Coin-OpEd: Pity the hitmakers

Despite making less money, indies apparently had a rosier perspective on the state of the industry. According to the survey, independent developers were more likely to hold the view that the industry was "more fertile and innovative than ever." Salaried game makers, however, were more inclined to feel that the state of traditional game development was "frustrating" and that "larger studios are 'trimming talent' and crunching harder."

That paragraph above? I wrote that on Wednesday as part of an article titled "US game devs average near $81,000 in 2010 - Survey." I wonder if the article would have gotten more attention if I had titled it: "US game devs make good money, hate their jobs - Click 4 boobies." The article would mostly be about workers' rights in the game industry, but it would also touch upon blue-footed seabirds.

In a much-publicized study published in 2010, Princeton economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that money can buy happiness, or at least, companies can buy their employees' happiness. The price? $75,000 seems to cover day-to-day emotional well-being (that number goes up to, basically, $1 billion when we start talking about general life satisfaction).

So, if the average game developer working for a major US studio is making $81,000, shouldn't their day-to-day happiness rank somewhere north of "frustrating"? The answer to that question, at least in part, can be found on the Twitter feed of THQ executive vice president of Core Games Danny Bilson.

"At Kaos studios in NY sitting with a team that's finaling on 7 day weeks for a couple of months. Talk about that 'thousand yard stare,'" Bilson, I'm not sure--bragged?--on January 11.

A day later, Bilson clarified that Twitter post with another:

"To be clear - Kaos Krunch = Kaos Quality and Kaos Dedication for a brilliant 'Homefront.'"

Homefront launched in the US for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on March 15, with Game Informer, IGN, and GameSpot all settling on the Metacritic medium of 7.0 (coincidence or North Korean conspiracy? 동시에 일어남!) By week's end, the game had shipped 2.4 million copies to retailers around the world, and 1 million copies had subsequently been passed on to gamers.

On March 31, Gamasutra reported that THQ had pink-slipped about 20 percent of Kaos Studios' staff, leaving it with roughly 70 employees. When my fellow news editor Brendan Sinclair pressed Bilson on the necessity of those layoffs, he said, "Well in the film business, everybody says good-bye at the end of the movie and then they go work on something else. I wish we had enough work to go around and keep everybody employed all the time, but sometimes it's just business."

Let's do some math. 60 straight days of crunch + 2.4 million units shipped = 20% staff reduction + X, where X holds a value equal to, apparently, The Way It Must Be Done. Now, I've received a C or lower on every math test I've taken since the 4th grade, so perhaps it's just me when I say something appears to be off here.

(Crunching, of course, is not isolated to THQ. Far from it, actually. As one example, a nearly identical situation played out in 2010, when an individual claiming to be the spouse of a Rockstar San Diego employee decried the deplorable working conditions at the Red Dead Redemption studio. Yet despite the odious aroma wafting from that heaping stink, Rockstar cut loose an unspecified number of staffers two months after the game's launch. Red Dead Redemption, of course, was one of the most successful games in 2010, both commercially and critically.)

How about individual contribution and the push toward specialization? Industry scuttlebutt suggests some 650 developers pulled from four studios are hammering away at the next installment in Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise. Ubisoft, for one, readily copped to the size of Assassin's Creed II's team, which producer Sebastien Puel pegged at 450 people.

With teams that size, how is it that someone could take creative ownership over their personal contributions to a game? I'd imagine the conversation would start something like this: Animator #31025: "See honey? The flap right there. That swish? It's really quite difficult to do. See it, with the wind there? That's what I've been doing for the past 18 months."

I certainly lost my creative spark after a single month's grind of weekly Coin-OpEds, so I can sympathize with game makers when executives like EA's John Riccitiello say things like: "Games with 2s, 3s, and 4s behind them almost always sell better than the original launch edition." Considering that only about 20 percent of released games turn a profit (in 2008, at least), it's no wonder that publishers would push for safe (read: boring) choices.

Oppressing one's workforce has, traditionally, been a solid way to spark a mutiny, and it appears as if a mutiny of sorts is what we're now seeing among game developers. Here's a breakdown of the value proposition: Lop $60,000 off the average salary, but gain creative freedom, autonomy, and a self-imposed work schedule. (Indie game makers earned on average $26,780 in 2010.) You might also create the next Minecraft and bank tens of millions of dollars or die a destitute beggar on the streets of Silicon Valley.

It's not just the young guns going indie: More than a few veterans of the corporate gaming scene have jumped ship in recent years. Earlier this month, I asked former Ensemble Studios producer and current Robot Entertainment executive producer Chris Rippy about the exodus of veteran talent from corporate development houses.

"You can come up with a really long list of people I think that fit that bill…It's tough to spend 36 or 48 months on the same project and not seeing something ship," he said. "It's certainly more rewarding and more enjoyable to get in a cycle where you're seeing the thing you worked on in the hands of players on a more frequent basis. That's just invigorating and gets you ready for the next one."

In the end, gamers want amazing, enriching, rewarding games just as much as developers want to deliver those experiences. To get there, I would suggest that the corporate gaming scene begin taking its cues from the California Milk Advisory Board: "Great cheese comes from happy cows."