@Lil Weed Lova is correct in that game development is one of the worst industries to work for in tech currently. They prey on young, passionate people and then spit them back out to crush the souls of the next batch. This is common knowledge and pretending that it isn't a problem because you dislike Pat is disingenuous and makes you look incredibly unintelligent.
It's not like this is a new problem either, this shit has been going on for decades and the only thing that has changed is that people are actually noticing it and talking about it now instead of just accepting that they will be worked to death over nothing.
The most notable example of this bullshit that people try to paint as passionate and noble were the CG cutscenes for the original Silent Hill done by Takayoshi Sato. Who locked himself in the office and spent his nights working on the cutscenes and even slept under his desk. He wasn't doing this out of passion for his job, he was doing it because Konami was threatening to remove all credit for the work he did on the game if he didn't do them all himself in 2 months.
This isn't impressive, this is abhorrent and abusive and the implications and after effects of this were completely ignored because he managed to pull it off and now when people mention what he had to go through they talk about it like it was necessary when it wasn't.
Used to work in a recycling facility, I remember the post Amazon days blitz of cardboard mixed with the 95 degree temperatures (115 on the sorting line), 11 hour days and 2 1/2 hour commute for five days being pretty shit. People passing out from heat exhaustion, an older supervisor nearly dying of heat stroke, having a grand total of <12 hours to eat, shit, sleep have any sort of fun and having only the OSHA allowed amount of breaks in between. Oh and the boss of the place was a total cunt who watched FOX Business all day in his AC cooled room, only occasionally poking his head out to tell us we were lazy.
Yeah, so? I also worked in a warehouse at a sorting line in the blistering heat both inside and outside doing hard manual labor for 11 hours a day with a 2 hour car ride to work and another 2 hour car ride back. I would come home at 2 am and manage to take a shower before passing out and then waking up just to leave for work immediately and only had Saturdays off. This isn't the fucking oppression olympics and nobody cares if you had it worse, imagine if you had to do all of that but instead of actually getting to go home you instead had to sleep at the warehouse under the conveyor belt because your boss coerced/threatened that you had to work 16+ hours and it was basically mandatory industry enforced required overtime that you could get fired over.
I don't remember a great media outcry for me, so I'm really struggling to feel sorry for people sitting ergonomic chairs all day in AC cooled rooms that spend 25% of their working time on reddit.
That's funny because all I ever see surrounding Amazon is union related and general workplace outrage, people have always been furious about working conditions in warehouses, Amazon especially, but corporations spend a lot of money intentionally discouraging and downplaying unions. Amazon owns Twitch and runs anti-union ads on it because they actively benefit from keeping people uninformed and misleading them.
Saying "Fuck you, I did my time so you do yours." Genuinely doesn't help anyone, we should be looking to change things to make shit better, not be bitter that younger people won't have to be fucked over like we were previously.
This all boils down to you not considering what they do "real jobs" and confirms that you're mad that they have the audacity to complain when you had it "worse." I've been in these offices and they're not as cushy as you're implying, they have tiny cramped desks with computers and shitty little metal chairs since actual computer chairs are expensive and some people have to bring their own to the office just to be comfortable at work.
Air conditioning is not a guarantee, it's usually seen as an unnecessary expense unless there are enough computers to worry about them overheating. It's never about the comfort of the people working there unless it's paid out of pocket by them or the company is smaller and cares more for the well-being of it's workers.
Even if they're not lifting boxes or sorting electronics or whatever bar you're setting for them they're still hunched over a desk for 15+ hours a day crunching code until they're exhausted because it's still mentally taxing. You can fuck up your back just as easily sitting down at an office job for hours on end as you could picking up shit in a warehouse.
also, the same people who screech about crunch are the same ones who get a panic attack when a games premier is pushed back.
That's generally what all gamers do when a game they were looking forward to is delayed regardless of what their stances are on crunch. The most vitriolic ones are usually the ones who think crunch is good. Pretty much everyone nowadays is under the impression that delaying games is overall good but disappointing because initial release dates are almost always wrong.
Lol vacation, boy what do you do for a living
Even at my shitty warehouse job I got at least 2 weeks vacation a year at my request that I could take at any time.
Skipping lunches is illegal in most places. There's a reason so many employment contracts explicitly tell you that if you work a certain number of hours, you will take a lunch break, no matter how much work you have or how close you think you are to getting it done. I've lost count of the times I've seen supervisors and managers yelling at employees to STFU about getting one last thing done and take their goddamn lunch break already.
It's illegal where I live so I was thinking that maybe it was an American thing, but now I'm thinking it's just an old person thing.
We had to work 12 once a week but whatever. The work hours weren't the crunch part, they were every day, every week of the year... occasionally devs having to do the hours I did routinely because they goofed off too much early on AGAIN is making me not want to feel bad for them, especially in the context of them having it worse than me. The reasons deadlines exist is because otherwise things would never get done. A general sentiment held by Barack Obama no less
“If you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen.The default position is inertia.”– President Barack Obama July 22, 2009We enter another weekend with yet another health care deadline hanging low on Washington’s horizon. It will be neither the first nor the last time that gauntlets...
www.pbs.org
You push back the deadline you'll still have crunch, because crunch largely exists from lazy workers not doing much until the deadline approaches. These people are lazy oafs who bitch to Kotaku anonymously about supposed work conditions they have
temporarily with no real way of substantiating it and they get saps repeating the horrors of crunch to make people feel sorry for them
Once again what Lil Weed Lova said: You could be on top of all of your work and that would just encourage the higher ups to pile on more to your workload and furthering feature creep and slowing development by no fault of your own. Proper time management and actually getting shit done gets infinitely more difficult the more work is piled onto your already full plate by your bosses making promises on the basis of features "being cool."
Look at Cyberpunk 2077's higher-ups insistence on adding superficial bullshit bloating development time and hastily having to add features that they never intended combined with the people in charge trying to get it out as fast as possible to hit that deadline while the dev team itself suffered, the team wasn't just sitting around on reddit they genuinely needed several more years to work on the damn thing and were being ground to dust to get this thing in the broken state it was in. Project Managers and Lead Developers are the ones responsible for keeping everyone on the same page and keeping time and in this instance they failed and we all got a good look, but some people still aren't actually seeing what they need to.
I absolutely despise people who don't understand the games industry, how it works and how games are made and will just call developers lazy because it's an easy out and means they don't have to learn anything or change their viewpoint; which is kind of ironic because this is the actual argument that David Jaffe should have made about insider vs outsider knowledge and would actually have made Pat engage with him but Jaffe has debate podcast brain rot so he didn't.
Woolie is one the biggest bitchers about crunch, you know, the guy who "can't" do a podcast because his back hurts from lying down too much. That's the type of person emailing Kotaku
Woolie runs a podcast and doesn't work in the games industry. He is not the one coding your video games and he's allowed to simultaneously believe in thinking crunch is bad and cry about his back hurting and being self-employed so he doesn't have to sit on his couch and speak into a microphone for 4 hours that we're not going to listen to anyways lol. This is peak "Yet you live in a society, curious." shit.
The whole crunch situation makes me wonder how the fuck crunch actually is while it's happening, rather than after the fact by le anonymous source
I want one major company to be like, "Fuck it, we put several cameras in the offices so EVERYONE sees how our devs work under crunch" without them knowing, but that would cause a stink eh
Edit - not for every project but for one major project that we know will have the dreaded crunch of bad times
Everyone is tired and depressed and morale is totally shot, the video itself would be boring but you'd be able to see exactly how long people are sitting in the same spot for hours and that itself would make the situation more real for people and maybe occasionally you would see them start to break down and hastily excuse themselves to go to the bathroom to cry because doing it while working is considered rude.
A major studio would never do this, it would be a total PR disaster and if anything like this leaked out the people responsible would be fired and possibly even have legal action taken on them for recording it and leaking it to the public.
You think this only happens in gaming? Have you ever had a job before?
I'm starting to think you've never had a job before based on how absolutely out of touch you are with reality and how little you actually understand about what consists of a normal work week and how you lack basic reading skills. I've seen this shit first hand and it's pretty clear that you're getting jealous over a fantasy job which exists in your imagination because you don't know what game development actually entails.
Tl;Dr game devs are just weak, spineless, and not in touch with reality? That's a brutal cut down.
Well if they'd unionize already and stop willingly let corporations abuse them then we wouldn't be having this discussion then would we? If they stood up for themselves then we wouldn't be having this crunch talk period because it would be a sane, normal level of overtime and not them working 18+ hours a day 6-7 days a week for 6 months straight or else.
Untrue. I don't care about limp wristed game devs anywhere near as much as I care about cardboard, let alone the people who make it.
This is just confusing to me because one of the biggest draws for the channel for a lot of people was that they were actually interested in video game production and actually cared about it, it's why I got into wanting to make games in the first place. You're an alt account so you wouldn't know that this thread is about dudes playing video games and not people writing gay hatefic about how much they don't want to fuck Pat because he's cringe and hurt their feelings.
something i've noticed about pat specifically, he seems to have never grown emotionally past shit he dealt with a full decade+ ago. if a character, person, or situation mildly reminds him of something that upset him when he was 19, it becomes "OH MAN, OH MAN I REMEMBER THIS GUY, MAN I HATED THAT GUY, FUCK THIS GUY MAAAAAN IT'S JUST LIKE THAT GUY" then glues his eyes to the chat in order to cackle at the 2 people that have the same issues and agree. this way Jerk From High School isn't winning guys, he's winning, look at the these guys that also hate him in chat/on twitter!
That's not unique to Pat, you're basically saying that he shouldn't remember or care about stuff that happened in his 20's. Of course he's going to talk about college and the people he met when he was a young adult.
He has spoken about assholes during his childhood making his life hell but he doesn't fixate on them like someone like MovieBob does where it lives rent free in his head and impacts how he interacts with people daily. Pat making an off-hand comment about hating some dude he met like 15 years ago isn't really that big of a deal as you're making it out to be.
You also have to remember that a good portion of their audience actually was in middle/high school when they started out and would relate to these kinds of stories so of course they're going to tell them.
i think he's hyperfixed on game dev crunch culture (aside from the good boy points) because the only actual significant "work" he's ever mentioned having to do is at a grocery store, being also fairly underpaid and overworked while incredibly easy to replace, so he thinks "that's LITERALLY me" when he sees game devs have to put in 75 hour work weeks and has to act like it's his personal cause or else the grocery store from 15 years ago will win. jaffe is just the retard he's chosen to occupy that space in his mind this time, and donating to random charities he doesn't care about is his "fuck you, dad" to his old boss or whatever.
Honey, you're doing that thing again where you spin a strawman out of your own imagination and try to psychoanalyze someone you had a parasocial relationship with based on unrelated twitter posts.
You guys actually made me realize that I was right about the fact that Pat's argumentative nature would attract other argumentative people, because all of this stuff that I've been seeing is exactly the kind of scorned parasocial nerdy bitching that I figured would happen eventually when people got tired of his schtick and the people who thought he was totally cool for speaking his mind and being a jerk would eventually turn on him.
I'm willing to make fun of Pat and Woolie because I am slightly annoyed by them sometimes but I don't think they're lolcows (Pat WILL become person of the day on twitter and get paddled though, I am sure of this.) and I don't hate them, my standards for both are a little higher than "Making dumb annoying posts on twitter and being kind of smug" so I don't get this complete autistic vitriol towards them and twisting every single little insignificant thing they do into some big drama especially the times when they are joking or being facetious. I think it's one thing to discuss the dumb things Pat and Woolie say or do but it's another to just fabricate things based on your own assumptions.
I know I'm guilty of this as well but I think I'm just over it. It's no fun anymore, even the people on the subreddit can dunk on Pat and Woolie and even be a little funny when doing it sometimes, you guys are all just joyless and it feels like this attitude is just all over Kiwifarms now. Where are the funny posts? Dynastia we need you now more than ever.
This is the first time I remember Pat ever giving to charity and of course it's out of spite and to a meme cause that doesn't even need the money. When people would ask him to do charity streams he would say shit like Canada's taxes are high, so that's basically his charity and proceed to never giving a shit for anyone else (and make fun of the homeless!). It's really not hard to see why Pat has so few pre YouTube friends still in his life, it's basically Fuggins and Woolie, who would probably ditch Pat if he could financially.
Pat has given to charity before, I remember him giving to the mermaids one. I don't really find this a negative because I've donated to lots of charities and kept it to myself and I find that it's preferable to announcing on twitter that you donated to XYZ for clout. You should give because you want to give, not so you can post about it on social media to make yourself look good. I do find this particular stunt obnoxious but I can forgive it this time because of how Jaffe is a leech who will invite guests over on the pretense of charity when it's to boost his own status and tries to paint the other party as bad if they refuse him, I cannot stand it.
Just fucking buy the game, cunt, don’t the overworked devs deserve it?
I've said this about Pokemon and I'll say it again: Unless it's an indie game, all of the money you spend on big budget games goes directly to the top of the company and the dev team sees none of it because they are paid wages that are set by the company and the money goes to shareholders that determine what happens next and Pat knows this. Pirate whatever you want and beg for all the codes your greedy little heart desires.
@Anchors-Away is right about him just being lazy though, it's not hard to get codes and Woolie has proven this and has shown shock at Pat's inability to figure it out but Pat is also someone who got TLOU2 for free and then tore it to shreds so that might make it a tad bit harder for him to get codes from other big companies in the future.
I think it's because of Jim Sterling, Shreier and, possibly, resetera. It's a popular topic these days and a good virtue-grifting opportunity for any e-celeb desperate for some positive attention.
Crunch has been a topic that people have spoken about for a while, I know Jim Sterling was doing videos on it years ago before it recently blew up thanks to non-Japanese video game companies just coming out and showing their whole asses and trying to brag about horse ball physics while their devs were being sent to psyche offices due to stress from overwork. I think it's more that now people are realizing that it's an actual problem and overall general video game work culture becoming common knowledge and openly talked about.
It's actually similar to how overall Japanese work culture is just like this in almost all areas where people basically have no time to themselves or their hobbies and are expected to work absurdly long hours with mandatory overtime and then are forced to socialize afterwards with the other staff and are expected to get married and have children right out of university on top of all this just like their fathers before them and younger generations are just giving up on life which is why death from overworking and suicide are so high combined with Japan's absolutely awful mental health care. It's they copied Japan's work culture, but for video games only and it's weird.
But I get it, saying that overworking your staff with unnecessary crunch is bad actually isn't controversial. But it also isn't false. So if you're annoyed by it now then get ready to be annoyed for a long time I guess.
