10 ms·

Fortnite’s success led to months of intense crunch at Epic Games

107 points by pmcpinto 7y ago

CompelTechnic 7y ago
If I were a mid-level manager at Epic, I wonder how I would handle internal politics at this time. So many competing objectives... 1. Focus on producing novel content to keep the game interesting, mixing things up enough over weeks/months, but without killing the core mechanics. 2. Hire lots of new employees, all while knowing that the popularity bubble may burst and they may need to be laid off in the near future. 3. Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry. 4. Acknowledge that this lucky streak is unrepeatable, and that if the game falls out of popularity, there is likely no one to blame. But when it happens, the demoralization will hit hard and the layoffs are inevitable. 5. All this, while the company reaps huge profits.
- cheez 7y ago
  Sounds better than the usual coding job. Meetings. Sprint plannings. Meetings. Why aren't you done your work? Are you sure this is a 3 and not 1?
  - thegabez 7y ago
    Should be a 2 hour task, right? Two weeks later, why wasn't this documented?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - heptathorp 7y ago
      Please, I come on HN to escape all of this.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- GuiA 7y ago
  4a. Acknowledge that some companies have too many "lucky streaks" for them to be "lucky streaks" (e.g. Pixar, Valve, Nintendo, etc.). Attempt to build a work environment conducive to great creative work such that if there's any way to make this kind of success repeatable, at least we're putting the chances on our side.
  - zelon88 7y ago
    Valve does not belong in that list. They got their lucky streak and used it to buy themselves a work environment where nobody has to be accountable to anyone in order to stay profitable. Productivity is optional at Valve. Take Steam or leave it, they don't need to make titles anymore. At least Nintendo and Pixar create new content.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - icecreammatt 7y ago
      What about all the work they have done with VR, Linux, and supporting like any common game controller with most steam games?
- vvanders 7y ago
  > Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry. Hah. I've know a few people on break-away titles(on the level of fortnight for an era) in my time in that industry. In most of those cases the employer or publisher had slipped in some sort of cap in royalties on a per-employee basis. So while their % cut of royalties was in the 7-figures they never saw anything above 6-figures. Kudos on you for thinking this way but I'd be surprised if most of the people working on Fortnight are seeing more than mid FAANG compensation.
  - Impossible 7y ago
    Mid FAANG level compensation goes a lot further in Cary, NC than it does in the Bay Area though. If bonuses are 3-4x salary like mentioned in the article, then most employees are making more than they would for an equivalent role at FAANG (baring stock anomalies). According to glass door senior software engineers at Epic make around ~$150K. Three to four times that is $450K-$600K, which is higher than the equivalent at FAANG according to level.fyi (L5 at Google and E5 at FB make ~$350K). This isn't justifying crunch so much as it's pointing out that Epic games seems to be paying out bonuses that are on another level. I've worked on break-away game titles and currently work at FAANG so I generally agree with you and have points of reference.
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    > more than mid FAANG compensation. Do FAANG do remote? If so... what's that compensation like?
    - nscalf 7y ago
      levels.fyi
      - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
        so... in Miami, I make $150k working for a non-FAANG company as a senior software engineer. If I worked for a FAANG company, I'd make $300k?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. While bonuses can help, expecting them to prevent resentment is, in my opinion, misguided.
sneakernets 7y ago
Game devs need to unionize. Now. This madness has got to stop.
- intertextuality 7y ago
  I love the downvotes for suggesting unionization. Very nice, HN.
  - ahoy 7y ago
    HN is full of people who fit the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" stereotype perfectly. Droves of developers sure that one day their SaaS site will make them rich, that one day they'll sell their side-project to google. Most of us won't!
    - flatiron11 7y ago
      I feel personally attacked
    - dang 7y ago
      When people make criticisms of the HN community that apply just as much to any large sample of humans in general, I don't think they're really talking about HN.
  - dang 7y ago
    That comment wasn't particularly substantive, and arguably broke this site guideline: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." Note, though, that it received corrective upvotes and is no longer downvoted. That's common, and is one reason why we ask users not to post like you did here. Such posts are not just off-topic distractions, they stick around as uncollected garbage once the thing they're mentioning no longer exists. This is in the guidelines too, so could you please review them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
virtuexru 7y ago
Honest question, why would competent developers subject themselves to this kind of treatment? If a company ever "requested" that I work Saturday or Sunday I'd be gone later that same day.
- vvanders 7y ago
  It's all in the culture. I did similar after a long drawn out crunch. Decided I was going home at 10pm rather than 11-12(after being in at 8am each day for the last 6 months). I was branded as 'not a team player' the whole team basically resented me for 'not pulling my weight'. In summary, fuck that industry. The real solution is unionization or fresh blood but I don't think it'll happen in the next 5-10 years. Both titles I worked on previously I'm almost dead certain the constant crunch lead to a sub-par game and subsequent poor releases. Until that industry learns that crunch isn't the solution nothing is going to change.
  - fwip 7y ago
    The video game industry already gets fresh blood constantly - then burns them out in three years.
- jmspring 7y ago
  I was once at a startup that did well enough at Demo, they wanted to launch without a proper ops team in place (it was a service). In addition to demands, lack of planning, and poor management -- there was an expectation that people work unreasonable hours. Taking a weekend off without proper genuflection was frowned upon. Multiple people walked before their 1 year cliff was up, other people stayed. Working hard isn't an issue, but expectations like those in the gaming industry or some startups (like the one I encountered) are unreasonable and it would help if more people voted with their feet. That said, I know a lot of people in gaming have a passion for such.
- Zealotux 7y ago
  Because there's a risk of being seen as "not a team-player" and a fear of losing your job as a result of it, social pressure is real in tech culture, if all developers refused to take part in the rat-race and left the office at 6 on Friday the management would have no other choice than to deal with it by _managing_ the human ressources differently, or increasing the count of developers which I will agree: is not easy when it comes to software development. Social pressure, and the lack of interest (or even contempt) the developers have when it comes to unions mostly explains why such abuse is still seen as normal in the industry.
fyoving 7y ago
It's remarkable how someone will always find a way to lambast successful companies even if it means faulting them for becoming successful and relevant in the first place.
- vvanders 7y ago
  > faulting them for becoming successful and relevant in the first place. Sorry but I'm going to call out bad work practices that run counter to building a better product when I see it regardless of the success. Crunch destroys lives(remember easpouse?) and has no place in that industry.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    When you have a tiger by the tail (either literally or figuratively), it's not unreasonable to temporarily increase your level of effort beyond that which is long-term sustainable. I've done it (in games, in 2 other startups, and in finance). I still do it now sometimes when waves of unrelated work all happen to peak near the same time.
    - intertextuality 7y ago
      It is unreasonable to force developers to increase their level of effort. Manage adequately, hire more people if necessary. There are other solutions that going "welp, we're successful, better work even more hours now".
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - vvanders 7y ago
      Yeah except that epic already prints money via their engine licenses and has since the days of UE3(when MS paid for the development of Gears while the rest of us licensees fended for ourselves mostly). There's literally no reason for this other than exploiting developers for more money.
  - fyoving 7y ago
argd678 7y ago
I think they interviewed mostly people new to the gaming industry who don’t know how to manage their time under pressure, Epic isn’t an easy place if you’re not pretty senior, they expect you to know what to do with little guidance. That said they also see the company as being a marathon since it’s success isn’t certain and fragile, so it’s something they expect employees to take care of because it’s a unique place, maybe similar to how museum staff look after art work. No doubt it’s brutal with Fortnight’s success, and you will get fired if you’re not competent and pulling your weight, but that’s the industry they’re in, you can’t have a few people putting everyone else’s livelihood at risk, and they also compensate very well when they’re successful. So it’s not like some sweat shop, it’s more complex than the article makes it sound.
- 9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
  > I think they interviewed mostly people new to the gaming industry who don’t know how to manage their time under pressure, So everyone who has to work long hours is just incompetent or new, or new and incompetent, and should just do the same amount of work in less time, duh? That's not how these high-pressure workplaces function. Even if you are a significant contributor and you are technically allowed to opt out of overtime, that doesn't mean everyone won't resent you for it, and that management won't interpret as a 'lack of commitment' when promotion or reviews come around. As a corollary, the recent rise 'unlimited time off' policies have been widely criticized because they often inadvertently contribute to implicit pressures to take less time off than before, because of the resentment, hostility and jealously. I've seen some companies rolling out unlimited time off with mandatory minimums which seems healthier, but I'm unsure how successful it has been. > they expect you to know what to do with little guidance Even good engineers need guidance, and guidance and training are especially important when you're doubling and tripling your workforce. > so it’s something they expect employees to take care of because it’s a unique place, maybe similar to how museum staff look after art work. This is a super weird analogy and makes no sense to me. > and you will get fired if you’re not competent and pulling your weight Where does the article say that Epic shouldn't fire incompetent employees? No one is saying that. > but that’s the industry they’re in, you can’t have a few people putting everyone else’s livelihood at risk Your response to a toxic work culture is just 'It is what it is, deal with it'? Don't you think we should have discussions about the human impact and damage caused by these intractable competing interests? And there's almost certainly a financial and business cost, it's just not as obvious to measure. > So it’s not like some sweat shop, it’s more complex than the article makes it sound. The article covers both sides pretty thoroughly, there's a litany of quotes from Epic PR addressing the claims and recounting their efforts to resolve them. I understand WHY these pressures exist, and it's clear the Epic want to do everything they can to leverage their transient popularity. But that's not to say they shouldn't be criticized or they shouldn't do better.
strikelaserclaw 7y ago
As much as it sucks to implicitly require people to work so many hours, i'd say it's OK in the short term if they were compensated accordingly (overtime or big bonuses), which according to the article they were (3x the salary?). Maybe someone more familiar with epic could enlighten me.
- notTyler 7y ago
  1) It's not short term. Fortnite is constantly adding new features. This isn't normal crunch before a game ships then relax after patching bugs, it's literally crunch every week. 2) The actual employees are paid very well via a profit share arrangement. To my understanding, the issue is when contractors are worked like this. I don't believe contractors receive overtime or bonuses. edit: some below have pointed out contractors do receive overtime.
- kaonashi 7y ago
  It's never ok, because once the suits get away with it once, it will be their crutch for every shitty decision that gets made.
- gambiting 7y ago
  Yeah, I know someone who works at Epic specifically on Fortnite(as a new hire too!) and the money is well, fantastic. The base salary was very high for the games industry and then bonuses on top of it were in the range of 1-2x the annual salary itself.
DaddyGotDough 7y ago
When I was contracting (not for Epic) I always negotiated an hourly rate. When they called for overtime I loved it, the meta is to become 10-20% more productive by whatever metric they use but bill 50-100% more hours at 1.5x my already large bill rate. I can generally work for 6 months like this without any life changing burn out symptoms.
Thaxll 7y ago
Semi related, but Epic pays 25%+ above market.
- pysxul 7y ago
  Do they really ? if you end up doing unpaid overtime, it might even things out
- kaonashi 7y ago
  How much is your health and sanity worth?
- bdavisx 7y ago
  And you're working ~50% more hours, do the math.
- Allagash 7y ago
  Which market? The games industry pays much less than the FANNG market rate (about 50%). I know a number of people who moved on from game dev to working at Google, Amazon, etc. This link is a few years old, but will give you an idea: https://www.gamasutra.com/salarysurvey2014.pdf https://www.gamasutra.com/salarysurvey2014.pdf
mrbill29 7y ago
Ah, I remember my first live game, where you think we'll just crunch for this release, it'll be fine. Then the next release comes and because you were crunching on the other it comes out half baked, so you crunch again and again and before you know it half the team that made it happen is gone and no one wants to work there. You see this mentality in a lot of mobile studios that we're started by ex-AAA employees. Hopefully they learn that you can't crunch a live game or you'll never stop crunching. Single release games eventually ended, a good live game can go on for a very long time. The next generation of mobile studios knew that and ended up having a very good policy of no over time... Well some did
mynegation 7y ago
I might ruffle some feathers here but here it goes. Very much in the same manner some people refuse to eat inhumanely raised and slaughtered animals, buy diamonds or coffee from companies associated with slave-like labor, or palm oil because its harvesting destroys the tropical forests, or watch American football to protest constant stress of trauma for players, I refuse to play big name games. It is a moral stance. Once in a while I spend some time playing an indie game and before I do that I make sure to find the site or the blog of the producer.
- ungzd 7y ago
  I'm not sure that level of crunch is generally lower in indie companies. In theory, they might be struggling more, they are in disadvantageous position against big companies, they have to do more experiments and take more risks than AAA, which make the same "press X to hollywood" or network shooters for the last 20 years. (I don't play big companies' (modern) games, because almost always I'm not in target audience and find such games completely unplayable)
  - Mikeb85 7y ago
    At least with indies the staff are more likely to share the windfall. While they crunch, it's their own choice and they profit directly.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Yeah, if crunch is the moral issue, then indie companies are more prone to work/life balance issues than even the AAA developers. Indie companies have the usual startup issues of either the developers are moonlighting after their day jobs (working two jobs, a personal crunch) or pushed hard for "passion" to work hard (crunch) to pay the bills when it's still life or death to the company. A lot of indies directly come from "game jam culture" which celebrates over-taxing developers with crunch "for fun". Sustainable business practices in the games industry are unlikely to be possible until the industry is much more strongly unionized. At which point it would be more likely for the AAA games to be union shops and/or able to afford unionized workers to work on games.
coldcode 7y ago
Working more than 40 hours is stupid, but I can see doing it for very short times. In a culture where you are branded as not a team player if you don't work 70+ hours a week uncompensated is exactly what Marx called exploitation. You make other people wealthy while you burn yourself out. No matter the job its not worth it. If however you own the company it might be worth the risk of killing yourself, but it's not right to make other people do it to enrich yourself. Not that that ever stopped people from demanding others do it (see Jack Ma for an example).

107 points by pmcpinto 7y ago

If I were a mid-level manager at Epic, I wonder how I would handle internal politics at this time. So many competing objectives... 1. Focus on producing novel content to keep the game interesting, mixing things up enough over weeks/months, but without killing the core mechanics. 2. Hire lots of new employees, all while knowing that the popularity bubble may burst and they may need to be laid off in the near future. 3. Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry. 4. Acknowledge that this lucky streak is unrepeatable, and that if the game falls out of popularity, there is likely no one to blame. But when it happens, the demoralization will hit hard and the layoffs are inevitable. 5. All this, while the company reaps huge profits.

cheez 7y ago
Sounds better than the usual coding job. Meetings. Sprint plannings. Meetings. Why aren't you done your work? Are you sure this is a 3 and not 1?
- thegabez 7y ago
  Should be a 2 hour task, right? Two weeks later, why wasn't this documented?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - heptathorp 7y ago
    Please, I come on HN to escape all of this.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
GuiA 7y ago
4a. Acknowledge that some companies have too many "lucky streaks" for them to be "lucky streaks" (e.g. Pixar, Valve, Nintendo, etc.). Attempt to build a work environment conducive to great creative work such that if there's any way to make this kind of success repeatable, at least we're putting the chances on our side.
- zelon88 7y ago
  Valve does not belong in that list. They got their lucky streak and used it to buy themselves a work environment where nobody has to be accountable to anyone in order to stay profitable. Productivity is optional at Valve. Take Steam or leave it, they don't need to make titles anymore. At least Nintendo and Pixar create new content.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - icecreammatt 7y ago
    What about all the work they have done with VR, Linux, and supporting like any common game controller with most steam games?
vvanders 7y ago
> Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry. Hah. I've know a few people on break-away titles(on the level of fortnight for an era) in my time in that industry. In most of those cases the employer or publisher had slipped in some sort of cap in royalties on a per-employee basis. So while their % cut of royalties was in the 7-figures they never saw anything above 6-figures. Kudos on you for thinking this way but I'd be surprised if most of the people working on Fortnight are seeing more than mid FAANG compensation.
- Impossible 7y ago
  Mid FAANG level compensation goes a lot further in Cary, NC than it does in the Bay Area though. If bonuses are 3-4x salary like mentioned in the article, then most employees are making more than they would for an equivalent role at FAANG (baring stock anomalies). According to glass door senior software engineers at Epic make around ~$150K. Three to four times that is $450K-$600K, which is higher than the equivalent at FAANG according to level.fyi (L5 at Google and E5 at FB make ~$350K). This isn't justifying crunch so much as it's pointing out that Epic games seems to be paying out bonuses that are on another level. I've worked on break-away game titles and currently work at FAANG so I generally agree with you and have points of reference.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > more than mid FAANG compensation. Do FAANG do remote? If so... what's that compensation like?
  - nscalf 7y ago
    levels.fyi
    - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
      so... in Miami, I make $150k working for a non-FAANG company as a senior software engineer. If I worked for a FAANG company, I'd make $300k?
JohnFen 7y ago
> Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. While bonuses can help, expecting them to prevent resentment is, in my opinion, misguided.

sneakernets 7y ago

Game devs need to unionize. Now. This madness has got to stop.

intertextuality 7y ago
I love the downvotes for suggesting unionization. Very nice, HN.
- ahoy 7y ago
  HN is full of people who fit the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" stereotype perfectly. Droves of developers sure that one day their SaaS site will make them rich, that one day they'll sell their side-project to google. Most of us won't!
  - flatiron11 7y ago
    I feel personally attacked
  - dang 7y ago
    When people make criticisms of the HN community that apply just as much to any large sample of humans in general, I don't think they're really talking about HN.
- dang 7y ago
  That comment wasn't particularly substantive, and arguably broke this site guideline: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." Note, though, that it received corrective upvotes and is no longer downvoted. That's common, and is one reason why we ask users not to post like you did here. Such posts are not just off-topic distractions, they stick around as uncollected garbage once the thing they're mentioning no longer exists. This is in the guidelines too, so could you please review them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

virtuexru 7y ago

Honest question, why would competent developers subject themselves to this kind of treatment? If a company ever "requested" that I work Saturday or Sunday I'd be gone later that same day.

vvanders 7y ago
It's all in the culture. I did similar after a long drawn out crunch. Decided I was going home at 10pm rather than 11-12(after being in at 8am each day for the last 6 months). I was branded as 'not a team player' the whole team basically resented me for 'not pulling my weight'. In summary, fuck that industry. The real solution is unionization or fresh blood but I don't think it'll happen in the next 5-10 years. Both titles I worked on previously I'm almost dead certain the constant crunch lead to a sub-par game and subsequent poor releases. Until that industry learns that crunch isn't the solution nothing is going to change.
- fwip 7y ago
  The video game industry already gets fresh blood constantly - then burns them out in three years.
jmspring 7y ago
I was once at a startup that did well enough at Demo, they wanted to launch without a proper ops team in place (it was a service). In addition to demands, lack of planning, and poor management -- there was an expectation that people work unreasonable hours. Taking a weekend off without proper genuflection was frowned upon. Multiple people walked before their 1 year cliff was up, other people stayed. Working hard isn't an issue, but expectations like those in the gaming industry or some startups (like the one I encountered) are unreasonable and it would help if more people voted with their feet. That said, I know a lot of people in gaming have a passion for such.
Zealotux 7y ago
Because there's a risk of being seen as "not a team-player" and a fear of losing your job as a result of it, social pressure is real in tech culture, if all developers refused to take part in the rat-race and left the office at 6 on Friday the management would have no other choice than to deal with it by _managing_ the human ressources differently, or increasing the count of developers which I will agree: is not easy when it comes to software development. Social pressure, and the lack of interest (or even contempt) the developers have when it comes to unions mostly explains why such abuse is still seen as normal in the industry.

fyoving 7y ago

It's remarkable how someone will always find a way to lambast successful companies even if it means faulting them for becoming successful and relevant in the first place.

vvanders 7y ago
> faulting them for becoming successful and relevant in the first place. Sorry but I'm going to call out bad work practices that run counter to building a better product when I see it regardless of the success. Crunch destroys lives(remember easpouse?) and has no place in that industry.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  When you have a tiger by the tail (either literally or figuratively), it's not unreasonable to temporarily increase your level of effort beyond that which is long-term sustainable. I've done it (in games, in 2 other startups, and in finance). I still do it now sometimes when waves of unrelated work all happen to peak near the same time.
  - intertextuality 7y ago
    It is unreasonable to force developers to increase their level of effort. Manage adequately, hire more people if necessary. There are other solutions that going "welp, we're successful, better work even more hours now".
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - vvanders 7y ago
    Yeah except that epic already prints money via their engine licenses and has since the days of UE3(when MS paid for the development of Gears while the rest of us licensees fended for ourselves mostly). There's literally no reason for this other than exploiting developers for more money.
- fyoving 7y ago

argd678 7y ago

I think they interviewed mostly people new to the gaming industry who don’t know how to manage their time under pressure, Epic isn’t an easy place if you’re not pretty senior, they expect you to know what to do with little guidance. That said they also see the company as being a marathon since it’s success isn’t certain and fragile, so it’s something they expect employees to take care of because it’s a unique place, maybe similar to how museum staff look after art work. No doubt it’s brutal with Fortnight’s success, and you will get fired if you’re not competent and pulling your weight, but that’s the industry they’re in, you can’t have a few people putting everyone else’s livelihood at risk, and they also compensate very well when they’re successful. So it’s not like some sweat shop, it’s more complex than the article makes it sound.

9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
> I think they interviewed mostly people new to the gaming industry who don’t know how to manage their time under pressure, So everyone who has to work long hours is just incompetent or new, or new and incompetent, and should just do the same amount of work in less time, duh? That's not how these high-pressure workplaces function. Even if you are a significant contributor and you are technically allowed to opt out of overtime, that doesn't mean everyone won't resent you for it, and that management won't interpret as a 'lack of commitment' when promotion or reviews come around. As a corollary, the recent rise 'unlimited time off' policies have been widely criticized because they often inadvertently contribute to implicit pressures to take less time off than before, because of the resentment, hostility and jealously. I've seen some companies rolling out unlimited time off with mandatory minimums which seems healthier, but I'm unsure how successful it has been. > they expect you to know what to do with little guidance Even good engineers need guidance, and guidance and training are especially important when you're doubling and tripling your workforce. > so it’s something they expect employees to take care of because it’s a unique place, maybe similar to how museum staff look after art work. This is a super weird analogy and makes no sense to me. > and you will get fired if you’re not competent and pulling your weight Where does the article say that Epic shouldn't fire incompetent employees? No one is saying that. > but that’s the industry they’re in, you can’t have a few people putting everyone else’s livelihood at risk Your response to a toxic work culture is just 'It is what it is, deal with it'? Don't you think we should have discussions about the human impact and damage caused by these intractable competing interests? And there's almost certainly a financial and business cost, it's just not as obvious to measure. > So it’s not like some sweat shop, it’s more complex than the article makes it sound. The article covers both sides pretty thoroughly, there's a litany of quotes from Epic PR addressing the claims and recounting their efforts to resolve them. I understand WHY these pressures exist, and it's clear the Epic want to do everything they can to leverage their transient popularity. But that's not to say they shouldn't be criticized or they shouldn't do better.

strikelaserclaw 7y ago

As much as it sucks to implicitly require people to work so many hours, i'd say it's OK in the short term if they were compensated accordingly (overtime or big bonuses), which according to the article they were (3x the salary?). Maybe someone more familiar with epic could enlighten me.

notTyler 7y ago
1) It's not short term. Fortnite is constantly adding new features. This isn't normal crunch before a game ships then relax after patching bugs, it's literally crunch every week. 2) The actual employees are paid very well via a profit share arrangement. To my understanding, the issue is when contractors are worked like this. I don't believe contractors receive overtime or bonuses. edit: some below have pointed out contractors do receive overtime.
kaonashi 7y ago
It's never ok, because once the suits get away with it once, it will be their crutch for every shitty decision that gets made.
gambiting 7y ago
Yeah, I know someone who works at Epic specifically on Fortnite(as a new hire too!) and the money is well, fantastic. The base salary was very high for the games industry and then bonuses on top of it were in the range of 1-2x the annual salary itself.

DaddyGotDough 7y ago

When I was contracting (not for Epic) I always negotiated an hourly rate. When they called for overtime I loved it, the meta is to become 10-20% more productive by whatever metric they use but bill 50-100% more hours at 1.5x my already large bill rate. I can generally work for 6 months like this without any life changing burn out symptoms.

Thaxll 7y ago

Semi related, but Epic pays 25%+ above market.

pysxul 7y ago
Do they really ? if you end up doing unpaid overtime, it might even things out
kaonashi 7y ago
How much is your health and sanity worth?
bdavisx 7y ago
And you're working ~50% more hours, do the math.
Allagash 7y ago
Which market? The games industry pays much less than the FANNG market rate (about 50%). I know a number of people who moved on from game dev to working at Google, Amazon, etc. This link is a few years old, but will give you an idea: https://www.gamasutra.com/salarysurvey2014.pdf https://www.gamasutra.com/salarysurvey2014.pdf

mrbill29 7y ago

Ah, I remember my first live game, where you think we'll just crunch for this release, it'll be fine. Then the next release comes and because you were crunching on the other it comes out half baked, so you crunch again and again and before you know it half the team that made it happen is gone and no one wants to work there. You see this mentality in a lot of mobile studios that we're started by ex-AAA employees. Hopefully they learn that you can't crunch a live game or you'll never stop crunching. Single release games eventually ended, a good live game can go on for a very long time. The next generation of mobile studios knew that and ended up having a very good policy of no over time... Well some did

mynegation 7y ago

I might ruffle some feathers here but here it goes. Very much in the same manner some people refuse to eat inhumanely raised and slaughtered animals, buy diamonds or coffee from companies associated with slave-like labor, or palm oil because its harvesting destroys the tropical forests, or watch American football to protest constant stress of trauma for players, I refuse to play big name games. It is a moral stance. Once in a while I spend some time playing an indie game and before I do that I make sure to find the site or the blog of the producer.

ungzd 7y ago
I'm not sure that level of crunch is generally lower in indie companies. In theory, they might be struggling more, they are in disadvantageous position against big companies, they have to do more experiments and take more risks than AAA, which make the same "press X to hollywood" or network shooters for the last 20 years. (I don't play big companies' (modern) games, because almost always I'm not in target audience and find such games completely unplayable)
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  At least with indies the staff are more likely to share the windfall. While they crunch, it's their own choice and they profit directly.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Yeah, if crunch is the moral issue, then indie companies are more prone to work/life balance issues than even the AAA developers. Indie companies have the usual startup issues of either the developers are moonlighting after their day jobs (working two jobs, a personal crunch) or pushed hard for "passion" to work hard (crunch) to pay the bills when it's still life or death to the company. A lot of indies directly come from "game jam culture" which celebrates over-taxing developers with crunch "for fun". Sustainable business practices in the games industry are unlikely to be possible until the industry is much more strongly unionized. At which point it would be more likely for the AAA games to be union shops and/or able to afford unionized workers to work on games.

coldcode 7y ago

Working more than 40 hours is stupid, but I can see doing it for very short times. In a culture where you are branded as not a team player if you don't work 70+ hours a week uncompensated is exactly what Marx called exploitation. You make other people wealthy while you burn yourself out. No matter the job its not worth it. If however you own the company it might be worth the risk of killing yourself, but it's not right to make other people do it to enrich yourself. Not that that ever stopped people from demanding others do it (see Jack Ma for an example).