Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.
The games industry is sickly and broken.
> Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.
Some do! I would imagine many indie game companies are not like this. There's kind of a split, where you have "strictly-business" companies - many Asian MMORPG publishers that have a subsidiary in the US are like this. There is no gaming culture, it's just a standard workday. You might get some plushies at the office or a poster or two.
The "cool" companies, like Riot and Blizzard, complete with campus statues of game characters and a culture to match, conference rooms named after game characters or items, are what gamers seem to want to look up to, though.
If you've played any MMORPG long enough, you'll see a lot of recurring themes, kids gleefully willing to "answer support tickets for free" and "I'll be a GM they don't even need to pay me" -- this probably is part of the reason that produces toxic culture, along with the fact that if you strictly hire only gamers, you're already going to almost certainly have a higher toxicity demographic in the first place, depending on the game. If we're talking something like Harvest Moon or similar, of course there's going to be close to no toxic players.
Riot's primary product involves matchmaking you into 4 other random people that you have to cooperate with for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more, where one person can lose the game for everyone by repeatedly dying to the enemy and making the enemy stronger. If you leave, you get banned or penalised for abandoning your team; this includes virtually unwinnable dragged-out hour long matches. You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game.
It's very difficult to boycott a game you've spent tens of thousands of hours on - a game that you're good at, that you have friends on, that you've spent heaps of cash shop currency on lootboxes for. Even if you desperately dislike the developer. This happens for many companies - look at all the loudmouthed people on reddit et al screaming about how no one should support EA or Blizzard, and then a month later go buy the new expansion pack for something and buy lootboxes and forget about it.
Oh yes. I must say, these days I hate playing multiplayer game modes with leaderboards attached.
Relevant to this thread: I used to play Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard's LoL clone) causally with friends. Then one day a colleague dragged me into his team, full of people dozens of levels above me (and otherwise experienced progamers). That was one stressful evening where I could tell everyone hated the noob that was me. My reflexes were OK, but my "meta" wasn't.
I never played a game of HotS with that colleague again.
I mean, seriously, I want to play games where one can excel in out-thinking the opponent. But HotS progaming feels more like an exercise in memorizing obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats.
I do agree with the sentiment though. The community is definitively not n00b friendly and I gave up soon as well :S
Just for the record:
obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats
Is exactly out-thinking the opponent, and we are not even talking of a game where execution enters into play as Heroes is no Dota2, let alone SC2 or Broodwar
What you want isn't real outthinking, you want to feel rewarded for feeling like you out-thought your opponent, be it true or not
Is that Tibia reference?
I do miss Tibia though :)
That being said, things are slowly starting to change, and employees of game studios are starting to demand better. It's still bad in most places, but the discussion is happening.
For most of the issues they made me believe that it's a halo effect. People that were great designers/devs/other became managers (and bad project managers) and then confusion ensues.
Anyone from Polish game scene can please give better insight?
Games are massively difficult to develop, and because of that there's this idea that insane crunch is inevitable for all projects. But every single story I've heard is that project management for just about every game is horrible, even in comparison to badly managed software in general.
