Bullshit. 80 hours a week is at least plausible. Working 100, no fucking way. That's 9am - 11:15pm actually physically inside the office EVERY SINGLE DAY OF YOUR LIFE. There is no way "most" of the gamedev industry do that.
Yup, that sound about right, I'd get in at 8am, go home at 5pm for ~30 minute dinner with my wife(then GF, I don't deserve her for sticking it through with me) and then back to the office till 10-12pm.
Got a ton of shit for it too because everyone else usually rolled in at 12-2pm and stayed till 2-3am so the time I worked from 8-12 wasn't noticed and I got called out for leaving "early" at 11pm.
Got into a huge fight with one of our content guys over it which was one of the catalysts for leaving that industry. That along with blowing a red light next to my place 2 times when I realized that job was literally going to kill me.
FWIW the previous gig was pretty similar.
That's not even half of the crazy war stories I have from that industry. I'm always happy to talk to engineers who are interested so I can tell them to stay the fuck away(or learn how to put proper boundaries on working hours, which will get you passed over on career progression).
Oh man, you're bringing back memories I had stuffed away. I had similar resentment stories, and everyone did. It's insane to work unpaid extra hours and have people bickering over who's putting in more or less than others.
Once I started managing, I found it extremely difficult to avoid discounting the people "only" working 55 hours rather than the guys who pulled 65. People with kids on my team putting in an extra 3 hours each and every weekday for years, and the company/environment/industry made it seem like slacking.
I more or less missed the first year of one of my kids over a long crunch. Here's to the wives we didn't deserve to keep!
Except that's absolutely the truth. When you're getting close to launch and crunching to meet the deadlines, you basically live in the office. Game dev is a total meat grinder, there's always two eager fresh newbies that want to make games for every dev seat available. This isn't even an industry secret, it's pretty well known and people still want to be game devs, it's insane to me.
For about 3 weeks of crunch time before shipping our Sony PlayStation title, I brought a cot and sleeping bag to my cube and basically lived in the office, going home about once a week for laundry reload. I'm proud that we shipped on time, but working like that is completely in the past for me, now with kids, a wife, and a non-gamedev job.
Got a ton of shit for it too because everyone else usually rolled in at 12-2pm and stayed till 2-3am so the time I worked from 8-12 wasn't noticed and I got called out for leaving "early" at 11pm.
Got into a huge fight with one of our content guys over it which was one of the catalysts for leaving that industry. That along with blowing a red light next to my place 2 times when I realized that job was literally going to kill me.
FWIW the previous gig was pretty similar.
That's not even half of the crazy war stories I have from that industry. I'm always happy to talk to engineers who are interested so I can tell them to stay the fuck away(or learn how to put proper boundaries on working hours, which will get you passed over on career progression).