video earlier about getting ideas and implementing them from artists at Carbine, I can't think of the people I knew working at the entry level ever having an experience like that (that they've related to me - and "Famous Developer X used my idea!" *would* have come up. Their experiences were much more along the lines of being expected to work ridiculous hours and weekends for months or even a year at a time. Always with words like "passion" being used to explain why (alongside the usual "budgets is tight" and what amounted to "do it or we'll fire you and find someone who will"). At the indie and small studio level this seems to be much less of an issue, obviously in such an environment people are responsible for a larger amount of the project (similar to what you mentioned wearing multiple hats on your older games), are likely more equal in the financial rewards, have more there that they made that they can point to and think "I made this". etc. In a more equal environment, and especially one where a publisher is less demanding, I think the downsides of long hours or crunch are felt much less and are much less of an issue - there's more genuine passion involved, and the people involved are much more likely to be in a position to say to their bosses the hours are too much or work needs to be more flexible. 3.) Similar professions and passion - I touched on writing above but I think it's very noticeable that in other creative areas like film and television, or other areas where unusual hours are required or useful, unions are very common (in the UK they're more common everywhere, but I think I'm right with this take for the US). Others have mentioned professions like firefighters, nurses, truck drivers and other professions where odd or extended hours are required, those professions are most often heavily unionised in part because of the potential for exploitation in the name of passion or need. Game developers by and large don't have this, especially not on the scale of actors, teamsters, stage employees etc. Most people in game development are in roles more similar to the below-the-line employees in film and tv production than they are actors or writers. That's just the nature of what the AAA game industry has become (and why everyone in related fields know many who left it). You said maybe unions are needed, from the experiences I've had related to me, they're damn well required - and efforts to unionise need support from industry veterans. You speak of the pendulum but I think you're speaking as someone who, at least more recently, has a lot more choice is where to stop and when to walk away (and go work elsewhere in game development). The people I knew getting burned out, overworked and exploited didn't have that kind of freedom due to it being their first few jobs in the field, threats of being blackballed among local developers etc. This all being said I do hear from friends still in game development that things have gotten better since the "Rockstar Spose" days that in many places things have gotten better - mostly post COVID - with WFH being more acceptable and allowing people more flexibility at work, but I don't know many people now who work for the biggest developers on the sorts of 400 developer plus games because they pretty much all, very reluctantly, quit.
Yahtzee has always had pretty good gaming takes. His show is super cynical, but you can tell that he really cares about the state of the gaming industry.
Yes, "work-life balance" and "passion" aren't a dichotomy; yes, not every industry/job can work on a strict 9-to-5 schedule; and yes, anybody who thinks creativity can be planned out is a fool at best. Thank you for reminding us of these truths. However, I have two major issues with the contents of this video: 1. The equation is incomplete: it's not a false dichotomy, but a false trichotomy, of which "9-to-5" (which you seem to equate with "work-life balance") is the third element. You can be passionate on a 9-to-5. I would say anyone who's able to work enthusiastically on something for 7-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for months or years on end qualifies as passionate. Even if they never work a minute longer than their schedule. Conversely, you can even have poor work-life balance on a 9-to-5 -- if, say, your job is soul-crunching or so physically demanding that you're left with no energy at the end of your shift. In other words, the schedule (or lack thereof) doesn't necessarily determine the quality of the output or your mental/physical well-being. And heck, what if you're not passionate anyway? Unless you're working on a one-person project, you can afford to have some people who are less passionate than others. It's impossible for everyone, even in creative positions, to be passionate on every project all the time. In our current society, we MOSTLY work so that we don't go homeless, don't starve to death, and have some material comfort in life beyond the bare necessities. 2. If this video made a big splash (e.g. millions of views, media attention...), you can bet it would be appropriated and misquoted in bad faith by company execs and number crunchers everywhere who would go "See? Even the legendary Tim Cain says you should be more passionate! Now go crunch some more and make me some money." It doesn't matter that you said unions are good elsewhere, or that you lost a decade to work. The second you simplify what "work-life balance" means and offer some pushback against it, your words will be turned against the workers by the corporate world. The problem, as always, is workers being made powerless to take control of their working conditions and organize their work in ways that fit their jobs and personalities the best. The bottom is being told by the top how they should work to maximize growth and profit, and the top will go as far as it can get away with to those ends. That's why you got unions pushing back so hard. "Work-life balance" is just a catch-all term and, I'd argue, is only the beginning. Eventually, you want to empower workers to organize their work themselves. In such a scenario, a worker would have much more leeway to, say, work when the creative juices are flowing, even if it's on a Sunday at 3 am, but even more importantly, they would also be able to go "you know what, here's what I did the other day, so today I'm not working at all, and you can't do anything about it, and I still expect to be paid". That's the part that's missing right now. Sure, the company will be happy to let you work on your spare time, but it'll still expect you to do your hours on top of that. And like some other commenters have said, companies will look at whoever is the most committed and expect the same from everyone else. Because, again, it's a profit & growth machine that operates on maximizing worker exploitation.
It does. If you watch his other videos you can see that they crunched a ton on most of Tims games. Bloodlines, Fallout and Arcanum all had months or even years of crunch. They were a small and very dedicated team and I get the impression that it was very much volunteery, but still. Watch Tims interview with Leonard Boyarsky, hearing him talking about bloodlines. It's brutal.
I'm not a game dev, rather a web dev. But work-life balance to me doesn't really mean working a 9-5 every day. There's periods of really intense work where I stay up well past midnight working on something, either because there are deadlines we need to hit or more often because chasing the "right" solution becomes it's own reward. To compensate there are periods when I do almost no work during a week. I completely agree that with a creative profession (which I'd like to think development is) you can't really schedule a 9-5 and be happy with the results - some days your brain works just right, you get into it and don't even want to stop, some days you're preoccupied with something else and can't deliver anything valuable try as you might.
I think an important bit of context is that for much of his career Cain been a creative director of some description, and for a time was even a company owner. All these things he's saying is fair for people in that position, but most people working in games are not in that position, and may never be.
I love mediocre games because they guarantee me a happy private life :D! I agree that creativity cannot be planned. Passion leads to burnout. It's an energy drain. Projects are like long throws. You throw hoping you throw far enough. Your muscles are your team members. Your throwing technique is your management ability. When it sucks, the ball doesn't fly far. If your techniques are good enough, you can also handle weaker muscles (team members). In the long run, it all comes down to management. Train your muscles (team members) with the right technique and you will throw far.
Hi Tim! I work as a programmer (databases, desktop and web applications) and I always struggled with the planning of new features. It's the same creative work - be it programming or designing UI and my boss for years forced me to make precise estimates. Only when I disassembled the steps necessary to achieve the goal to rudimentary tasks, I would then be able to make estimates at most differing in orders of tens of percent (less or more) from the final time cost which is a really commendable feat if you ask me. As you say - when the creativity hits, the work flows, but when it doesn't - you may be just stuck doing the mundane part of the work (that must be done) while waiting for those good ideas to come. So I agree with you wholly. Anyway, loved all your videos until now, including your games since 1999. Thank you for all that you're doing. Jan
I work on my game in bursts. The average week will have 3-4 days where I'm working on the game for 13-15 hours, and a day or so when I'm so burnt out I'll just zone out in bed. Some work days I'm super non productive, and spend more time focusing on AFKing in OSRS, other work days where I'll just not eat or drink or even leave my desk. It's chaotic and organic and weird.
Yahtzee has been going almost nonstop for over a decade and is still as sharp and insightful as ever, his side show "extra punctuation" has brought up some good subjects
I have at least a 'lost decade' - but the time wasn't truly lost, I have things that which I wouldn't want changed to a 8-5 job, and more 'life' balance. That was part of the balance, and that was part of life. And was willing to spend a fair amount of it doing the things I was passionate about. Perhaps your decade isn't exactly lost, either?
Tim, you were talking about passion and importance of it as a function of being young and having more energy (and many other aspects). Do you think that it is also a part of company polices and maybe can be inspired by management? You have mentioned before about Interplay and how they have managed to give fallout team that inspirational boost, but also how Carbine has totally killed your vibe. Maybe a video on what to do and NOT to do from the managerial perspective!
Problem is if you want the big AAA games the market craves then you need the big money behind it and the corporate culture that goes with it. Kickstarter showed there’s a limit to even how much the most passionate fanbases can contribute monetarily.
Hi Tim, Really thankful for all your videos! Very I opening, I’m currently a game design and animation student and I’m just wandering how you guys animated and created your models back in the fallout days, the visual style and animation feels so iconic to this day, would love to know how it was done if you have any insight on it! Thanks Tim: )
It was the "craft" era of games, as in craft beer. Games today just have too much money involved and too many bizarre financial decions, eg: $50+million write-offs. Somehow when a big budget games fails financially its "just the cost of doing business." But when a creator has a great idea, its "no, we can't take a chance on your project." Maybe we need another mid 80s games crash.
In "work-life balance" balance is a keyword. Sometimes you need to work more, some times you need to take care of your personal life more. Don't go extreme on anything. Keep balance. And not only when it comes to work or personal life.
Very fun video. You come from a very different base statement than I expected. I was not expecting the balance to be viewed as opposed to passion which is a voluntary, internally originating effort (at least I have never heard the argument phrased this way). I always heard it as balance as opposed to crunch, i.e. an involuntary, externally motivated pressure to get stuff done. I agree with your take. I just don't know whether it answers the question of whether crunch belongs in the process and if so what are its limits or where should the balance lie. It's always great to watch your videos.
I don't think the vid is trying to answer whether crunch belongs. I think there's a difference between some companies toxic crunch culture and understanding that creativity can't be boxed in.
@@NoahStavish thanks. I don't see work life balance stifling passion and creativity which is why I agree that work-life balance vs passion is a false dichotomy as Tim suggests. However this is not why people are typically advocating for and try to ensure work-life balance. They tend to ask for it because they are sometimes/often being asked to crunch against their will to get things done. In an ideal world how much you work beyond your contract should be an individual's choice.
@@StavrosNikolaou I'm very aware of toxic crunch culture. I've been in the industry for a decade and have had 100+ hour work weeks and once had to work for two months with only 2 days off with every day being over 10 hours. I think crunch for the most part is due to poor planning on multiple ends, and other things should be forced to give instead of months of crunch. The studio I work for now is anti-crunch and it's been much better for work-life balance, though because I'm passionate I do find myself often thinking about work and coming up with ideas in off-hours. I know I'm not the only one, because at the leads level we're discussing what to do with other workers who want to work longer because they get into a good workflow or they also can't get their mind off a feature for whatever reason. This is difficult to balance from a company perspective though. Tim makes a bunch of fantastic points, and I largely agree with him.
@@NoahStavish Thank you very much for your insights. I really hope I did not come off as suggesting that you are not familiar with crunch; if so, I apologize 😕 I also agree with the majority of the points made on the video. I guess I'll have to wait until the video when Tim addresses crunch (which I'm sure will come :) to check what his experience has taught him on dealing with it and hopefully minimizing it.
Sacrifice is fine, sacrifice is something you do when you make a decision to do what is important to you even though you miss something, you still know it is the right thing. I also think work-life balance doesn't mean 9 to 5. It means the ability to care for yourself and live your life. You can have inspiration in the evening and want to work on your creative thing, and that can even last all night and into the morning and maybe you pull that all-nighter and do some amazing work. To me, work-life balance is then not getting punished by your employer for having a nap instead of sitting through a useless meeting or not performing to expectations in mid afternoon after being up for 48 hours. It means working on saturday, but also being able to go to your doctors appointment on tuesday. It means crunching for a few months, and then being allowed to take vacation. The problem is when it's not really sacrifice because it's not really voluntary. Where you're told that you need to be passionate, which means you are told to perform even when you can't, you aren't allowed the downtime to be creative, there is always give but never take. Balance doesn't mean rigid schedule, it's just give and take, it is seeing value for the things you give up. The problem is that people who do make these products use the idea of passion to guilt people into sacrificing theirselves for nothing in return.
I've discussed this very topic with people before. My position is this: Making games is an art form (and a science, but that side is less relevant to this discussion). Really think about the best art you've ever seen. I bet you'll notice a trend wherein almost all of that art was made with blood, sweat, and tears. Hardship was involved. Harsh limitations would be put on them that they'd have to create the art around, pressure was generally on them in some form. It's the 'starving artist' idea, and that idea is prevalent for the simple fact that it tends to be true. An artist so passionate and creative about their work that, despite and even BECAUSE of harsh conditions, will create something wonderful is one to be applauded and appreciated. It's not the path for everyone, and I think large swathes of people involved in game development don't need to have that same pressure placed upon them. But for those seeking to make 'art', particularly those involved in any sort of design work, whether it be map/level/mechanics/art/music/sound/etc. *should* be pushed into that. I think the special types of artist come in two forms: The 'starving artist' and the artist who has transcended being the 'starving artist' into simply being a master of their craft who can capture that same creativity with ease, without needing the suffering (this second type is rare). There's simply certain things in life where you can't have it all. You can't say, "I want to make wonderful art" but then say, "But why isn't this a 9 - 5?" or even "Why can't I have all the money and time I want, and be given no limitations?" There's something deep in the soul where the artist has to reach deep to make something amazing, but that doesn't come without either remarkable amounts of experience or being driven almost to madness. I believe it was Yasunori Mitsuda, composer for Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, etc. that remarked that he had a nervous breakdown with pretty much every new game score he made early on. And you listen to the music of these games and you can really tell he poured his soul into them. Silent Hill as a series started because Konami took a small team of the rejects they had (most of whom didn't have tremendous experience), put them together, gave them too little time and too little budget and told them to make a game that'd sell like Resident Evil. And look what we got. I'm of course very sympathetic to the idea of having a good work-life balance. But if you want to make art, you really have to be willing to push yourself for that art in ways that you wouldn't have to push yourself in other fields. As you pointed out, Tim, once this stops happening, you see the artistic side die and the "product" side really become even more dominant.
It all really comes down to "is the lemon worth the squeeze?". Is the work fun? Would you keep doing it even if you weren't paid? Is there something more that you are getting out of the interaction besides the paycheck? Then it's most likely a passionate job, if not then it's the work life balance thing. Passion can't be brought, passion is the illogical and emotional force that you take personally and that you want the most and best out of... it has nothing to do with pay and everything to do with what the work is.
Long days because you enjoy the work is fine but overtime shouldn't be the norm. You cant ramp up or "crunch" if needed when everyone already work overtime each and every day.
Was a reply under another comment, but don't want ot to be buried there. I'd argue that those passionate people get used, and almost anything special they would add to a project will be smoothed over in favour of stuff that sells, It's why we're like 95% of the time only finding those special games in the indie sector, where it's a small team who run themselves, and aren't administrated by executives who only work with statistics, 10-50 people teams, I've seen maybe 3 games from mainstream developers in the last 5 years, that could be called special, while, almost every year a special indie game comes out. To reiterate, passionate people in a corporate setting are exploited, and, usually, anything special is removed to sell better, while in a community setting, like at an indie company or a very good company like Valve, they add their passion, make a product special, without harming their normal colleagues. The best, most reliable, way to avoid this across the industry, is mass unionisation, one union for game developers, that would allow the workers to set rules to stop execs from exploiting them, while ensuring passionate people can do their thing without allowing the execs to use their exceptional work as the base line for normal workers.
There are a lot of people here who are very against what Tim is saying, but will also complain non-stop about the games made by the "work-life balance" crowd. You want to make something great? You have to be great, period. You don't want to be great? That's fine, no one's forcing you.
Dunno, this is the first video of you where I would beg to differ. We see the issues with this mindset already. Many veterans leave the industry because it is not possible to have a family or stable life with them. It has to change. As a creative myself I also beg to differ on the flow. A creative can't only work when we feel inspired or like it. You can also make notes for ideas and work on stuff later. Leisure-time and other things besides work are important to fuel your creativity. The industry clearly has to change. It's is hard to schedule it, of course, it is impossible to work with hard deadlines, but there has to be a balance and that balance is not there right now. People must have time to life outside of work. It's good for us, for our creativity, and therefore also good for the product made. And games, while also being an art, are also a product, as sad as it is.
Firstly thank you for all your videos. Even though i disagree on this one i’m glad you made it and grateful! The examples you gave of ‘professions that go above and beyond’ have one huge difference from game devs: they all reap disproportionate rewards from success. Actors can make millions from a single project. Athletes can retire wealthy in their 30s. Writers OWN their work (unless they have a bad publishing deal) and make royalties. Game developers don’t even get paid overtime hours. We are offered ‘free meals’ which is frankly insulting. A meal costs less than anyone on a game dev team makes in one hour but it’s usually offered for 3/4/6 hours of overtime. This is doubly sick when you consider that games are THE most profitable entertainment medium. Even the regular workers on film sets (makeup, grips, lighting etc) all get OT and have strict regulations on what is permissible. Game devs have nothing. Get laid off regularly through no fault of their own and see ZERO royalties from their games. Game development has gone from a wacky sub culture fueled by mountain dew and pizza to a viable career but the game development companies are still treating employees like college kids. Employers can start talking about passion once employees are fairly compensated for their work.
"The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art." ~ Ursula K. LeGuin That's why I'd like to see marketing departments forbidden from interfering with the creative process and not just at game development studios. Also, as much as "parent" or "umbrella" corporations -- heh, "Umbrella Corporation" -- say they're not going to interfere with development studios' creative processes, they nonethelsss do: with unreasonable demands for financial ROI to the exclusion of any other kind, e.g. gamers' love, respect and support of their favorite studios. Most of the bigger studios are losing that last -- and fast -- if they haven't already lost it, whether they realize/care or not, for the simple reason that they refuse to regin in their own and others' marketing departments and the lust for profit is plainly visible to anyone with eyes to see it in their games. Most *studios* probably feel they have to do as they're told by their publishers/investors or go out of business. They might remind their publishers and investors that quality art cum products require more time, energy and investment than they're being allotted, especially if the publisher is actually a wing of the development company itself. Investors likely don't care about quality. Gamers don't either, necessarily, though more and more gamers themselves are revolting against the trend toward mediocre and lackluster as well as the dictates of the Megamachine. Developers probably feel they're all alone in resisting the trends that have taken over the industry in general. They're not.
The way I see it is that there's a big difference between having to do overtime to hit a deadline near an important milestone/end of development, having to make occasional changes and iterations that weren't scheduled because the game absolutely needs them, and death marching to the end of development with a spent, moribund workforce that often feels like their leads don't know what to do with their game and/or company-wide expectations of workhours way beyond what is normal (and possibly legal). When I hear stuff like "we should ensure that nobody does uncalled for overtime", I think it's usually a pre-emptive measure to make sure a company doesn't start having a culture where the "passion" is expected is extra hours that usually don't even translate into productivity. Maybe it's overboard, but I can understand why that sort of thinking exists, because even benign things can be used maliciously by a company's boss, and also, to be completely honest, sometimes people need to be protected from themselves if they have tunnel vision. Sometimes you're passionate but need to be told to rest a minute, and spend some time with your spouse/kids/family/dog so you can come back energized and look at the problems from another angle. I'll admit, I don't know what the discussion is on the dev side, following a few professionals on social media doesn't really substitute having the experience of talking to your colleagues every day for years of development. Also, I imagine "passion" is easier to muster on smaller projects where the work you do is tangibly visible, versus something like those mammoth games like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty, with literally thousands of people working on them. I don't blame the devs who want to do that 9-5 for not having passion, when their job might literally be to polish the animation timings of a specific goon who only gets seen briefly through a mission (I'm spitballing because I actually genuinely have no idea how those productions work, the numbers are sort of unfathomable to me). That's like... a whole other ballpark compared to something like Fallout, which was a small B-tier project (not to the idnustry at large these days but definitely at Interplay back then) where you people probably *had* to take on multiple hats, otherwise it just wouldn't get done. And in some ways, that can be good, as it clearly led to a very tight-knit team with 0 fluff and needless meetings from what you say, so something good came out of those restriction! On the other hand, I completely understand why the sacrifices can feel like too much these days (and honestly for some probably felt like too much back then, maybe not for the Fallout team, but for another similar team), especially since a large part of the workforce isn't just composed by young 20-something white kids anymore. Hopefully tools and organizational methods have advanced enough that a project with a similar scope wouldn't need those hours from the people involved, but if the budget allows for it (and that's a big if!) the sacrifice of losing a tight-knit team and spending more in exchange for a more structured development environment with less need for overtime... well, to me it's worth it. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I see things. Sorry for the long comment, thank you for your insightful videos as always.
I think it already has been pointed out in the comment section but it bears repeating: The core discussion about passion isn't that it is inherently bad but how companies are abusing passion to drain workers of theirs for maximizing their profit. For the game dev world this especially falls in for all the newcomers which want to join one of the megacorps (speak activision, epic, ubisoft, riot, ea etc.) and then just find themselves being drained of any excitement they had about the profession (or some other kind of abuse) + being massively overworked and underpaid. The concessions to make here are that these things are not bad in all listed ways at the same time (and that is why it can be more insidious "Am I really being mistreated?/I only have to bear with it for a bit" etc.etc.) On other end the discussion of the topic can be very scrambled due to people being exposed to different parts of it and forming different perspectives and because it is a "younger perspective" it can be that the nuance is still kind of missing (I'm not saying that young people can't be nuanced or brilliant, they absolutely are but they might not have had enough or the type of experience to really understand/fill in the knowledge of these things). ... aaand I'm fairly certain I'm still missing plenty of "ifs and buts"
Europe tends to work well with creative types when they choose their hours and still have unions and good work life balance. 9-5ers, who don't care, are there for just the paperwork. Plus, why the F is, having to be in a office a sign of work? I would work, 20 hours a day for a few days to make sure a games convention worked for 20 years, it's intense times, but there's balance when I didn't need to work so hard for a few months. And I note, I wasn't part of a union, in fact, I was doing and leading my work for free... well I wish it was, it usually ended up costing me thousands of euros.
It's a natural evolution of the industry, the bigger it gets the more people simply work in the industry because it's their job not because they're passionate about making games. These people expect the same "work environment" as any other office job.
It's funny how distinct game development is in this regard. I'm an engineer primarily working on web/app dev, and I very much treat that as a 9-5. I don't want to think about the work at the end of the day. But when I'm working on a game or mod as a side/personal project? I'll happily stay up until 3am coding and working on features.
My impression is that a large number of young people going into games industry these days want to work -in games-, but not want to work on a game. When I got into it, it was NOT a cool job at all. It was for nerds and losers, so you got a very specific kind of personality who wanted to get into game dev. When the motivation is the idea of being part of some culture, and not driven to make something, then you are going to get people with a different kind of motivation. But the larger issue is these huge companies want to build soulless money grabs, but then want to exploit 'passion' to get more work for less money so they can make hundreds of billions and not tens of billions, and devs can't afford rent in hub cities where most of the work is.
Games as a service is in a precarious place right now. Free to play games are shutting down left and right, which is not only a huge preservation issue, but it basically invalidates all the work being put into those games. I've had amazing experiences with the model - I loved Overwatch until they drove it into the ground - and I think the issue is less wanting a 9 to 5 schedule and more wanting companies to be better about how they plan and execute development. Make better choices about the kinds of games they back, and make better scheduling choices so the team isn't in constant unnecessary crunch. The devs I know are not against crunch as a concept, they're against bad decisionmaking at the top.
Something that no one takes into consideration when talking about work life balance is whether or not putting in that extra time will end up making you a lot more money. This is something that should be factored. If making a great game means that your studio gets to stay afloat for another 3 years while you work on a sequel, or if it gets you into bonus territory where you directly make more money, then I'd say it's worth the trade off. The problem isn't working insane hours, the problem is working insane hours and not being compensated for it.
I think a lot of the devs I’ve seen complain about crunch are not complaining about occasional crunch. They’re complaining about no compensation for it, or constant/extended crunch. Limited crunch is probably fine exactly as you say Tim, but there is no reason that I can see (no good or humane reason that is) why it cannot come with proper overtime pay or PTO, as the individual prefers. Am I missing a good reason? (shareholder value is not a good reason to my mind)
Something i tend to do is compartmentalize. In this case work vs home life. When i learned of this term and that not everyone does it, it certainly triggered some introspection on whether i should continue on this route, or make a change.
Personally, I'd say that the issues I have with the lack of work life balance comes from games that are products, as you mentioned. A lack of work life balance for games that are passion driven is much more forgivable than a company pushing its employees to overwork to get a product out the door. This is *especially* true when it comes to games as a service, which means that the crunch period is never ending. A self imposed imbalance is preferred over a company mandated one.
I get the feeling that passion is one part of the pendulum's vector, the magnitude. You need to always be aware of the direction it is swinging or will swing.
I feel like all of those games would have still been possible if there was a healthy work ethos at Interplay. Instead of you having to do three jobs, they could have hired enough staff so nobody would have to work multiple jobs. Sure overtime might be required sometimes (as with most jobs) but it should be kept to a minimum and it should be compensated fairly (200% at least). Weeks of crunch like some game developers have is just inhumane.
Crunch is the result of Design and Business/Management failure. "Passion" is the excuse they use to force workers to sacrifice in order to make up for design and business/management failures. Every time a crunch happen, everyone in design and business/management should get a massive paycut. I guarantee you crunch will cease to exist because they then: - design will make DAMN SURE their proposal is good before wasting development resource on it. (wasting time making bad ideas = crunch) - management will make DAMN SURE that they make realistic schedules with room for error. - business will make DAMN SURE that they properly research the budget, scope/focus, instead of coming up with random budget and making random (usually tone-deaf) feature demands.
Well, it was my belief in work-life balance that kept me out of game development and into a more stable tech career. if you guys were getting paid, and I mean getting PAID like those you cited--athletes, writers, actors--then it would be less of an issue. But from what I can tell, you are getting basically a nice tech job salary and they are using that passion against you. You work the hours, you get paid. None of this salaried exempt nonsense.
"noticed some people walking away from my videos with very odd takes on what I said" -- part of me kinda fears that's just the age we live in. algorithms primed for angering us into never looking away from feeds can, in turn, prime us into sensationalist listening patterns. I don't mean to say this for cynicism, only self-awareness.
*I think a big part of this discussion centers around what you have described as games as products.* In the companies that make these games it's much more typical to regular coding jobs. There is little to no room for creativity and passion is pointless because you are just one of a thousand cogs in a machine and your contributions are at best limited but more typically gated buy five or more layers of corporate structure who decided what the game was well before making it and based on market trends divined by toy and beverage executives. This balance that you're talking about only exists in the realm that strays away from AAA, is a big difference from the 12 hours that you were putting in to make games you were passionate about, and spending the same 12 hours in the spreadsheet mine on the newest Call of Duty where you had to send in 7 revisions contributing to a gun that ends up getting scrapped because the progression system it was being made for it doesn't fit with the executives brave new battle pass plan. It's also be aspect of the exploitation of passion, everyone is exploited under capitalism as we all know, but the prime example of this is the thing that has become public recently where blizzard pays half or less than what other companies pay for the same job because they ride off of the reputation that they have, or should I say had. The great blizzard games of the past inspire the game developers of the present and then that company pays them bottom Dollar because the people are so happy to get a job with blizzard in the first place. The point of all this being that the passion/work-life balance thing you're talking about is a balance that doesn't exist for a great number of people in the games industry because of the vast all modernized corporatization that has taking place within it. That's why the focus has been so much on maintaining that work-life balance, it's fighting back against the corporations that have seized us all, basically exclusively. Passion is a dirty word because of how it's exploited not because of its value to a creative project. I think people would phrase what you're talkin about these days more as avoiding burnout in a creative project
Hi Tim! I wonder, given that I share a lot of your perspectives on the passion/work-life false dichotomy, if you picked up a lot of these habits while you were in graduate school? I know that you said you disliked being a PhD student (who would, frankly?) but I feel like a decent PI can really hammer home what it's like to sustain passion in research. I was given the same advice by my PI, that I need to work on things I'm passionate about, and to work when it strikes me rather than forcing myself to try to work on data or writing. For me, this is very different from, say, clinical work which is more like a 9-5 job. I can be passionate about the wellbeing of my patients, but I see that as more of an occupation, whereas I will often be struck by an idea or mentally work through a problem -- possibly in the middle of the night -- and I'll rush over to start digging into the data set using different R utilities, get lost in an article rabbit hole, or write up a few pages in a literature review. In those cases, I don't feel like I'm overworking myself or that I'm not abiding by a sense of work-life balance because it's a kind of internal expression of what I want to produce. Anyway, thanks for the video, very thought provoking!
Tim, I hope someday I can prove to you that you can make games from 9 to 5 - I write this as I'm prototyping a thing on a Sunday because I just gotta get it out :(
I think Balzac is the best example of having passion over work-life balance. He wrote from 1am to 8am every morning, often worked 15 hours or more at a stretch, and apparently once worked 48 hours with only 3 hours of rest in the middle. The result of this: terrible health which probably contributed to his early demise at the age of 51. However, today he is considered one of the greatest French writers in history. In other words, he was willing to sacrifice his own health for his art. I don't think a lot of people would be willing to do that.
The problem is exploitation. Studios and publishers know that people are willing to make sacrifices, so they work them to the bone. Why can't I be passionate about my job, AND clock off at 5?
I agree, passion != bad work life balance. I think bad work life balance comes from the misuse of other people's passion (and not compensating them correctly for their efforts). The idea of the "starving artist" comes to mind. To me, the starving artist isn't necessarily starving because they're bad at what they do or because they literally can't work some other job. They are starving because their passion for their art is what drives them more than their desire to live what others would consider "comfortably". It isn't wrong to be passionate, it's wrong to force people to burn themselves out (especially for an unreasonable exchange).
Imo 9-17 is eneugh time in a day to make any creative project for the vast majority of time, passion or no, and then you can also be a parent, a partner, a citizen etc.
It is not limited just to creative professions, the problem of working outside 9 to 5 often applies to professions which are focused on working with people. I saw a lot of similarities in working rythm of my father (a programmer) and mother, a teacher. Tho she had a job which included fixed hours, I saw her doing a lot of work outside the clasroom, not only grading test or preparing the workload that is needed in professional promotion procedure, but also preparing the lessons itself - trying to tailor them somewhat for the class to absorb it in easier fashion. (Actually lack of understanding if that work process is what leads to society, at least in my country, rather opposed to reforms for better work quality and compensation for teachers because "they work shorter hours and get the summer vacation" [Yeah, nice. Sure you are not teaching classes, but as a rural elementary teacher you also probably host basically a daycare for older children, or as a city one you are basically leveraged to organize events]). But in this kind of professions the pendlum going for passion could also lead to another consequence rather than a lost decade - burnout. I actually saw plenty of young teachers succumbing to that because of comiting too much time to their profession which leads to the thing one once took pride in and made them happy to be no longer giving any satisfaction. It's even worse if someone sticks to the profession, which can turn into long lasting mental problems. As I anticipate people saying "But teachers have programs and workbooks to do lesson planing for them" I leave a simple argument: people who make lesson programs have to make it uniform to be used on few million students, which hardly cares that little Billy struggles with fractions, while little Timmy is terminally bored and will now create trouble to combat it. The program is more similar to the video game producer in this case "you have to teach them enough so they can do standarized test, here is your deadline, handle it".
It would be interesting to hear your opinion on why development cycle has grown so much. It seems games now take 10y to make, are still buggy, you still have crunch and end product is not better than before, quite the opposite.
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Crunch you do because you're passionate and driven is very different from the crunch you do because it's been mandated by management and you have a deadline to meet.
And crunch that takes a few weeks is different then crunch for a year.
You're assuming that these things aren't connected though. It could be both mandated and something you're passionate about. And the reason it may be mandated is because without it your studio shuts down and you don't have a job. Not every game development studio is EA or Ubisoft who can keep paying their employees indefinitely.
@@TorQueMoDdefinitely a lot of complexity. The issue is one of freely given informed consent, which is a murky issue in today's world. I believe games are an art form and turning an art form into an industry always requires grinding up some artists. Just because artists often grind themselves up doesn't make it ok. Of course, the needs of staying in business and keeping a job add another layer. All these things are applying continuously at an individual level for each person involved. What a mess. I haven't even watched the video yet
They are and they aren't. Crunch on projects in many industries is necessary but especially when you work in a creative industry. Some times you'll be on board and passionate and sometimes you'll roll your eyes and want to go home, but you do it either way. The difference is we're entering an era where people just don't have the get it done attitude anymore and that'll end up being a very serious problem for our culture.
@@SpartanArmy117 you're right about the first part, but the problem is that crunch is expected as a norm rather than a necessary evil. The AAA industry is unsustainable and burns out creatives
The problem is in a corporate environment a corporation will always use the best and most committed person as a required baseline and expect others to emulate it. This is when passionate individual is essentially working against a team. If someone can operate on 4 hours sleep and stay at work 6 days a week and not be paid any extra than the person who works the agreed hours and does what is expected of them. The corporation will expect others to emulate the former and use that as their marker for future performance reviews.
Likewise if someone can do the job of 2 or 3 people then there is no reason to hire 2 or 3 people just stick with the one overworked person who isn't complaining and then when that person leaves or is poached away complain they have to hire 2 or 3 new people to replace them.
Creativity and passion can't be planned for like you say but it sure as shit can be exploited by those with no qualms about doing so, I think that is why there is such a bigger push it's to save the passionate overworkers from themselves and save others from being measured beside them.
It's strange because that sounds exactly like how his own experience was working at Interplay, all while getting grossly underpaid. I love Tim, but I'd be more curious to hear from his own past employees at Troika who **seemingly** crunched for years.
And you cannot make anything special without that person, and they won't work for you if you stop them.
@@Shotzeethegamer I'd argue that those passionate people get used, and almost anything special they would add to a project will be smoothed over in favour of stuff that sells, It's why we're like 95% of the time only finding those special games in the indie sector, where it's a small team who run themselves, and aren't administrated by executives who only work with statistics, 10-50 people teams, I've seen maybe 3 games from mainstream developers in the last 5 years, that could be called special, while, almost every year a special indie game comes out.
To reiterate, passionate people in a corporate setting are exploited, and, usually, anything special is removed to sell better, while in a community setting, like at an indie company or a very good company like Valve, they add their passion, make a product special, without harming their normal colleagues.
The best, most reliable, way to avoid this across the industry, is mass unionisation, one union for game developers, that would allow the workers to set rules to stop execs from exploiting them, while ensuring passionate people can do their thing without allowing the execs to use their exceptional work as the base line for normal workers.
@@radfoxuk8113 Passionate people are the people WHO MADE the companies that made the great games. Then they get that structure around them.
@@Shotzeethegamer But the dispassionate execs are usually the ones funding that company, deciding it's direction, and don't forget shareholders, they can get a say too... Just look at what happpened to No Man's Sky, their whole marketing effort was screwed up due to Sony execs having more of a say in essential parts of development than the actual developers, and it's not a singular case, it happens all the time, the publisher will fuck up a developer's work, like Look at the The Thingf prequel, it was completely ruined by a no-nothing exec who insisted on replacing the incredible practical effects with cheap CGI, cause it would "sell better".
I'm a game designer. Obviously, I don't have that big of experience as you, Tim, but I still need to add something from my own experiences. You, dear young developer reading that, should only crunch from passion when it's your game, your project. Don't be too passionate about other people projects, don't let it ruin your life. Crunch from passion, when you feel it will give you something real - be it money, some special kind of experience, knowledge. This is the rule I live by and it's not related only to work stuff. What Tim maybe is not seeing, is that he's a well known game developer, a person with huge successes, a legend of the industry basically. I'm bringing that out to tell you guys who are not yet in the industry - not everyone of you will ever achieve position that Tim holds. This is a harsh truth, but most of you won't be great game developers. You hard work won't pay off as you would expect. You most probably will be good employees, make some fun games, but eventually there's a high chance crunching will quite literally burn your passion, your private life, and you'll feel miserable.
Be passionate - for your own projects. Don't sell your soul to other people, and don't normalize crunch for yourself, it's not worth it.
He probably wouldn't have gained his position if he hadn't worked his butt off though. It didn't just come to him magically. You have to work hard to reap the rewards.
@@TorQueMoD killing yourself with work RARELY results in any amount of wealth or fame
This is so well said. I have learned this lesson in my own life and I have very rigid boundaries when it comes to work. I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of the ‘passion’ element in work, but what I’ve given up in enjoying in a career I’ve gained 2x over with meaning in my life. I’m looking forward to raising kids some day and being a present father who has the time and energy to give my child what they need.
This is what I think is missing from the video. It's fine to slave away for a creative venture that can actually be yours: to control, to profit from, to be credited for. You should absolutely never allow that pressure to be put on you in order to enrich someone else. Ever. At the end, he says that if you do, you'll have a great home life but a resume of mediocre games. Great! Work is work. Life is what exists in all the other hours. Lead a fulfilling life.
Hi Tim! I really love the videos, as someone who is relatively new to game dev (started my own company a year ago).
I think the issue with the word "passion" is that lot of bosses have used that as an excuse to take advantage of their workers. They will ask their employees to put in more time, do sacrifices, instead of doing any themselves.
We're a small team, I want my employees to care, I want them to feel passionate and that this is their game. However, like you said, I want them to have a life outside of this. If we arent achieving what we need, then I'm going to hire more people or I'm going to cut scope. I want us all to be passionate, but not sacrifice our lives for it.
In the same stead, I agree that it isn't just a dichtomy. Our hours are flexible, sometimes we put in 12 hour days, but in return ill ask them to work less the next day.
I think it's just the system of taking advantage of employees who live on passion and want to make games that has people so against it (and rightfully so imo). Also the employees get nothing for their "passion" when the bosses get all the reward for their labor, but thats the socialists in me talking haha
❤❤ thanks for reading
I agree with you on this, all this talk of overwork and crunch and so on, might not even be a thing if the rewards for that work was balanced more fairly, ie less bonuses for the people on top and more to the people actually putting in the hours.
Heh. The problem in that example is not the word '' passion '' or the concept of '' passion ''. It's the boss. As tim said. passion good, work-life balance good. If it swings too far in favor of one, it's usually not an optimal solution. That's taboo, but the counter-point is that some employees can use the work-life balance thing to put 0 passion into the game. And it does happen, yes. Everywhere, every job, every day. And I'm just an employee.
I don't care how much my clients are making off of my work, if they want me to extra push myself, it's only a matter of good old moneyyyy:D
@@mcashed i mean thats exactly it. A lot of time studios will ask people to crunch out of "passion" and barely pay overtime. So they exploit those employees, and dont reward them for all their hard work on top of crunch, especially for an extended time, being horrible for your health.
Well said.
I like the way Leonard put it in your first talk, when talking about Fallout's development team: "We exploited ourselves". It's one thing to forego life-work balance and work feverishly on a project that you believe in, of your own free will... it's another when it's imposed on you from above. *Insert AAA company here*
It's very complicated because do you impose it on yourself? Or is it subconscious? Is it peer pressure? And how, as a boss, do you handle promotions in the future? How do you, consciously or not, not favor the devs who visibly worked much longer, and maybe got more experience out of it? How can you measure the burnout potential they might have, compared to other employees?
Letting individuals decide, in a larger organization, doesn't really work. Not crunching has to be enforced.
Very interesting video but I disagree on a few points, or think they might be overlooked
- Work life balance doesn't necessarily means 9 to 5. Creative people can and should have flexible hours, but they should have reasonable deliverables, the kind that roughly average a normal work week, with highs and lows. If one person isn't enough to provide that and you're in a company, it's the manager's job to provide additional manpower, not that person's job to crunch themselves to death.
- Your level of investment should be proportional to the stake you have. Big companies ask of their devs to crunch themselves for games where they have no creative input on and for which they'll probably get fired at the end. I love Witcher 3, but I would have been fine with it being smaller if it meant less devs quit in disgust at the end because they were so overworked. These people should demand through unions normal workloads, even if they feel strongly for the games. Conversely it's normal for indies to go all in on their games, because it's THEIR GAME.
- Most people have a set amount they can produce for creative endeavours per day. Crunching occasionally is doable, but doing in the medium to long run has drastically diminishing returns.
My socialist friends don't want to hear it, but unions are relatively toothless in the present environment. They can still try to negotitate on the part of their members for better pay or hours or benefits, etc., but I hear even game dev work is being outsourced to financially poor communitites to save on development costs in the "global economy." There's still some hope, however. As Ursula LeGuin put it, "it's power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."
Well said.
well said
I would push back against the idea that great, artful games come at the cost of work-life balance. The problem is that it's always in the companies' interests to exploit employee passion. They will insist that the nature of game development as art simply requires that you abandon work-life balance, that you make great personal sacrifices, because that aligns with their financial interests.
The current games industry simultaneously contains terrible amounts of crunch AND mediocre "games as products", and honestly, to hear someone suggest things like "well, maybe devs these days just don't have enough passion, they aren't willing to put in the hours", feels pretty anti-worker to me (even though you agree that workers should demand WLB from their employers). I think the same forces and incentives that are making games more mediocre and monetization-focused are also responsible for preventing better working conditions in the industry, and we shouldn't be so easily turned against each other to defend corporate interests.
The same goes for other creative careers you mentioned (writing, acting, etc.). The problem is not necessarily that they have passion and work long hours, but that those choices are made FOR them, for the sole benefit of their employers, who will happily wax poetic about the self-sacrifice demanded by great art while they pocket the spoils.
What you had in Troika - that shelter for kids - was great. More companies should implement it, although even better is remote working. Now you can communicate easily remotely so many jobs shouldn't require live presence.
It's great because it allows those with children to be able to use their passion to create. Without proper childcare many have to choose between neglecting their children or scaling back how much they can work. It is so prohibitively expensive in my country (the UK) that for many they will be giving nearly their entire wage to cover it. We do have some good rules once a child gets to three but before that people are hanging in at work so as not to lose a position whilst earning nothing. If there's one thing that changes your opinion on work life balance it's having kids. Before you have them or if you choose not to (I appreciate im missing out those that want them but can't) you don't realize how it changes absolutely everything about your life. I know that sounds trite but it's true.
As for things like microtransactions I doubt it's developers that want it, it's publishers pushing them to do it, and it's killing the industry. As for Unions, everyone should join one.
Agreed, remote work is genuinely great most of the time, but problems arise when project leads don't become aware of problems. Having coders or artists debating something offline can lead to a lot of wasted time, in an office environment you'd hear them talking and be able to offer a solution and insight they might not have noticed due to fixation.
We call it "the shed"
The main issue is Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation; it’s ok if you regularly want to work 14 hr days to finish a project, because you feel you need to do it; it’s NOT OK to work those hours because the company is forcing you or enticing you to work like that; if you’re doing it for your own reasons, it’s fine; if your only doing it because THEY say you have to, it’s a problem…
There's a pendulum that doesn't receive much attention. Some great books have been written about that dynamic lately, e.g. Ian McGilchrist's 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World'. Jill Bolte-Taylor wrote a book and gave a TED talk after her stroke, titled 'My Stroke of Insight,' about "the divided brain" as well. Both neuroscientists by profession, their research and experience is highly insightful of the present human condition. Recommend. (More great ideas for outstanding video games studios might like to explore as well.)
Even if you are personally motivated to work those kinds of hours it's still unhealthy and ultimately unproductive in the long term, because if you don't have some balance you WILL burn out sooner or later and then you won't be creating _anything_ for a long while until you recover. Small bursts of long hours can be useful, but it still has to be done in moderation or it's just bad... There's also the problem of peer pressure, even if you personally can take some longer hours and don't have other responsibilities, by doing those hours you are putting pressure on your colleagues to do the same and bad managers will exploit that and take it as the norm. A *good* manager will tell you to go home and get some rest, and pace yourself.
Some careers just work differently, if you're a firefighter you work weird hours, because it's needed, sometimes you're just working 10+ hours a day until a situation has been solved. It comes with the job. I think the worst problem is executives/shareholders that see their workers as a resource that can be used up to gain another resource (profits), leaving burnt out wrecks of people in its wake.
Yeah, nowadays it's billion dollar companies crunching their employees. It's not about passion anymore, its about doing unpaid overwork, it's about exploitation of that passion.
And then they will invoke "bad market or industry conditions" when they can't hire, or staff with passionate competent personnel. Like what has been happening for over a year.
Well no shit executive, you spent the last 30 years burning people up, making some of the best one flee to others industries, and literally sucking the life of the rest who don't have time to recharge, to do others things that will feed their creativity.
Or they just don't want to work for you. Like the infamous example of Naughty Dog, where a whole animation department left, and the studio had such a horrible reputation they were forced to hire right out of unis and very junior people from the film industry, where their reputation was unknown.
@@deantjewie Exactly, I think I said elsewhere that as long as compensations were commensurate with the amount of effort/work being put in people wouldn't be as angry about it, but currently the lions share of profits goes up top to people who most certainly shouldn't be getting as much as they are.
Resonating with this. I've found I emotionally don't want work-life balance but physically need it (at least while I'm still getting back to baseline after burnout in '21). This means I can happily do a little extra for a milestone but have to be sensitive to the signs that I'm reaching my limit.
That may be the most important thing for passionate devs to learn, when to take a breather.
i'm a design and development engineer in the auto industry for one of the Big 3 OEMs. our job isn't 9-5 either. it ebbs and flows though. during launch, its all hands on deck. plants run 24 hours a day 6-7 days a week. we need to be there too. in my opinion, the major issue is lack of appreciation at the VP level, and lack of overtime pay. thankfully that's changing. companies are starting to provide overtime pay, and acknowledge work/life balance, and show appreciation for folks working their asses off. its amazing how even a small amount of appreciation can go a long way
Tim has provided an incredible amount of value and knowledge with these videos, I look forward to watching them every day. Thank you for giving us your time and energy with these videos Tim, they have helped me immensely.
I feel like if someone describes someone else as "too passionate" they're just being polite and mean some word other than "passionate". But what Tim is saying is effectively correct. When you're passionate about your job then you don't mind going the extra mile, and it won't feel like "unpaid overtime" - the problem is far too much of every industry wants you to be "passionate" about your job without ever providing you a source of passion, but they still want you to act and be motivated like you're passionate. It's difficult to say how I would act in the situations that Tim's been in because I've never been in those situations myself.
Tim seems to have failed to understand that nowadays "passion" often is a buzzword corporations use to exploit the workers. "You don't want to work 12 hours a day for pennies? You don't have a passion". It's especially funny to demand passion when AAA game design is handled down from business and marketing departments and is focused on making the blandest product possible to appeal to the biggest number of people.
It's sadly the lie of "Do what you love." Convincing people that the joy they get, or the joy they want to convince you of, is worth low pay, little to no benefits, and long, awful hours. There's a reason we're seeing a resurgence in unionization. It always boils down to exploitation.
Art is now content, IPs, and product. There's a reason we're seeing a rush towards AI, but I don't think it's to replace people, as much as to devalue people for better exploitation. "Get to work, serf, or we'll have an AI do it for nothing!"
By the way, what they said is not caricature. That has been the literal Blizzard playbook for 15+ years. They pay less and demand more, "for the passion" and "for the prestige of working a Blizzard". They weren't even hiding it.
Yeah, when bosses talk about "passion" what they mean is "I need you to do work late for free so I can get a bonus".
It doesn't help that many, if not most, gamers blame "the devs" for everything that's wrong with modern gaming. Some CEOs are pretty obviously doing the same because they keep calling on "the devs" to "take one for the team" and "come through for the company."
There must be a short circuit somewhere in the global brain preventing us from seeing that the real culprit is institutionalized greed.
None of the ailments touched on the past few days are restricted to the gaming industry. It's pretty obviously a systemic issue and we're literally not conscious of it for the most part. I'd hazard to guess, routine and habit have made it largely unconscious to us. "It's just the way things are" and "there is no alternative." Or so we hear.
Now, all our chickens have come home to roost. In every field we look, there's a crisis of one kind or another. (Seriously. Just Google 'Crisis' of this or that field.) All those crises share a common root.
Personally, I think those who say it's a 500-year old worldview and paradigm in need of subsumation to its proper place are correct. As Albert Einstein is often paraphrased as putting it, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." And, yet, world leaders keep trying to do just that.
I once did 100-110 hours of work a week for a month in July
I was physically mentally tired and was literally sick and tired
enjoyed it a lot it was like being a solider on a mission or something
did 80-90 hours of work a week all year until July
will get back on regular schedule after Christmas or in January
sometimes you only have a finite amount of time to make something
There is value in never doubting your ability
I agree with you. In the past few years I started feeling this sentiment from young people especially where anyone saying that they are passionate or that they want to go extra mile are put down because of all the usual reasons, you are exploited, capitalism bad, whatever. Sure people do get exploited at times but now it got to a point where people are shamed for being passionate and doing extra. Your pendulum analogy is very apt here. I personally believe that most people are just lazy (perhaps its a dark view) and they just hate when someone is doing extra because it puts them in a bad light so they just want to put down anyone who rises above. Easier to put down someone than to be truly passionate or work hard.
Tim, you're clearly coming at this from an honest place of caring about the craft and having worked some crazy hours at times to make some amazing games (big fan of VTMB), but you cannot ignore the very deliberate exploitation that takes place across this industry in the name of "passion" when talking about this contentious topic. THAT'S why people talk about it as an either/or thing. As a worker you have to put your foot down and know when to say NO, not just to your boss but also to yourself if you're prone to overworking. Yes, you can be passionate about your craft and sometimes you have to push yourself to achieve something special, and certainly it's true creativity can be unpredictable, but you have to take care of yourself and keep a healthy balance AND be wary of those who would seek to exploit your hard work for profit and little to no compensation, with no regard for the long term well-being of yourself and your colleagues.
Excellent treatment of this topic, Tim.
I'm not advocating 100 hour work weeks either... but passion unrestrained by "welp, its quittin time!" is a precondition for great work.
The greatest artists and scientists of all time overworked themselves voluntarily.
It's perfectly okay NOT to do that!!! It's clearly unhealthy in many ways TO do that!!!
but all the same. if you and another guy are equally talented and fortunate, and the other guy is willing to work twice as hard as you... The other guy will soar higher.
"Fallout wouldn't have been possible working 9 to 5" is, I think, a miscommunication, a slip of the tongue. Because literally it means that without crunch, the game couldn't have been made. What I think you wanted to say was, if that same team at that time didn't crunch, the game wouldn't have been made. Which is different, because crunch is a failure of management. With more experienced managers and producers, with more budget to have a larger team and/or a longer production, the game would have been made. But mistakes were made, and short term profits were favored, hence crunch.
Thing is, as is almost always the case, the people who made those mistakes were the ones who benefited from it. No manager or exec was fired because of this, nor saw multiple years of bonuses disappear to cover the increased health cost of the crunched team (not to mention the inane amount of overtime they should have gotten).
"There is too much work life balance". Not possible, by definition it is a balance. Your balance point might be different than others, but something can't be too balanced.
4:41 you equate discoveries and innovation with risk, then oppose that risk to work life balance. Why is that in opposition? Risk in production should be for the entity financing it (because they are the one benefiting from it). If you want to do a large unknown feature, it's a risk to production. That should have been accounted for, with some buffer made in prod budget and time. But going outside the buffer should be a risk for the studio boss or the publisher: do they accept the risk of increasing the budget of the production for that innovation? Why should the basic gamedev in their cubicle being the ones paying for that with crunch, which is very rarely fully financially covered.
"actors don't work 9 to 5" is frankly beyond disingenuous, and entering the disgusting territory. This is a totally false analogy, because TV and movie set have very strict union rules, and actors are not paid 9 to 5 hourly rate either. Did you force your employees to be unionized before you hired them? Did you pay them SAG rates? I very much think not. Actors work in burst, not unlike fishermen and other specialist jobs do, with long hours for some time, and a lot of downtime after that. And to not be exploited by the production, there are strict limits to what is accepted.
As for writers, the ones you are probably referring too are their own bosses, and therefore will profit from what they do. There is a difference working 70h week to enrich yourself, and doing that to enrich someone else. Professionals writers as a regular jobs, like journalists, are not doing this. Because like gamedevs they are not their own bosses.
"you can't design a car working 9 to 5". Not only you absolutely can, but it's actually how it's done. Nevermind cars, that's usually how planes and tanks and rocketship are designed.
And of course there is overtime here and there, fires to put out. THat happen. But there is a huge difference between fully paid, with multiplier, overtime here and there. And crunch. I like Mike Darrah definition of it, I'll paraphrase as: a damaging sustain effort. Literally damaging, as in will harm your health, physical or mental.
Everyone has a different threshold of course, and that can change with age and other factors. But nobody is saying you should never work more than 32, 35, or 40h a week. If you can balance it, work as much as you can. Just work that extra time on your own things. Write a book, develop your garden, help at a soup kitchen, learn a new skill or language, work to stay in shape, hell do a second job if you really want to. But allowing, or even worse pushing people to work very long hours, harming themselves in the process, to enrich other people, is just plain wrong to me. And saying it's opposed to passion, is also very wrong. People can be passionate, and work hard, without being exploited or working insane long hours. Working hard and working long are not the same thing.
As to schedule, I agree creative work is not possible on a strict 9 to 5. Which is why it should be normal, and ok, for people to come in Monday morning to drop the work they spend their week end on, stay an hour to see if a fire need them, then go back home for two days (or whatever variation on that). Creatives need flexibility, but flexibility goes both ways.
As a construction worker I have throught out my career worked on several Microsoft buildings. I was always interested to see how they built their offices and the additonal ammenities they offered in order to keep people on the job as long as possible. To a construction worker that looks like Paradise but, I know the grass is not always greener on the other side. The same goes for 'Office Space' where they show some kind of idealized version of construction work.
I did eventually (kind of) get to scratch my interest in Game Dev by being a high level backer on the game Shadowrun:Hong Kong...I got to visit the studio of HBS and it was definately different then Microsoft but, what you could tell there is you had a bunch of people who were very passionate about the games they were making. Even without all the bells and whistles offered on a Microsoft campus.
I love hearing about your thoughts. I wish there would be more this type of content from the gamedev sphere.
Some of my favorite games come from your effort in your 'lost decade'... so not lost... found and loved.
Spoken like someone that's been in management/director roles. Saying sometimes you gotta sacrifice the life part in work/life balance.....but never saying sometimes you gotta sacrifice the work part in work/life balance. Life comes before work always...every..single...time.
Wonderful perspective on the subject. I think a lot of the modern conversation around work-life balance in the games industry is a conversation being had in response to crunch on games that are more in line with products. Devs are getting crunched on games that launch incomplete, parts missing, but with monetization. That multiplayer Halo game is a good example and what happened with OverWatch 2's PvE & Progression content.
I think the pendulum analogy is a very good one (especially as someone who still loves zombie stories). Work-life balance matters more to me when I'm working a grueling gig that wants more and more for me and that leaves me with less and less. I think it was super useful to have you deconstruct the false dichotomy -specifically- as it relates to games. If I felt that doing more would yield a better, more faithful expression of my intent, I think I could make that investment and see it less as a sacrifice. I appreciate that you strove for nuance.
Question; Do you think it makes sense for devs to want to make games as a 9-5 thing with how many games there are being made as products? Is that a logical response to the climate?
My perception from people who talk about work life balance and passion is not that they think of passion as a dirty word or something to reign in. It’s moreso that the passion of developers can often be used against them and exploited in order to work excessive hours to meet deadlines that may be unrealistic for the goals of the studio. The labor conditions in game studios can be very unhealthy, which is largely dependent on the studio, but I recognize this gets really complicated since making games is a creative activity. It’s not predictable and many people want to make the best game they can, but if unchecked or actively exploited, the work conditions can get way out of hand and end up hurting those involved. It’s a complex issue, and I think it gets harder to control the larger a studio gets and the more ambitious the projects are.
John Carmack has an interesting take on Work-Life balance, "Work-Life balance versus your life's work." He sees his work as his life's work, and that's great. It makes sense, he mentioned he's always been able to work on things that he personally finds interesting. However, one person's life's work shouldn't necessarily dictate other people's life's work, which is where i think a lot of the modern discourse of Work-Life balance stems from. People should be able to choose their own work to life balance.
I think you have a reasonable take here Tim, and I agree with a lot of it - I do think however that it's (obviously) coming from the place of someone who grew up with the massive growth/transformation of the games industry through the 80s-00s. I think that the experience for younger people getting into at least the AAA industry will be profoundly different than the experience you had in your youth. Most of the people I know who entered the gaming industry when we graduated (around the 2010 mark) have at least left the AAA/Big Studio/Big Publisher sphere, many of them cited burnout and ludicrous expectations on their hours/time. The demands were almost always dressed up as needing "passion" (see also "commitment", "pride in our work" etc.) for their current product, even for people at the lowest position on the totem pole in games whose development teams were in the hundreds (and so were a very small part of the game, a far cry from the responsibility, creative input, kudos and financial rewards of more senior people at the studio). The issues as I see them from those friends were:
1.) The weaponization of "passion" against work-life balance as well as pay/benefits. It wasn't just the 9-5 aspect, which I think oversimplifies the complaints that I've at least heard. Childcare was a big one, as well as the desire to start a family being impossible because the lengths crunch reached, not being able to make or schedule time for friends, family, partners etc. Because of being made to feel on call (I specifically recall a friend who worked in QA who would get called in at all sorts of hours at the last minute because a new build had been delivered and the company he worked for promising ridiculously short turnaround times). Some of this weaponization is, as other people have already said, been done at the publisher level or from those far above the trenches but some of it has come from long-time developers (who have become leads, studio execs etc). who think that because they put in ludicrous hours when they were younger, that this is normal and to be expected now (and part of this is related to 2. below). I am not, of course, saying you believe or practice this, but without naming names some of your contemporaries (for lack of a better word) who took a similar path into executive positions in studios definitely have, and I think this is likely a part of why people have taken prior comments in a bad light - they've seen similar talk used to, in all honesty, exploit their time and real passion for game development. Honestly I think that most people in game development demonstrates passion just by staying there, when many could take their skills to other industries and earn a lot more scratch with the same skills.
2.) When it come to passion for game development (and similar creative endeavours) size matters. There's a very big difference between the small studio working overtime on a project they've all come together to make (so the indie scene these days, less so in the 90s, 80s when small teams were more normal) and being one small cog in a massive publishing/development machine like Ubisoft. You mentioned writers as one example of a profession that doesn't have to follow a 9-5 schedule, but this is also generally a profession where the author(s) will either be one in a small or singular author, writing to a small number of publisher deadlines. That's a far cry from the bad end of the trench in video game developers of people churning out assets or code week after week that make up only a small part of the game they're working on. Obviously everyone gets that internal feeling of recognition "I made that", but the scales are very different depending on the size of the project and it's unfair to lean on passion or pride to get more work out of someone who, ultimately, is contributing a small part of the whole and has little to no say in the direction of the game their making (and often very little reward for their time, either at face value or what they could get in parallel professions). You remarked in a video earlier about getting ideas and implementing them from artists at Carbine, I can't think of the people I knew working at the entry level ever having an experience like that (that they've related to me - and "Famous Developer X used my idea!" *would* have come up. Their experiences were much more along the lines of being expected to work ridiculous hours and weekends for months or even a year at a time. Always with words like "passion" being used to explain why (alongside the usual "budgets is tight" and what amounted to "do it or we'll fire you and find someone who will"). At the indie and small studio level this seems to be much less of an issue, obviously in such an environment people are responsible for a larger amount of the project (similar to what you mentioned wearing multiple hats on your older games), are likely more equal in the financial rewards, have more there that they made that they can point to and think "I made this". etc. In a more equal environment, and especially one where a publisher is less demanding, I think the downsides of long hours or crunch are felt much less and are much less of an issue - there's more genuine passion involved, and the people involved are much more likely to be in a position to say to their bosses the hours are too much or work needs to be more flexible.
3.) Similar professions and passion - I touched on writing above but I think it's very noticeable that in other creative areas like film and television, or other areas where unusual hours are required or useful, unions are very common (in the UK they're more common everywhere, but I think I'm right with this take for the US). Others have mentioned professions like firefighters, nurses, truck drivers and other professions where odd or extended hours are required, those professions are most often heavily unionised in part because of the potential for exploitation in the name of passion or need. Game developers by and large don't have this, especially not on the scale of actors, teamsters, stage employees etc. Most people in game development are in roles more similar to the below-the-line employees in film and tv production than they are actors or writers. That's just the nature of what the AAA game industry has become (and why everyone in related fields know many who left it). You said maybe unions are needed, from the experiences I've had related to me, they're damn well required - and efforts to unionise need support from industry veterans. You speak of the pendulum but I think you're speaking as someone who, at least more recently, has a lot more choice is where to stop and when to walk away (and go work elsewhere in game development). The people I knew getting burned out, overworked and exploited didn't have that kind of freedom due to it being their first few jobs in the field, threats of being blackballed among local developers etc.
This all being said I do hear from friends still in game development that things have gotten better since the "Rockstar Spose" days that in many places things have gotten better - mostly post COVID - with WFH being more acceptable and allowing people more flexibility at work, but I don't know many people now who work for the biggest developers on the sorts of 400 developer plus games because they pretty much all, very reluctantly, quit.
Yahtzee has always had pretty good gaming takes. His show is super cynical, but you can tell that he really cares about the state of the gaming industry.
Yes, "work-life balance" and "passion" aren't a dichotomy; yes, not every industry/job can work on a strict 9-to-5 schedule; and yes, anybody who thinks creativity can be planned out is a fool at best. Thank you for reminding us of these truths. However, I have two major issues with the contents of this video:
1. The equation is incomplete: it's not a false dichotomy, but a false trichotomy, of which "9-to-5" (which you seem to equate with "work-life balance") is the third element. You can be passionate on a 9-to-5. I would say anyone who's able to work enthusiastically on something for 7-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for months or years on end qualifies as passionate. Even if they never work a minute longer than their schedule. Conversely, you can even have poor work-life balance on a 9-to-5 -- if, say, your job is soul-crunching or so physically demanding that you're left with no energy at the end of your shift. In other words, the schedule (or lack thereof) doesn't necessarily determine the quality of the output or your mental/physical well-being. And heck, what if you're not passionate anyway? Unless you're working on a one-person project, you can afford to have some people who are less passionate than others. It's impossible for everyone, even in creative positions, to be passionate on every project all the time. In our current society, we MOSTLY work so that we don't go homeless, don't starve to death, and have some material comfort in life beyond the bare necessities.
2. If this video made a big splash (e.g. millions of views, media attention...), you can bet it would be appropriated and misquoted in bad faith by company execs and number crunchers everywhere who would go "See? Even the legendary Tim Cain says you should be more passionate! Now go crunch some more and make me some money." It doesn't matter that you said unions are good elsewhere, or that you lost a decade to work. The second you simplify what "work-life balance" means and offer some pushback against it, your words will be turned against the workers by the corporate world.
The problem, as always, is workers being made powerless to take control of their working conditions and organize their work in ways that fit their jobs and personalities the best. The bottom is being told by the top how they should work to maximize growth and profit, and the top will go as far as it can get away with to those ends. That's why you got unions pushing back so hard. "Work-life balance" is just a catch-all term and, I'd argue, is only the beginning. Eventually, you want to empower workers to organize their work themselves. In such a scenario, a worker would have much more leeway to, say, work when the creative juices are flowing, even if it's on a Sunday at 3 am, but even more importantly, they would also be able to go "you know what, here's what I did the other day, so today I'm not working at all, and you can't do anything about it, and I still expect to be paid". That's the part that's missing right now. Sure, the company will be happy to let you work on your spare time, but it'll still expect you to do your hours on top of that. And like some other commenters have said, companies will look at whoever is the most committed and expect the same from everyone else. Because, again, it's a profit & growth machine that operates on maximizing worker exploitation.
I think this kind of opens the door to crunch though, doesn’t it?
It does. If you watch his other videos you can see that they crunched a ton on most of Tims games. Bloodlines, Fallout and Arcanum all had months or even years of crunch. They were a small and very dedicated team and I get the impression that it was very much volunteery, but still.
Watch Tims interview with Leonard Boyarsky, hearing him talking about bloodlines. It's brutal.
yeah, well, what did you expect from someone who has whole period of his life he calls a "lost decade" due to crunch 🤣
I'm not a game dev, rather a web dev. But work-life balance to me doesn't really mean working a 9-5 every day. There's periods of really intense work where I stay up well past midnight working on something, either because there are deadlines we need to hit or more often because chasing the "right" solution becomes it's own reward. To compensate there are periods when I do almost no work during a week.
I completely agree that with a creative profession (which I'd like to think development is) you can't really schedule a 9-5 and be happy with the results - some days your brain works just right, you get into it and don't even want to stop, some days you're preoccupied with something else and can't deliver anything valuable try as you might.
I think an important bit of context is that for much of his career Cain been a creative director of some description, and for a time was even a company owner. All these things he's saying is fair for people in that position, but most people working in games are not in that position, and may never be.
Really level headed and well thought out point.
Work life balance is a topic I didn't think I wanted you to cover
I love mediocre games because they guarantee me a happy private life :D!
I agree that creativity cannot be planned.
Passion leads to burnout. It's an energy drain.
Projects are like long throws. You throw hoping you throw far enough.
Your muscles are your team members.
Your throwing technique is your management ability.
When it sucks, the ball doesn't fly far.
If your techniques are good enough, you can also handle weaker muscles (team members).
In the long run, it all comes down to management.
Train your muscles (team members) with the right technique and you will throw far.
Hi Tim! I work as a programmer (databases, desktop and web applications) and I always struggled with the planning of new features. It's the same creative work - be it programming or designing UI and my boss for years forced me to make precise estimates. Only when I disassembled the steps necessary to achieve the goal to rudimentary tasks, I would then be able to make estimates at most differing in orders of tens of percent (less or more) from the final time cost which is a really commendable feat if you ask me. As you say - when the creativity hits, the work flows, but when it doesn't - you may be just stuck doing the mundane part of the work (that must be done) while waiting for those good ideas to come. So I agree with you wholly.
Anyway, loved all your videos until now, including your games since 1999. Thank you for all that you're doing.
Jan
I work on my game in bursts.
The average week will have 3-4 days where I'm working on the game for 13-15 hours, and a day or so when I'm so burnt out I'll just zone out in bed.
Some work days I'm super non productive, and spend more time focusing on AFKing in OSRS, other work days where I'll just not eat or drink or even leave my desk.
It's chaotic and organic and weird.
I am a developer (not game) and your message is still relevant.
One of your best speeches so far. Agreed on most points. Well done.
Yahtzee has been going almost nonstop for over a decade and is still as sharp and insightful as ever, his side show "extra punctuation" has brought up some good subjects
I have at least a 'lost decade' - but the time wasn't truly lost, I have things that which I wouldn't want changed to a 8-5 job, and more 'life' balance. That was part of the balance, and that was part of life. And was willing to spend a fair amount of it doing the things I was passionate about.
Perhaps your decade isn't exactly lost, either?
Tim, you were talking about passion and importance of it as a function of being young and having more energy (and many other aspects). Do you think that it is also a part of company polices and maybe can be inspired by management? You have mentioned before about Interplay and how they have managed to give fallout team that inspirational boost, but also how Carbine has totally killed your vibe. Maybe a video on what to do and NOT to do from the managerial perspective!
Problem is if you want the big AAA games the market craves then you need the big money behind it and the corporate culture that goes with it.
Kickstarter showed there’s a limit to even how much the most passionate fanbases can contribute monetarily.
Hi Tim,
Really thankful for all your videos!
Very I opening, I’m currently a game design and animation student and I’m just wandering how you guys animated and created your models back in the fallout days, the visual style and animation feels so iconic to this day, would love to know how it was done if you have any insight on it!
Thanks Tim: )
"Work life balance, most of the time." Fantastically said.
Great video. Microtransactions and GAS is death for games.
I align with you 1000% on this.
It was the "craft" era of games, as in craft beer. Games today just have too much money involved and too many bizarre financial decions, eg: $50+million write-offs. Somehow when a big budget games fails financially its "just the cost of doing business." But when a creator has a great idea, its "no, we can't take a chance on your project." Maybe we need another mid 80s games crash.
Google "live service bubble bursting." Yay? \o/
In "work-life balance" balance is a keyword. Sometimes you need to work more, some times you need to take care of your personal life more. Don't go extreme on anything. Keep balance. And not only when it comes to work or personal life.
Very fun video. You come from a very different base statement than I expected. I was not expecting the balance to be viewed as opposed to passion which is a voluntary, internally originating effort (at least I have never heard the argument phrased this way). I always heard it as balance as opposed to crunch, i.e. an involuntary, externally motivated pressure to get stuff done.
I agree with your take. I just don't know whether it answers the question of whether crunch belongs in the process and if so what are its limits or where should the balance lie.
It's always great to watch your videos.
I don't think the vid is trying to answer whether crunch belongs. I think there's a difference between some companies toxic crunch culture and understanding that creativity can't be boxed in.
@@NoahStavish thanks. I don't see work life balance stifling passion and creativity which is why I agree that work-life balance vs passion is a false dichotomy as Tim suggests.
However this is not why people are typically advocating for and try to ensure work-life balance. They tend to ask for it because they are sometimes/often being asked to crunch against their will to get things done. In an ideal world how much you work beyond your contract should be an individual's choice.
@@StavrosNikolaou I'm very aware of toxic crunch culture. I've been in the industry for a decade and have had 100+ hour work weeks and once had to work for two months with only 2 days off with every day being over 10 hours.
I think crunch for the most part is due to poor planning on multiple ends, and other things should be forced to give instead of months of crunch. The studio I work for now is anti-crunch and it's been much better for work-life balance, though because I'm passionate I do find myself often thinking about work and coming up with ideas in off-hours. I know I'm not the only one, because at the leads level we're discussing what to do with other workers who want to work longer because they get into a good workflow or they also can't get their mind off a feature for whatever reason. This is difficult to balance from a company perspective though. Tim makes a bunch of fantastic points, and I largely agree with him.
@@NoahStavish Thank you very much for your insights. I really hope I did not come off as suggesting that you are not familiar with crunch; if so, I apologize 😕
I also agree with the majority of the points made on the video. I guess I'll have to wait until the video when Tim addresses crunch (which I'm sure will come :) to check what his experience has taught him on dealing with it and hopefully minimizing it.
Sacrifice is fine, sacrifice is something you do when you make a decision to do what is important to you even though you miss something, you still know it is the right thing.
I also think work-life balance doesn't mean 9 to 5. It means the ability to care for yourself and live your life. You can have inspiration in the evening and want to work on your creative thing, and that can even last all night and into the morning and maybe you pull that all-nighter and do some amazing work. To me, work-life balance is then not getting punished by your employer for having a nap instead of sitting through a useless meeting or not performing to expectations in mid afternoon after being up for 48 hours. It means working on saturday, but also being able to go to your doctors appointment on tuesday. It means crunching for a few months, and then being allowed to take vacation.
The problem is when it's not really sacrifice because it's not really voluntary. Where you're told that you need to be passionate, which means you are told to perform even when you can't, you aren't allowed the downtime to be creative, there is always give but never take.
Balance doesn't mean rigid schedule, it's just give and take, it is seeing value for the things you give up. The problem is that people who do make these products use the idea of passion to guilt people into sacrificing theirselves for nothing in return.
I 100% get where you're coming from. I too have come to many of the same conclusions that you have. Different industry but the lessons are the same.
I've discussed this very topic with people before. My position is this: Making games is an art form (and a science, but that side is less relevant to this discussion). Really think about the best art you've ever seen. I bet you'll notice a trend wherein almost all of that art was made with blood, sweat, and tears. Hardship was involved. Harsh limitations would be put on them that they'd have to create the art around, pressure was generally on them in some form. It's the 'starving artist' idea, and that idea is prevalent for the simple fact that it tends to be true. An artist so passionate and creative about their work that, despite and even BECAUSE of harsh conditions, will create something wonderful is one to be applauded and appreciated. It's not the path for everyone, and I think large swathes of people involved in game development don't need to have that same pressure placed upon them. But for those seeking to make 'art', particularly those involved in any sort of design work, whether it be map/level/mechanics/art/music/sound/etc. *should* be pushed into that. I think the special types of artist come in two forms: The 'starving artist' and the artist who has transcended being the 'starving artist' into simply being a master of their craft who can capture that same creativity with ease, without needing the suffering (this second type is rare).
There's simply certain things in life where you can't have it all. You can't say, "I want to make wonderful art" but then say, "But why isn't this a 9 - 5?" or even "Why can't I have all the money and time I want, and be given no limitations?" There's something deep in the soul where the artist has to reach deep to make something amazing, but that doesn't come without either remarkable amounts of experience or being driven almost to madness. I believe it was Yasunori Mitsuda, composer for Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, etc. that remarked that he had a nervous breakdown with pretty much every new game score he made early on. And you listen to the music of these games and you can really tell he poured his soul into them. Silent Hill as a series started because Konami took a small team of the rejects they had (most of whom didn't have tremendous experience), put them together, gave them too little time and too little budget and told them to make a game that'd sell like Resident Evil. And look what we got.
I'm of course very sympathetic to the idea of having a good work-life balance. But if you want to make art, you really have to be willing to push yourself for that art in ways that you wouldn't have to push yourself in other fields. As you pointed out, Tim, once this stops happening, you see the artistic side die and the "product" side really become even more dominant.
It all really comes down to "is the lemon worth the squeeze?".
Is the work fun? Would you keep doing it even if you weren't paid? Is there something more that you are getting out of the interaction besides the paycheck?
Then it's most likely a passionate job, if not then it's the work life balance thing. Passion can't be brought, passion is the illogical and emotional force that you take personally and that you want the most and best out of... it has nothing to do with pay and everything to do with what the work is.
Long days because you enjoy the work is fine but overtime shouldn't be the norm. You cant ramp up or "crunch" if needed when everyone already work overtime each and every day.
another great video, you always make my day better everytime you upload.
Was a reply under another comment, but don't want ot to be buried there.
I'd argue that those passionate people get used, and almost anything special they would add to a project will be smoothed over in favour of stuff that sells, It's why we're like 95% of the time only finding those special games in the indie sector, where it's a small team who run themselves, and aren't administrated by executives who only work with statistics, 10-50 people teams, I've seen maybe 3 games from mainstream developers in the last 5 years, that could be called special, while, almost every year a special indie game comes out.
To reiterate, passionate people in a corporate setting are exploited, and, usually, anything special is removed to sell better, while in a community setting, like at an indie company or a very good company like Valve, they add their passion, make a product special, without harming their normal colleagues.
The best, most reliable, way to avoid this across the industry, is mass unionisation, one union for game developers, that would allow the workers to set rules to stop execs from exploiting them, while ensuring passionate people can do their thing without allowing the execs to use their exceptional work as the base line for normal workers.
Very wise words Tim.
There are a lot of people here who are very against what Tim is saying, but will also complain non-stop about the games made by the "work-life balance" crowd. You want to make something great? You have to be great, period. You don't want to be great? That's fine, no one's forcing you.
Dunno, this is the first video of you where I would beg to differ. We see the issues with this mindset already. Many veterans leave the industry because it is not possible to have a family or stable life with them. It has to change.
As a creative myself I also beg to differ on the flow. A creative can't only work when we feel inspired or like it. You can also make notes for ideas and work on stuff later. Leisure-time and other things besides work are important to fuel your creativity.
The industry clearly has to change. It's is hard to schedule it, of course, it is impossible to work with hard deadlines, but there has to be a balance and that balance is not there right now. People must have time to life outside of work. It's good for us, for our creativity, and therefore also good for the product made. And games, while also being an art, are also a product, as sad as it is.
Firstly thank you for all your videos. Even though i disagree on this one i’m glad you made it and grateful!
The examples you gave of ‘professions that go above and beyond’ have one huge difference from game devs:
they all reap disproportionate rewards from success. Actors can make millions from a single project. Athletes can retire wealthy in their 30s. Writers OWN their work (unless they have a bad publishing deal) and make royalties.
Game developers don’t even get paid overtime hours. We are offered ‘free meals’ which is frankly insulting. A meal costs less than anyone on a game dev team makes in one hour but it’s usually offered for 3/4/6 hours of overtime.
This is doubly sick when you consider that games are THE most profitable entertainment medium. Even the regular workers on film sets (makeup, grips, lighting etc) all get OT and have strict regulations on what is permissible. Game devs have nothing. Get laid off regularly through no fault of their own and see ZERO royalties from their games.
Game development has gone from a wacky sub culture fueled by mountain dew and pizza to a viable career but the game development companies are still treating employees like college kids. Employers can start talking about passion once employees are fairly compensated for their work.
"The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art." ~ Ursula K. LeGuin
That's why I'd like to see marketing departments forbidden from interfering with the creative process and not just at game development studios. Also, as much as "parent" or "umbrella" corporations -- heh, "Umbrella Corporation" -- say they're not going to interfere with development studios' creative processes, they nonethelsss do: with unreasonable demands for financial ROI to the exclusion of any other kind, e.g. gamers' love, respect and support of their favorite studios. Most of the bigger studios are losing that last -- and fast -- if they haven't already lost it, whether they realize/care or not, for the simple reason that they refuse to regin in their own and others' marketing departments and the lust for profit is plainly visible to anyone with eyes to see it in their games.
Most *studios* probably feel they have to do as they're told by their publishers/investors or go out of business. They might remind their publishers and investors that quality art cum products require more time, energy and investment than they're being allotted, especially if the publisher is actually a wing of the development company itself. Investors likely don't care about quality. Gamers don't either, necessarily, though more and more gamers themselves are revolting against the trend toward mediocre and lackluster as well as the dictates of the Megamachine.
Developers probably feel they're all alone in resisting the trends that have taken over the industry in general. They're not.
need to put some life back into that balance.
The way I see it is that there's a big difference between having to do overtime to hit a deadline near an important milestone/end of development, having to make occasional changes and iterations that weren't scheduled because the game absolutely needs them, and death marching to the end of development with a spent, moribund workforce that often feels like their leads don't know what to do with their game and/or company-wide expectations of workhours way beyond what is normal (and possibly legal). When I hear stuff like "we should ensure that nobody does uncalled for overtime", I think it's usually a pre-emptive measure to make sure a company doesn't start having a culture where the "passion" is expected is extra hours that usually don't even translate into productivity. Maybe it's overboard, but I can understand why that sort of thinking exists, because even benign things can be used maliciously by a company's boss, and also, to be completely honest, sometimes people need to be protected from themselves if they have tunnel vision. Sometimes you're passionate but need to be told to rest a minute, and spend some time with your spouse/kids/family/dog so you can come back energized and look at the problems from another angle.
I'll admit, I don't know what the discussion is on the dev side, following a few professionals on social media doesn't really substitute having the experience of talking to your colleagues every day for years of development.
Also, I imagine "passion" is easier to muster on smaller projects where the work you do is tangibly visible, versus something like those mammoth games like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty, with literally thousands of people working on them. I don't blame the devs who want to do that 9-5 for not having passion, when their job might literally be to polish the animation timings of a specific goon who only gets seen briefly through a mission (I'm spitballing because I actually genuinely have no idea how those productions work, the numbers are sort of unfathomable to me). That's like... a whole other ballpark compared to something like Fallout, which was a small B-tier project (not to the idnustry at large these days but definitely at Interplay back then) where you people probably *had* to take on multiple hats, otherwise it just wouldn't get done. And in some ways, that can be good, as it clearly led to a very tight-knit team with 0 fluff and needless meetings from what you say, so something good came out of those restriction! On the other hand, I completely understand why the sacrifices can feel like too much these days (and honestly for some probably felt like too much back then, maybe not for the Fallout team, but for another similar team), especially since a large part of the workforce isn't just composed by young 20-something white kids anymore. Hopefully tools and organizational methods have advanced enough that a project with a similar scope wouldn't need those hours from the people involved, but if the budget allows for it (and that's a big if!) the sacrifice of losing a tight-knit team and spending more in exchange for a more structured development environment with less need for overtime... well, to me it's worth it. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I see things.
Sorry for the long comment, thank you for your insightful videos as always.
I think it already has been pointed out in the comment section but it bears repeating: The core discussion about passion isn't that it is inherently bad but how companies are abusing passion to drain workers of theirs for maximizing their profit.
For the game dev world this especially falls in for all the newcomers which want to join one of the megacorps (speak activision, epic, ubisoft, riot, ea etc.) and then just find themselves being drained of any excitement they had about the profession (or some other kind of abuse) + being massively overworked and underpaid.
The concessions to make here are that these things are not bad in all listed ways at the same time (and that is why it can be more insidious "Am I really being mistreated?/I only have to bear with it for a bit" etc.etc.)
On other end the discussion of the topic can be very scrambled due to people being exposed to different parts of it and forming different perspectives and because it is a "younger perspective" it can be that the nuance is still kind of missing (I'm not saying that young people can't be nuanced or brilliant, they absolutely are but they might not have had enough or the type of experience to really understand/fill in the knowledge of these things).
... aaand I'm fairly certain I'm still missing plenty of "ifs and buts"
Thank you for making this video ai asked about it a month ago and this is extremely insightful.
Europe tends to work well with creative types when they choose their hours and still have unions and good work life balance. 9-5ers, who don't care, are there for just the paperwork. Plus, why the F is, having to be in a office a sign of work? I would work, 20 hours a day for a few days to make sure a games convention worked for 20 years, it's intense times, but there's balance when I didn't need to work so hard for a few months.
And I note, I wasn't part of a union, in fact, I was doing and leading my work for free... well I wish it was, it usually ended up costing me thousands of euros.
It's a natural evolution of the industry, the bigger it gets the more people simply work in the industry because it's their job not because they're passionate about making games.
These people expect the same "work environment" as any other office job.
It's funny how distinct game development is in this regard. I'm an engineer primarily working on web/app dev, and I very much treat that as a 9-5. I don't want to think about the work at the end of the day. But when I'm working on a game or mod as a side/personal project? I'll happily stay up until 3am coding and working on features.
My impression is that a large number of young people going into games industry these days want to work -in games-, but not want to work on a game. When I got into it, it was NOT a cool job at all. It was for nerds and losers, so you got a very specific kind of personality who wanted to get into game dev. When the motivation is the idea of being part of some culture, and not driven to make something, then you are going to get people with a different kind of motivation.
But the larger issue is these huge companies want to build soulless money grabs, but then want to exploit 'passion' to get more work for less money so they can make hundreds of billions and not tens of billions, and devs can't afford rent in hub cities where most of the work is.
A lot of people lose those decades without any great games to show for it.
If Brian Fargo is your boss then I guess you will have no work life balance lol.
Games as a service is in a precarious place right now. Free to play games are shutting down left and right, which is not only a huge preservation issue, but it basically invalidates all the work being put into those games. I've had amazing experiences with the model - I loved Overwatch until they drove it into the ground - and I think the issue is less wanting a 9 to 5 schedule and more wanting companies to be better about how they plan and execute development. Make better choices about the kinds of games they back, and make better scheduling choices so the team isn't in constant unnecessary crunch. The devs I know are not against crunch as a concept, they're against bad decisionmaking at the top.
Something that no one takes into consideration when talking about work life balance is whether or not putting in that extra time will end up making you a lot more money. This is something that should be factored. If making a great game means that your studio gets to stay afloat for another 3 years while you work on a sequel, or if it gets you into bonus territory where you directly make more money, then I'd say it's worth the trade off. The problem isn't working insane hours, the problem is working insane hours and not being compensated for it.
I think a lot of the devs I’ve seen complain about crunch are not complaining about occasional crunch. They’re complaining about no compensation for it, or constant/extended crunch.
Limited crunch is probably fine exactly as you say Tim, but there is no reason that I can see (no good or humane reason that is) why it cannot come with proper overtime pay or PTO, as the individual prefers.
Am I missing a good reason? (shareholder value is not a good reason to my mind)
Thanks for sharing, Tim.
Something i tend to do is compartmentalize. In this case work vs home life. When i learned of this term and that not everyone does it, it certainly triggered some introspection on whether i should continue on this route, or make a change.
Personally, I'd say that the issues I have with the lack of work life balance comes from games that are products, as you mentioned. A lack of work life balance for games that are passion driven is much more forgivable than a company pushing its employees to overwork to get a product out the door. This is *especially* true when it comes to games as a service, which means that the crunch period is never ending.
A self imposed imbalance is preferred over a company mandated one.
I get the feeling that passion is one part of the pendulum's vector, the magnitude. You need to always be aware of the direction it is swinging or will swing.
Hey Tim! Hope you have a great day
90% of people don't give a shit about their job they just work to pay the bills. There is no passion to be found there, just a reality check.
I feel like all of those games would have still been possible if there was a healthy work ethos at Interplay. Instead of you having to do three jobs, they could have hired enough staff so nobody would have to work multiple jobs.
Sure overtime might be required sometimes (as with most jobs) but it should be kept to a minimum and it should be compensated fairly (200% at least). Weeks of crunch like some game developers have is just inhumane.
Crunch is the result of Design and Business/Management failure.
"Passion" is the excuse they use to force workers to sacrifice in order to make up for design and business/management failures.
Every time a crunch happen, everyone in design and business/management should get a massive paycut.
I guarantee you crunch will cease to exist because they then:
- design will make DAMN SURE their proposal is good before wasting development resource on it. (wasting time making bad ideas = crunch)
- management will make DAMN SURE that they make realistic schedules with room for error.
- business will make DAMN SURE that they properly research the budget, scope/focus, instead of coming up with random budget and making random (usually tone-deaf) feature demands.
Well, it was my belief in work-life balance that kept me out of game development and into a more stable tech career. if you guys were getting paid, and I mean getting PAID like those you cited--athletes, writers, actors--then it would be less of an issue. But from what I can tell, you are getting basically a nice tech job salary and they are using that passion against you. You work the hours, you get paid. None of this salaried exempt nonsense.
gamedev tend to pay much less than other jobs, like fintech or bigtech jobs, for the same qualification.
"noticed some people walking away from my videos with very odd takes on what I said" -- part of me kinda fears that's just the age we live in. algorithms primed for angering us into never looking away from feeds can, in turn, prime us into sensationalist listening patterns. I don't mean to say this for cynicism, only self-awareness.
More people working & more money for their time. Not less work effort.
*I think a big part of this discussion centers around what you have described as games as products.* In the companies that make these games it's much more typical to regular coding jobs. There is little to no room for creativity and passion is pointless because you are just one of a thousand cogs in a machine and your contributions are at best limited but more typically gated buy five or more layers of corporate structure who decided what the game was well before making it and based on market trends divined by toy and beverage executives. This balance that you're talking about only exists in the realm that strays away from AAA, is a big difference from the 12 hours that you were putting in to make games you were passionate about, and spending the same 12 hours in the spreadsheet mine on the newest Call of Duty where you had to send in 7 revisions contributing to a gun that ends up getting scrapped because the progression system it was being made for it doesn't fit with the executives brave new battle pass plan.
It's also be aspect of the exploitation of passion, everyone is exploited under capitalism as we all know, but the prime example of this is the thing that has become public recently where blizzard pays half or less than what other companies pay for the same job because they ride off of the reputation that they have, or should I say had. The great blizzard games of the past inspire the game developers of the present and then that company pays them bottom Dollar because the people are so happy to get a job with blizzard in the first place.
The point of all this being that the passion/work-life balance thing you're talking about is a balance that doesn't exist for a great number of people in the games industry because of the vast all modernized corporatization that has taking place within it. That's why the focus has been so much on maintaining that work-life balance, it's fighting back against the corporations that have seized us all, basically exclusively. Passion is a dirty word because of how it's exploited not because of its value to a creative project. I think people would phrase what you're talkin about these days more as avoiding burnout in a creative project
Hi Tim!
I wonder, given that I share a lot of your perspectives on the passion/work-life false dichotomy, if you picked up a lot of these habits while you were in graduate school? I know that you said you disliked being a PhD student (who would, frankly?) but I feel like a decent PI can really hammer home what it's like to sustain passion in research. I was given the same advice by my PI, that I need to work on things I'm passionate about, and to work when it strikes me rather than forcing myself to try to work on data or writing.
For me, this is very different from, say, clinical work which is more like a 9-5 job. I can be passionate about the wellbeing of my patients, but I see that as more of an occupation, whereas I will often be struck by an idea or mentally work through a problem -- possibly in the middle of the night -- and I'll rush over to start digging into the data set using different R utilities, get lost in an article rabbit hole, or write up a few pages in a literature review. In those cases, I don't feel like I'm overworking myself or that I'm not abiding by a sense of work-life balance because it's a kind of internal expression of what I want to produce.
Anyway, thanks for the video, very thought provoking!
Tim, I hope someday I can prove to you that you can make games from 9 to 5 - I write this as I'm prototyping a thing on a Sunday because I just gotta get it out :(
Great video, now i'll lose my night processing this hahaha
I think Balzac is the best example of having passion over work-life balance. He wrote from 1am to 8am every morning, often worked 15 hours or more at a stretch, and apparently once worked 48 hours with only 3 hours of rest in the middle. The result of this: terrible health which probably contributed to his early demise at the age of 51. However, today he is considered one of the greatest French writers in history. In other words, he was willing to sacrifice his own health for his art. I don't think a lot of people would be willing to do that.
The problem is exploitation. Studios and publishers know that people are willing to make sacrifices, so they work them to the bone. Why can't I be passionate about my job, AND clock off at 5?
I agree, passion != bad work life balance. I think bad work life balance comes from the misuse of other people's passion (and not compensating them correctly for their efforts).
The idea of the "starving artist" comes to mind. To me, the starving artist isn't necessarily starving because they're bad at what they do or because they literally can't work some other job. They are starving because their passion for their art is what drives them more than their desire to live what others would consider "comfortably".
It isn't wrong to be passionate, it's wrong to force people to burn themselves out (especially for an unreasonable exchange).
Perfect!
Imo 9-17 is eneugh time in a day to make any creative project for the vast majority of time, passion or no, and then you can also be a parent, a partner, a citizen etc.
It is not limited just to creative professions, the problem of working outside 9 to 5 often applies to professions which are focused on working with people. I saw a lot of similarities in working rythm of my father (a programmer) and mother, a teacher. Tho she had a job which included fixed hours, I saw her doing a lot of work outside the clasroom, not only grading test or preparing the workload that is needed in professional promotion procedure, but also preparing the lessons itself - trying to tailor them somewhat for the class to absorb it in easier fashion. (Actually lack of understanding if that work process is what leads to society, at least in my country, rather opposed to reforms for better work quality and compensation for teachers because "they work shorter hours and get the summer vacation" [Yeah, nice. Sure you are not teaching classes, but as a rural elementary teacher you also probably host basically a daycare for older children, or as a city one you are basically leveraged to organize events]).
But in this kind of professions the pendlum going for passion could also lead to another consequence rather than a lost decade - burnout. I actually saw plenty of young teachers succumbing to that because of comiting too much time to their profession which leads to the thing one once took pride in and made them happy to be no longer giving any satisfaction. It's even worse if someone sticks to the profession, which can turn into long lasting mental problems.
As I anticipate people saying "But teachers have programs and workbooks to do lesson planing for them" I leave a simple argument: people who make lesson programs have to make it uniform to be used on few million students, which hardly cares that little Billy struggles with fractions, while little Timmy is terminally bored and will now create trouble to combat it. The program is more similar to the video game producer in this case "you have to teach them enough so they can do standarized test, here is your deadline, handle it".
It would be interesting to hear your opinion on why development cycle has grown so much. It seems games now take 10y to make, are still buggy, you still have crunch and end product is not better than before, quite the opposite.
Salient as always, have a great day timothy
Quick question, Tim: When you upload your videos, do you let youtube pick the thumbnail, or do you pick a spot in the video and use that instead?
In one of previous videos he said that he picks the funniest one from the three that TH-cam automatically offers when you upload the video