Kotaku
By: Luke Plunkett
2005. Insomniac Studios. Ratchet Deadlock was having its final touches applied, and Resistance was nearing the end of pre-production. Chris Pfeiffer, Gameplay Director at Insomniac and Max Garber, System Lead, were all busted up. Exhausted. Pfeiffer remembers it, none too fondly, as an "endless sea of work". Deciding a break was in order, the two decided on a trip to China.
"It was one of the best vacations I ever had" enthuses Pfeiffer. "Everything was actually different, interesting and new...the Chinese people were exceptionally nice to us". Traveling to Beijing, Shanghai and X'ian, the trip was "an absolute blast", and was just what was needed to help get over the hassles of work.
They drank a lot, they danced a lot, they drank some more. Good times. Nineteen days later, however, the pair were home. Back to the grind.
But for Pfeiffer, what had begun as a simple holiday was quickly turning into something more...substantial. "After getting back to the US, I started to dream about visiting China again", he says. Working around the clock, for six and sometimes even seven days a week on the final year of Resistance, it was his only real escape from the pressures of work.
Finding himself trapped in a seemingly infinite cycle of long days and working nights, Pfeiffer began to question the sanity of an industry that relies on work conditions rarely seen elsewhere in the Western world.
"There's something fundamentally wrong with an industry when making games is so expensive that the pressure to push your staff to their individual breaking points is completely understandable, if regrettable", he says.
Pfeiffer believes the games industry, as a business, needs to grow up. "It isn't the days when Atari programmers were going catatonic at their desks, but people haven't been able to wrap their minds around the fact that individuals are internally self-throttled" he says.
"When people work 16 hour days weeks on end, you may get 12 hours of work done on the first day, 10 on the second...but eventually the effective work completed per day drops below a standard eight hour day".
To be fair to Insomniac it's an industry-wide concern (recent EA and Activision lawsuits only serving to highlight this), but when nearly every major studio is forced into these conditions by the external pressures of the business, what you gonna do?
At the time...not much. So Pfeiffer continued to work around the clock, breaking himself just to get a title shipped out the door. And all the while, every day, morning and night, he kept thinking about China.
Except now, he was reading up on it as well - both as a result of his trip, and his girlfriend being Chinese, he began to learn the language and study the culture and politics of China.
He soon learned that China has laws in place that make such work conditions as he was enduring at home illegal. Work days there can be no longer than 11 hours, and employees are only legally allowed to work 36 hours of overtime a month.
"There are places in the US games industry where the base work week is 50 hours and that doesn't even start to account for the extended periods of 'crunch time", he says. "In China, you couldn't legally run a shop that way. And heck, who wants to live their lives that way?"
Not Pfeiffer, and not his friend Max Garber either. So in 2006, with Resistance finished and the two fed up with the conditions they'd suffered getting it there, they decided to pack their bags, depart Insomniac and form their own studio.
Where? Where else? China.
Pfeiffer is at pains to stress that it's not Insomniac themselves that caused the move.
"Ted [Price] is an exceptional person and phenomenal CEO...we have learned a lot from working there"
But at the same time is insistent that "there's a better way to work, and live, than the way western studios currently operate".
"I am simply a guy that has been in the industry approaching 13 years and knows that something has to give. If we as an industry are going to keep raising the bar, the attriton rate of top people has to decline" he continues.
"Ten-year veterans cannot be leaving an industry they loved due to fatigue or because they're having families". So the two set out to do something about it. Landing in China, they got cracking on getting their studio up and running. It's name? Balanced Worlds. It's goal? Balancing worlds.
"Balanced Worlds is going to be a place people will strive to work at", Pfeiffer says. "And after they arrive, we want them to stay with us a long time". The name Balanced Worlds is as literal as they come - they want their employees to pay as much attention to their social and personal lives as they do their time at work, something that was obviously lacking in Pfeiffer's life back home.
"We will have an onsite chef for breakfast, lunch and dinner", he boasts. Massages, dry cleaning, company supplied drivers, language and cultural tutoring (English or Chinese), haircuts, fitness memberships, car washing and maid and grocery services are just some of the other perks Balanced Worlds have in store for their development staff.
Sound outrageous? It would be - in the US. In China, both the cushy services and manual labour (maids, etc) are relatively inexpensive, something he believes will help entice talented developers who are fed up with conditions in the West.
"The industry is full of explorers, adventurers", he says. "We haven't had to 'sell' the idea of moving to China. People are drawn to it. It's been surprising how many industry veterans have offered to join us so far".
With the ink not yet dry on these signings, he's reluctant to name names, but says the staff consists of Western veterans and passionate, "highly-talented" Chinese graduates. "Our management staff will mostly be Westerners at first", he says, "[but] the goal is to eventually have people of all nationalities at all levels".
It's clear that Pfeiffer believes Balanced Worlds is, in theory at least, aiming at being more than your everyday studio. He sees it as more of an experiment: in work conditions, in staff management, in location and in it's overall outlook on the industry.
They've yet to take the final step and commit to a publisher/platform ("We are considering all consoles, and might even go portable", Pfeiffer says), but a decision on that is only a few months away.
Whichever path they do decide to go down, the studio won't be dealing in just their own titles - Pfeiffer believes that the workload required to complete a console title is fast becoming too much for Western studios to deal with, crunch time or not, and that his studio will stand to benefit from this. He predicts that very soon, outsourcing jobs to studios in places like China and India won't be an option. It will be a necessity.
"US game companies will be increasingly focused on 'iteration time'. The lower the time it takes to test, modify, improve, test...the less expensive games will be to create", he predicts. "And there is no doubt in my mind that successful US/Japanese game companies will have to heavily rely on outsourcing large portions of their games to companies like us".
But won't that heavy reliance be at odds with their "balanced worlds" outlook? If it came down to it, which is more important to the studio? Their own titles, big outsourcing gigs or happy staff?
The answer comes quickly from Pfeiffer: "We want to make great games while living a good life".
Balanced Worlds are due to open their doors in June 2007.
Comments
This is seriously cool. I look forward to seeing the Balanced World logo on games and thinking, "Hey, I read about the inception of that studio."
This is actually rather intriguing... if it works out and they manage to pull some talented developers from the US and/or Japan, I could see this becoming a trend, with an end result hopefully being that similar rules are enacted in the US.
Yeah, I know the rule changing thing is a pipe dream, but a man has to have hopes!
Something like this would hopefully have an influence on the US gaming industry as well.... it probably won't though.
This is nothing new really. Everywhere in the software world managers expect you to work like you're a robot. That's pretty standard for engineering in general. It shouldn't be, and a lot of people need to be slapped for it. But that's the standard.
There are a lot of great points raised in this article.
The amount of productive work does seriously decrease the longer some one is in crunch. Things like this are pretty much unavoidable at times when your working under super tight deadlines.
" both the cushy services and manual labour (maids, etc) are relatively inexpensive"
I think a better question to be asking them is why that those services are cheaper. And the answer isn't that China is a magical world of economic efficiency.
On second read, while it's a decent idea, and I guess there's some cost cutting benefits to be had with a shop in China. I feel this is a missed opportunity to fix a whole slew of industries in America at the sme time. People moving to China is annoying, and game companies will probably have to follow suit eventually if this idea pans out. But how much more impact would it be if everybody in the industry decided they wanted to work for this one company and it happened to be across the road from the old work place. Management might inquire why this new place so close to home is so successful. People leaving to go to China isn't nearly as visible as a building across the road.
Might have something to do with those billion-plus people, though, no?
Shanghai already has a pretty large contingent of Western Developers. Ubi has a very big studio, EA is there, and there are a bunch of other small startups like American McGee's shop (Mauretania Import Export?), Massive Black. I think there are a couple more formed from ex-Ubi people. Most just do outsourcing for games primarily being developed in the West.
The industry is diving in a pretty dark cave right now, with next-gen development costs Versus the strong possibility of a market as small as before.
Perhaps only actual "laws" could stop this mindless "race" .. but it would in short term result in worst games (later with dev-teams developing new ways to make better games under the legal time restrictions.)
On the other hand, if well cared.. developers could become far more efficient (by not migrating to the movie industry / getting more experienced in time or simply having working conditions) .. as we have seen in other kinds of industry (unfortunately, only in a few sample companies).
Moving to China for the labor laws is like moving to Antarctica for the warm weather.
This is called taking advantage of massive poverty and a fixed favorable exchange rate.
Huzzah!
Very brave to do what your heart tells you.
Ah, aDEADguy, how ignorant. Still living in the 60s? Next thing you know you're gonna bust out a comment about the Cultural Revolution that's raging right now.
Jesus.
Anywho, I'm Chinese and I've always believed that China's modernization is going to make more of stuff like this happen, which can only be a good thing for everyone.
As for cheap labor? Simple economics: more supply (bigger population) equals less steep prices.
I worked at a game company once, so I can relate. I now work at a company doing web/graphic design, and in addition to not having to worry about 6 month crunch times, I make more money!
Working at a game company may sound like a dream job, but one can only take so much. The industry standard of working employees to death needs to change.
Gunhaver, I studied Chinese language/history/politics for 4 years in college and lived over there for six months. My brother taught English there for a year and my cousin has lived there for 5 years. I spent plenty of time learning about China and am pretty familiar with the issues that are still present there.
One of the many issues that still remain there is the lax enforcement of many of their labor laws.
I'm not arguing that there aren't laws on the books that theoretically outlaw these practices, I'm pointing out that they are not properly enforced. Saying they are is completely false.
Also, although the Chinese government does now allow for some small degree of currency fluctuation the exchange rate is essentially fixed at 8 yuan to $1. To argue that this fixed exchange rate doesn't greatly benefit the local economy of China is preposterous.
I'm not saying that China can't and won't modernize. I'm saying that the laws are still abused there and are less enforced than in other developed nations (look at the governments stance on labor unions for more on their acceptance of these problems) and that the fixed exchange rate makes it possible for the company to offer the amenities it mentions at a fraction of the cost it would in a less impoverished nation.
These aren't provided cheaply by increased efficiencies but rather an overabundance of cheap labor and a favorable exchange rate.As a gamer, this is great news. Cheaper labor means better games faster. But this follows the same pattern of outsourcing jobs to other countries that is bad for americans. While the people spearheading this project paint a pretty picture, the writing on the wall tells an entirely different story.
I think its great what's happening to china. I'm happy for you guys, really. But excuse me if I'm not elated that you're stealing our jobs.
I do hope that game developers start treating their employees better. Moving somewhere else with a cheaper cost of living isn't the answer, particularly somewhere notorious about how their citizens are treated. Improving working conditions in the U.S. is a better answer and could be done starting a company here but the temptation to take advantage of the exchange rate and cheap labor was too high.
I am sure they are correct that U.S. game developers will outsource as much as possible but is that going to give anyone a better standard of living in the U.S. or just in the outsource country until their costs of living rise and the game developer abandons them also?
I would argue if you are unhappy with working conditions in the U.S., start a company here. There are plenty of unhappy game company employees who'd flock to your door for a slightly lower wage if better treatment and hours were part of the deal.
It's all about squeezing every penny out of your employees, which is not a decent way to treat folks.
I'm not sure this is an optimal reaction to work conditions at American dev shops, for many of the reasons cited by others here. However, it does further call out the fact that conditions are less than ideal and truly reaching a breaking point. That they are going to try something different is good, whether it works or has an impact on others will be something interesting to see.
I am curious about Japanese dev companies. The insinuation is that this is a Western problem, but the fix presented is just being able to offer amenities because they are cheaper somewhere else, and I'm assuming the cost of living low enough that they can do less work while retaining a higher quality of life. That doesn't strike me as a Western vs Eastern issue and does not seem sustainable over the long term.
Don't outsource to China! They're evil communists, planning on taking over the world!!!
Outsource to Australia instead! =)
Yes well as painful as it may be to have jobs stolen it wouldn't be happening if Canada and the US had labor laws in place to prevent companies from exploiting their workers in this manner.
I've been in the industry for about 7 years and I tip my hat to these guys for taking more than a single step in the right direction and also at the same time drawing attention to that issue.
I can't think of a single developer that likes working these hours, they're just resigned to the fact that it exists, so much so that most of them are stuck in the mindset that it has to be this way.
Poor management allows for scheduling where crunch time is taken into consideration and planned for, and poor deals with pushy publishers allows those schedules to be created.
Good for these guys I say.
From what the article says, he's not really outsourcing in the conventional sense. Outsourcing is when you go overseas and hire local labor instead because they're cheaper. From what I gather, he's going overseas but then trying to get labor from the US. The local labor he'll be hiring are chefs, maids, etc., which he wouldn't be hiring in the first place in the US.
So, if I have a company in California, and I have two American employees, Alice and Bob, and then I close up shop, move to China, and hire Chiang and Wu, I am outsourcing in the traditional sense, and "stealing American jobs", as it were.
But if I have a company in California, and I have two American employees, Alice and Bob, and then I close up shop, move to China, hire Alice and Bob again, and hire Chiang and Wu as chefs and maids, I'm not outsourcing in the traditional sense, and am certainly not "stealing American jobs", because the same Americans are doing the same jobs.
I like the idea of treating the employees better but do the maids chefs and presumably masseuses get their own maids and chefs. I bet they just get a shinny nickel or even $3.05... I don't know the going rate for those labors.
So hes saying that we should all move to China and become gold farmers for WoW?
Unfortunately these working conditions are not limited to the game industry. Programmers and engineers, developing everything from missile control systems to network backbone equipment to medical equipment work under the same ridiculous conditions. This has become the accepted practice throughout high tech.
Of course we could be worse off like those who work in service industries who have to work two full time hourly jobs just to pay rent and feed their families.
I live in Washington State. At both the Federal and State levels, the government has explicitly exempted computer programmers from overtime protection. Everyone else in the country gets time-and-a-half for more than 40 hours a week of work. Around 1999 or so, they changed the law to remove those protections for computer programmers. It's because they knew there was nothing programmers would do about it. Programmers are mostly young and naive.
During the past fifteen years, with the connivance and permission of Congress, American businesses have moved billions of dollars to Asia, setting up the next generation of production and programming.
This is just another in a long string. I wish these gentlemen well. It will be interesting to follow up in five years, and see how many other software businesses in Asia have their same committment to worker mental health and balanced lives.
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