Honest question, why would competent developers subject themselves to this kind of treatment? If a company ever "requested" that I work Saturday or Sunday I'd be gone later that same day.
Because videogames are glamorous and a significant portion of people in CS went into it for the specific purpose of working in videogames. As such it's one of the rare sectors in our industry where employers do not struggle too much to hire fresh blood.
At the risk of sounding a bit jaded I don't feel too bad about overworked videogame developers. The vast majority of them can quit at any point and probably land a job in some other sector of the industry, probably with better work conditions and a better salary.
Developers chose to work for these videogame studios. They chose the glamour of being able to say "I wrote some code for GTA V" rather than the comfort and quality of life of being able to say "I write backend code for a flower shop".
Backend code for a flower shop contributes to global and local economy and facilitates trade. Video games are (in my opinion) largely cheap entertainment with some artistic merit and mild popular culture importance (depending on your social crowd). I guess this is an unorthodox opinion, but I consider backend flower code to be cooler and better.
I get it, some jobs are more desirable than others, and there has to be some reason for people to take the less glamorous job, but that barrier could just be skill. I support hard work when it comes to training. Hey, you want to make video games, well it's a really competitive field and you better train your ass off in order to be the best at what you do. I think generally, leveraging passion in order to get people to work really hard is good. They get fulfillment out of it, and everyone else gets a great product.
But that's not what this is. This is investors and executives who found a money pump and are pumping as hard as they possibly can without any regards for the health and wellbeing of the human machine they're putting pressure on. At some point, you have to give people the time to live their lives outside of work or the world is going to become a worse place. They become stressed and depressed, and it affects their families and friends, and and then has a ripple effect on society.
I agree with you completely, I'm not arguing that these studios are behaving ethically. I'm just pointing out that the fact that videogame studios have bad working conditions has been public knowledge for a long time and the engineers who apply for these jobs have to be aware of it. Yet they still decide to get into these jobs even though I'm certain that the vast majority of them could land a more comfortable and probably better paid developer job elsewhere.
I realize that I'm playing the "blame the victim" game and I'm not entirely comfortable with that but in this case it reminds me of that guy who knowingly got in touch with a cannibal to get eaten. If you know what's going to happen and you still on your own free will and without external pressure decide to continue on that path can you really complain that things are exactly how you knew they were going to be?
Are these people coerced in any way to work for these game studios? Were they lied to? Didn't they know that AAA game development is a thankless, soul-crushing task with very tight deadlines and terrible work ethics? Because I remember having almost exactly this conversation with a friend at school more than 15 years ago when he told me he wanted to become a game developer.
I did similar after a long drawn out crunch. Decided I was going home at 10pm rather than 11-12(after being in at 8am each day for the last 6 months).
I was branded as 'not a team player' the whole team basically resented me for 'not pulling my weight'.
In summary, fuck that industry.
The real solution is unionization or fresh blood but I don't think it'll happen in the next 5-10 years. Both titles I worked on previously I'm almost dead certain the constant crunch lead to a sub-par game and subsequent poor releases. Until that industry learns that crunch isn't the solution nothing is going to change.
Because there's a risk of being seen as "not a team-player" and a fear of losing your job as a result of it, social pressure is real in tech culture, if all developers refused to take part in the rat-race and left the office at 6 on Friday the management would have no other choice than to deal with it by _managing_ the human ressources differently, or increasing the count of developers which I will agree: is not easy when it comes to software development.
Social pressure, and the lack of interest (or even contempt) the developers have when it comes to unions mostly explains why such abuse is still seen as normal in the industry.
I'd add also the possibility of being recognized, even if only in the game end credits.
If you're young and a possibly a game enthusiast, it can move mountains.
I was once at a startup that did well enough at Demo, they wanted to launch without a proper ops team in place (it was a service). In addition to demands, lack of planning, and poor management -- there was an expectation that people work unreasonable hours. Taking a weekend off without proper genuflection was frowned upon. Multiple people walked before their 1 year cliff was up, other people stayed.
Working hard isn't an issue, but expectations like those in the gaming industry or some startups (like the one I encountered) are unreasonable and it would help if more people voted with their feet. That said, I know a lot of people in gaming have a passion for such.
At the risk of sounding a bit jaded I don't feel too bad about overworked videogame developers. The vast majority of them can quit at any point and probably land a job in some other sector of the industry, probably with better work conditions and a better salary.
Developers chose to work for these videogame studios. They chose the glamour of being able to say "I wrote some code for GTA V" rather than the comfort and quality of life of being able to say "I write backend code for a flower shop".