Former Gameloft Employee Worked Insane Hours, Felt Company Wanted 'Quantity Over Quality'

Gamertag Radio writes: "Early this morning, I came across an article about a former Head Studio Programmer at Gameloft who worked 120 hours a week. I posted this article on Twitter to see what the gaming community had to say about this.

It turns out one of my friends used to work for Gameloft, and he sent me this e-mail about his experience with the company back in 2007. Here's his e-mail (verbatim)."

[Del673]

Yeah, pretty sure I don't want to work in the industry these days. All these stories coming out about the poor treatment make me happy I never pursued a job in the industry.

[bumnut]

I have a friend who left the industry a few years ago, he said they just use your skills to make them money, then make you redundant.

[ian72]

Thats over 17 hours a day for 7 days, or 5 days doing 24 hour shifts and 2 days off.
Thats just stupid, 120 hours a week. No-one in their right mind would do those hours.

[Perjoss]

eventually you'll see stickers on the front of games boxes with something like 'fair trade' or whatever, meaning developers were treated normally and were allowed to go home at a decent hour and only ever asked to work 1 weekend per month :)

[evilmonkey501]

and nothing ever got finished....

[Perjoss]

Not enough games on the market for you? look at the release schedule for 1 year of games across all platforms. It's a common complaint amongst gamers for the last few years that there are too many quality titles to play.

Trust me, if you had less games to play you would appreciate them much more. I remember back in the day spending crazy amounts on import games like SNES starfox and SNES street fighter, but I played them to death (always having fun) as there was not too much else of the same quality around.

[maniacmayhem]

You can look at a lot of gameloft games and see a lot are re-skins of their past games.

This is how the industry is, especially the mobile industry.

Even worse if you work qa.

[Ulf]

The games industry is not a place for people looking for an easy job. They do, indeed, abuse the zeal of young folks looking to "make games" to instead get way more than the typical work week out of people.

Most developers in the games industry are under the age of 35 for a reason -- most of them get sick of it, and leave. That's one of the reasons its so hard to find a strong, stable studio in the industry -- most studio founders and administrators follow the status quo, rather than looking to great established studios like Blizzard, Bungie, and Naughty Dog, for inspiration with regards to running a studio.

Tech industry folks, who tend to start games companies, usually don't understand the artistic and creative forces that go into making a studio *great*. They only understand the hard work ethic of the tech industry in general, and when they see their product clearly failing to appeal during development, they push harder, thinking that's whats needed to fix it.

If you look closely, you'll find that studios led by artists and designers tend to have fewer of these personnel issues than the ones founded by engineers and businessmen. Its not a hard rule, as many great studios were founded by engineers with good creative vision (unfortunately an industry rarity), but its a sadly good metric. The real trouble is that you inevitably have to put someone with the "logistics" mindset into an administrative position with a lot of control... otherwise your company flops hard due to poor financial planning -- thus the rare creative engineer (+leadership skills) is an industrial strength gem, and the rarity of such folks is the reason there are so few profoundly successful games developers.