Has anyone here experience working in the video game industry? It sounds pretty cool but what's it really like?

Has anyone here experience working in the video game industry? It sounds pretty cool but what's it really like?

Had a friend in my MBA class that worked in vidya. He enjoyed the work but not the workload and work environment. It was for a AAA dev so they had milestone and crunchtime bullshit forcing him to work 12+ hour days for 3-6 months at a time. He did some indie work that paid a bit less but was far more relaxing but at 35 years old with a family, it just didn't pay enough to support them.

So he went into my MBA program and then became a professor at Full Sail. I'm not an expert, but I'd recommend you learn more important and critical programming and computer skills and go for an in-demand IT job. Put a few years in and then if you still have the itch, see what's available in the vidya industry. You'll probably have better options than being a new grad right off the boat.

Already thought that it's hard for software developers. Plus the programming work isn't much different something not video game related.

What about the marketing/game design jobs? Seems much more relaxed, better paid and more vydia related then being the code monkey. I imagine it's hard to get into a position though.

>I imagine it's hard to get into a position though.
Of course it's hard, the "idea guys" are usually at the top. If you really want to be an idea guy become an indie dev or be a millionaire and make your own studio.

>What about the marketing/game design jobs?

Whatever the industry, you typically want to be the one making decisions instead of the grunt crunching the numbers. The issue is, you usually have to do your time in the trenches first and do a good job at it, before being able to get one of those jobs. Even then, you have to deal with in office politics shit and what not.

Realistically, if you want a managerial vidya position, you might want to do 3 years as a code monkey, then go back to school for your MBA, then it will be a lot easier to making into a mid-level position. I did finance and accounting undergrad and the internships were bullshit none paid, file stuff and get people coffee busy work and the job offers were for shitty sales positions. In grad school, we all had people after us for internships that paid at least $18 an hour and most got full time offers.

Unless you go to a top school or are well connected, expect to go through a few years of shit before things improve.

is he a jew?

Fuck this guy.

>big company/industry game dev
shittest job in the world unless you own the company

>indie dev
have a chance to put out games at your own pace and if you have the creativity and drive to actually do well, you can turn a profit

He sounds like a tranny tßh

From all the stories I've read from people in the industry, it's a soulcrushing experience doing anything for most triple A devs. You want to either earn less money and work at smaller studios, or earn more money AND get treated well and work in normal software stuff.

You know when you see social justice faggots in colleges protesting? it's kind of like that these days.

I worked for Ubisoft for almost 2 years.
I'll probably work there again in a few months.

And how was it?

What was it like? What was/is your job? Was it really as soulcrushing as people here saying?

>having parasite wife and worthless shit kid that will fuck you over for 18 years, probably more

sounds like he's living the good life having to wageslave 65 hours weeks and not having a dollar go to himself.

Frankly it was pretty good.
At Ubisoft I was game tester, so I was basically playing the game all day, trying to find bugs. You are assigned a focus (Like, gameplay issues, level design hiccups, narrative bugs, and so on).

After 2 years It was a bit annoying, but not nearly as bad as other jobs. You are always talking to devs and programmers, and they usually really like you because you help them polish their features. Sometime you can piss them off, like when they create the next big feature and it crash the whole game, they knwo it's on them though.

Since you talk and work various work fields you get a ton of experience and knowledge on the dev universe.

The only huge drawback are the wages wihch are very low (Around net 1200€ each months, not counting the extra hours)
And you have to pull a lot of extra hours, like really a lot and tester are not the worst, my assigned programmer managed to exceed his overtime quota of 2018 at the end of 2016.

Frankly it was pretty good, would go again if they paid better, but that's ubisoft for you.
Being a level designer is great though.

>having parasite wife and worthless shit kid

I don't know how life has made you so bitter, but I truly do hope you see the brightness in this world.

What are the chances of getting involved into some game dev stuff as a writer? I had this idea of a game that I've been working on for last couple of months, got down a lot of stuff and it's bretty gud and easy to implement in the game, at least as far as my experience in games tells me.
I take it without solid writing background there isn't much to hope for, but still

having kids is the best thing, really.

I'm the dude above, I worked a lot on the narrative département.
My chief told me he got in by making his own stories, writing for small series, small films and even ads.

He got in by showing his work, and had a narrative designer position.
Our writers are basically all in USA (For licensing reason) so I don't know where do you live but being in US seems to make things a bit easier. They were 3 for a AAA game.

It's not impossible, but it seems like you clearly have to create stuff on your free time.

If hacks like hamberger hepler and mac walters can get jobs writing, no reason you couldn't.

Enjoy your frequent layoffs.

>It's not impossible, but it seems like you clearly have to create stuff on your free time.
Well I've been creating stuff since I could write pretty much. Got a shitton of short stories and poetry that got me quite a lot of awards back in school. Not that great of achievement, but still

Stuff I'm writing now is pretty original for vidya at least in terms of setting, it's an rpg inspired by vtmb and wod in general. So far so good

Have only worked as a dev at a small indie studio (with square enix as a publisher).

Will probably go back into game dev at some point, but wouldn't really consider working at AAA / large studios for the meanwhile.

Most of my friends are programmers and the thought of being one of many code monkeys at a big company, churning out script all day just seems frightfully dull to me.

From my time working in digital, I've always preferred working at smaller agencies over huge multinationals. -And I feel much the same way re game dev.

Just tend to have far more chill atmosphere, there's far more opportunity to directly influence work, more creative freedom and less upper management, bureaucratic bullshit.

Try to apply, and if you are rejected ask what the employer would like more on your resume, it would be a good start for you.

>draw decent art, write well
>multiple "indie dev" acquaintances want to use my assets in exchange for exposure
>mfw aspiring artists/writers still fall for this scam of a proposition

Art is just a hobby for me--my more realistic option is to transform my personal trainer career into an in-house fitness person for a company large enough to have one on its insurance plan. That sounds dumb, but I swear that's actually a thing.

They were absurdly lucky, similar to Chris Metzen (who until retiring was essentially a bonafide salaried Ideas Guy).

He looks like one of the fine brothers

SiR?

Haha, no. Just a /fit/izen who wants to help other nerds get swole.

>office politics shit and what not.

I hate this.

It should be a crime to tell kids that "it gets better" because learning that popularity contests are still a thing with adults only now there's money attached to them sucks.

As expected from infected hosts.

So you're telling me that Ubisoft has people like you and they still manage to shit out bug infested games? How?

75% of wives are like this

>be me, 17, fresh outta highschool
>apply to most prestigious game art and design university for the lols with half assed port folio
>they only invite 40 people out of the odd 2000
>actually get invited
>lol wut but ok
>make my way through fort sjw to reach interview room
>sit down
>I'm facing tumblr itself, 3 fat whales with trigger glasses
>2 female students who have that at the verge of tears look
>be a fucking white male
>don't get taken

>art university

The good news about drawing is that you don't actually need classes if you are driven enough. There are so many resources online for both critique and technique that all you're paying for at the school is the prestige and connections.

>making a shitty game

You deserve them, I love how the industry is almost going back to it's roots you fuck up you're out

remember Atari? yeah that's fucking right you don't

It's difficult to explain.
First you must understand that making open-world games is hard, really hard, there's so much possibilities and cases that testing everything is simply not possible.
Second Ubisoft is really late in their tool department, each game has its very own engine, developed along the game,n this makes the devs having daily headaches and an environnement-prone to bugs in general.
You can add to the pile Ubi doesn't really consider well their testers, most of them are outsourced in Romania, India, and soon Philippine. These people a gaining less in a year that you do in a month, so they are clearly not willing to put much efforts in their testing routine.
In bonus, Ubisoft is pretty harsh in the HR department, very few permanent contract, which makes devs going in and out and coding on other people stuff.

But now bugs and polish is pretty much one of their priority, the Unity backlash did tremendous amount of damages to the company, and they're still a bit shaken.
There's also others details in won't go in, but also don't forget ubi love dat money, and they really love that release schedule, except most of their games could use a few more months, but you can miss the christmas perdio, you see?

Ah and most of the creative directors are really dumb. One of them told me that MGS 5 was complicated and he couldn't understand what do to in the game. The directors can be very stupid at times.

t. betas

I have a few dev contacts
EA, Capcom, Konami, some indie as well

All their stories are truly something I want to hear more of, but they always say how poor working conditions are frequently depending on what needs to be done.

The reusage of engines, modification of engines for X benefits (darkspore engine was used for another game later in time with heavy modifications for example). Bugs that were eventually made into features (Street Fighter combos - one dev i know thats worked on the series from the start (left before 5 happened) was saying how they saw others playing it for bugtesting, but upon talking they were actually practicing abusing the bug, to then become combos).

Then there's the aspects of what they shot for, but were never able to achieve for whatever reason. Time, budget, technical complications, management saying fuck no, and many more reasons. And then there's shit that happens where theres an idea, was implemented, was removed for whatever reason only to then be reimplemented in a different game

The game industry is something grand behind closed doors, but only if you can put up with bullshit and occasionally being treated like a slave (pay sometimes held for X reason, legal or not sometimes). Then there's other shitty partnerships (like working with Konami as Guillermo Del Toro had learned) or contract work that simply cannot be done in that amount of time, but you have to anyway.

When dev content slips out from time to time it makes me happy to see what kind of things happened so often - for example, there is a common practice of using placeholder textures, audio, scripts and more. One such incident used pirated Simpsons content as placeholder VA of all things. Sometimes they take WoW textures for world textures because it works and fits well.

tl;dr
video game industry is shit but has benefits

>Ah and most of the creative directors are really dumb. One of them told me that MGS 5 was complicated and he couldn't understand what do to in the game. The directors can be very stupid at times.
How do they get elected? Is it by seniority or why do they decide on someone who is not the best person for the job?

I spoke with the guy who was the lead tester for functions of the Playstation 4 system. His team was testing features like the Playstation Store, music and video players, etc. This was when they were adding Twitch connectivity. He was Japanese living in California working at their US headquarters. I asked him how they handled testing something of this scale with millions of users across the globe and he described the 10 some odd levels of testing they do for each release. 1 actual QA environment and 9 staging levels before it goes out to the public. He was assembling a team for testing Facebook functionality. If I had lived close enough he said he could've used me on the team.

You work your ass off for 2 months then get fired after release.

>video game industry is shit but has benefits
About what I expected, I guess it's something that you only go in if you are passionate enough to put up with the bullshit.

>Is it by seniority
Ding ding ding
The Peter principle in full force, and since these guys are around since X0 years, you just can't fire them like that, the only solution is a serious audit and move the bad weed in a place where they can't hurt anything.

Careful now : they are definitely not all like that, being a director is serious work which demands many skills and you must weight every decisions you take carefully, it's hard.
But some of them are clearly bad at this for several reasons.

One of my director, for example, had no leadership whatsoever, no professionalism, used ad hominem all the time, both for the team and to minimise the competition.

>You work your ass off for 2 months then get fired after release.

This is kind of true for software development in general though. And for a lot of other industries that don't produce stable work too.

A stable position is very rare, the norm is to only be hired for something like a few months or a year to help with a project and then it's time to start looking for a new job.

To be fair, this is kind of like being hired to build a house and then complaining that you were fired when you finished building the house. What were you expecting? To be kept on retainer forever?

>since these guys are around since X0 years, you just can't fire them like that

Given that there's a whole generation of people who grew up with this bullshit, you'd think they'd be old enough buy now to be able to do something about it. Like, not ALL of them can become the next worthless director drawing a paycheck and continue the cycle, so what exactly is happening?

I've never had a job where the people above me were blatantly trash (PT from ), so I'm pretty ignorant as to why this is still a thing.

I used to be a tester for Nintendo and it's just as much of a fucking nightmare house that you expect

>Can't just fucking call them or email them like any other dev, you have to use this broken, busted message board system they only check once a week
>Won't answer anything unless it's in Japanese
>Send them bug reports they will outright deny and yet still send us a new version with those same bugs fixed
>Absolutely fucking nobody is allowed to know anything about anything, and yet other devs I have tested for will at least give you the fucking name of the game under the implication you will be thrown into a dark hole and never seen again if you talk about it

>under the implication you will be thrown into a dark hole and never seen again if you talk about it

What can they actually do about this but blacklist you and whatever else the NDA says they can do (sue?)?

Like any other job
You get shit on and stress out meeting deadlines

If they can find a good enough (((lawyer))) and (((prove))) that some schmuck in his mid-20's "damaged" potential sales of the game by talking about it with his friends you can rest assured that you will be sued into oblivion

I'm guessing that is all but really isn't it enough?
It's not like keeping your mouth shut is that hard and losing a job and being blacklisted from working it elsewhere must sucks enough.

I worked with Nintendo on a Wii game and this sounds on point.
We had a question for them, it took them more than 2 weeks to answer us, because the local nintendo office had to take our question, translate it into japanese, to answer in japanese, and so it can be translated again to us.

No wonders nobody want to works with them.
I gotta say Sony are pretty cool on that regard.

At an indie game studio for marketing. Colleagues have worked on AAA titles before.

Basically you have a very specific targets to reach and during certain periods of the year your devs are going to be crunching extremely hard to reach deadlines. This in my opinion is a natural part of game development and often needs to happen else the game just doesnt get released to quality standards. However, when and where to use this is extremely finnicky.

You will get burnout and you will get people dropping out of the company, And doing crunch for too long will have horrible health and probably personal problems affecting you.

Alot of companies Ive seen usually speaky highly of transparency and cross division support but it all depends on having a good project manager delegating time and resources in a smart and efficient way. Otherwise it rapidly falls into closed castles where everyone does their own thing and fight on every major feature/issue.

Marketing for a game is fairly cut and dry though, you usually dont have to crunch and I dont see too much of a difference between this role and in many others in other industries.

Ive never done it, but I do know marketers pay people to shill for them on game forums (never heard of Sup Forums in particular but I wouldnt be surprised). However, people underestimate just how dedicated people can get in spreading word of mouth (FOR FREE LOL). No seriously, people do want to talk about games they are excited about.

As someone aspiring to get into the gaming industry, which company is the least SJW if I ever decided to work with one in the industry instead of remaining indie? I don't want to work with Tumblr land whales or the nu-male looking cucks in their stupid hats who worked on Mankind Divided. I mean, I'm probably going to have to tolerate this shit.

But which company is the least SJW to work with that actually gives a fuck about the quality of their games the most?

My cousin has interned for a small dev a year ago or so. From his stories, there are two or three people in the company that are living the dream, and a few dozen coders and designers doing grunt work. Testing sucks. He wasn't there for a release crunch, but everyone had stories for him about how shitty it gets. After he graduated he took an entry level dev position for a medical place and pulls more than $20k over what the established game coders got, and almost double what his starting salary would have been there.

Apparently if you want to get involved the graphic designers had the most fun day to day and the most enthusiasm for the work.

>half assed port folio
>don't get taken
No shit.

Easier to blame others than yourself though, right?

>that latest video where he all but confirmed that the faggots at blizzard all think its perfectly fine that dvas flight is 5 second cooldown

I hate this company.

Japanese companies.
Good luck.

The SJW stuff is not as prevalent as you think for most companies.

Well I mean, in any large triple A studios or successful studios in general in the west you will absolutely be tossed out and black listed from the industry if you bring Sup Forums into real life but this isnt different from most careers.

Most of them might make a blanket statement about diversity, but for the most part employees dont care except for quality and its a heavily nerd male industry in general.

However if youre someone who thinks that a company wanting to create a female main character as "SJW" just stay away. We neither want you and to be fair, you would probably hate it as well.

Also interested in this answer.

I'd kill to have more "industry" friends, but it seems there is always at least one whale in every "cluster" of people who would otherwise interest me, it's really annoying.

I consider fat women+nu-males a harbinger of unfun and immediately drop participation once one gets any amount of power.

Seriously? Is there no Western company not corrupted by that shit completely?

Or is it just like any other business where some middle-aged HR dyed hair bitch bullies and seeks ways to fire employees for the slightest shit? Seriously, middle-aged women are awful in office workplaces.

>However if youre someone who thinks that a company wanting to create a female main character as "SJW" just stay away. We neither want you and to be fair, you would probably hate it as well.

No, I'm cool with that. I just don't want everyone making a big deal about making a female main character as some revolutionary new thing.
Couldn't care less about the gender or race of a character. That stuff kind of writes for itself, even without gaming journalism making a big deal about someone like Mary Read in Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Who exactly was responsible for that ridiculous stuff? Surely, it couldn't have been the gaming journalism websites themselves, right?

Is there a position responsible for that kind of marketing or something? I don't want you to name names or something. Just whoever is responsible realizes that queer and transsexual characters have been in games since forever, right? I'm legitimately curious.

No it was satire.
"SJW" are not as predominant as you think they are.

In the internal board of my company a certain female person posted a feminist frequency link, she got trashed to hell and back, even by women. The only dude obviously SJW are the same old 2-3 guys posting liberal links, but you'll have that in any company.

Well, that's a relief to hear.

How are the conditions in the workplace, by the way? Considering you're typically working overtime to meet deadlines. Are people decently fed and have aircon/heating in the workplace? Like I don't expect you guys to have the greatest diets or sleeping schedules.
Just hear some nightmare stories here and there about certain developer workplaces.

For my part it was pretty good.
Unlimited fruits and clear water.
During overtime they pay you a good meal, which is usually too much honestly, you have to be careful or you'll gain some weight.

During my first months I gained 13kg, without noticing, I lost them all by just being careful.

There's a nice cafeteria, a baby foot, and soem arcade. Nothing fancy to be honest, but is comfy I must say.

>Is there a position responsible for that kind of marketing or something?

Generally not. I mean only speaking anecdotally we dont have a "liberal diversity" marketer for any company.

We get a game, we come through a very specific theme and messaging and purpose of the game as well as the target demographics and sales figures we need to hit, etc...

Then we take the best or most interesting aspects of the game to highlight in press releases/news and in interviews with journalists.

The closest ive seen is a bunch of relatively old mid to upper management people going oh whats trendy right now? Super short under cut hairstyles! Tattoos! Oh we need something unique, lets make her gay! Cool, send it to product and design to hash out the details.

Its not really an agenda anymore than lets superficially make something more trendy.

I dunno, maybe its different at a place like bioware or something.

Is this that fucking dumbass who went on and on about heroes during the VGAs instead of thanking his family and coworkers before fucking off?