The Game Industry

Here's a few things about the game industry you may not know.

1) Design your own game? 99.9% of the time you don't get to design whatever games you want to work on. Publishers come to the developer and say, we want to make a ____ game. Developer decides to do it or not, if they do, they draw up a concept for the idea, if the publisher approves, the development process begins. There's more to it then that, but the overall idea is the publisher tells you what to make.

2) Why do Buggy games ship? Buggy games are not always the fault of the developer. Many times the game is rushed out to make a deadline and shipped with bugs. I have yet to meet a developer who wants to ship a buggy game. Almost every time the publisher wants to meet some date, so the sales happen in a certain quarter to make the stock holders happy. More often then not there is some great feature the developer wants in the game but it gets cut beause of deadlines. Unfortunatly the publishers can't see that shipping a game a month late, but getting extra features and better quality game would generate more money in the long run.

3) What is crunch time? Usually near the end of a project, or near a milestone you will work crunch time. Which means working long hours, sometimes 7 days a week. A lot of developers work salary and aren't paid overtime. There is a lot of controversy about this in the industry. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if you should or shouldn't get overtime, I get conflicting stories all the time. And each State has it's own laws on overtime. The company I work for is kind enough to pay us overtime....one of the few that does. It's not uncommon to work 80 hours a week...sometimes for a few months. When I worked at a previous company, we spent 5 months work 80-100 hours a week, with no overtime, no time off, no bonus, nothing, it's one of the main reasons I left that company. The current company limits us to 60 hours a week.

4) Is making games fun? Yes. Even though it's alot of hard work, the job is creative and fun. Before working in the industry I did warehouse work in a factory. I didn't enjoy going to work, now I do.