I've seen many, many, MANY, devs get exploited by their companies with no one fighting for their rights. The burn out rate for devs is enormous. There is practically no one past the age of 40 who works in the industry because they know it's a fool's game if your not management and you will really not have too much of a life.

"And when the games developers union strikes and we have no games for six months,"

Wow, that's a pretty selfish consumer for you. Screw the people who make the game if their lives suck, just get me more. No wonder companies currently have the upper hand, most consumers don't give a crap how the game gets into their hands.

..."and end up paying $10 more per game to pay for their inflated wages, see how you like it then. It's not like this is a coal mine where workers are dying because there aren't enough job safety rules, then I could understand it."

Inflated wages? Really? You're not living in my world, son that's for sure. Doesn't exist.

You know, 80 hour weeks for a year. Guess what? That will screw up your health, family, pretty much your life in any context. Black lung or heart disease, hypertension, and depression. Still dead too early.

BTW, unions are in pretty much all of entertainment EXCEPT video games. Why do you think the profits are so high for the corporations and everyone wants to jump in.

Unions are for:

Movies
TV
Sports
Animation

I don't see the quality suffering for those now, do you besides the tastes of the masses?

And don't give me the "it's a different industry/model" guff. If it's content that is made by a group of people for a specific platform that is commercialized it's in the same group.

I know that unions can be a double-edged sword. No question. But I would rather take the "new bad" with the "better good", instead of the "mostly bad no matter what" that the situation was before.

I still believe though that to change the direction that these conference is going, and on the "inside", you should at least attempt to make it better.

Host a panel about how corporate and the need for one-upmanship the industry is getting and ways to mitigate it.

Do a presentation on what you think would be an innovative technique for design in future games.

etc, etc

Conferences are only as good as the people presenting. If most of those presenting aren't doing it for the intrinsic value of furthering the industry the nmaybe GDC should go the way of the dinosaur.

It's honestly all in his mind about the combative aspect. If that's your worldview what do you honestly expect? At least with GDC they are trying to do something useful.

They are honestly some pretty good seminars at that conference and people willing to further ahead the collective knowledge of our field. Insomniac and Naughty Dog are great examples of that. They don't NEED to share their tech discoveries with anyone but do so knowing that more people on an even field will help the whole industry.

I don't see him doing anything to further the industry, except maybe to bitch, be cynical (which is extremely easy to do) and set a bad example of how not to be.

Too Busy screen with no focal point while glass shattering, check

Horrid lighting for most screens, check.

I'll pass on this one.

Heh......heh..

OK, that was lame..

Hahahah!!! (breathe) Hahaha! This guys MAIN JOB is to make new grads and the masses feel that "there is no crunch".

Just a little biased..

"The industry has become overly reliant on playing recruitment chess - taking employees from one competitor and then losing their own in return. This never ending game benefits no one.."

Uhh, you're lying through your teeth. Yes it does! It DEFINITELY benefits the employee. Treat me like crap with low pay and I see another company willing to pay me better on a better title, you damn better believe I'll move over to them.

It's called capitalism and the market.

Top (not) Myths About Working In Gaming

- Work Hard/Play Hard

Sorry, this is still true. Just a couple of months back I worked for a week in which I didn't go home and slept at the office for a milestone. And this is working 10 years into the industry.

Play Hard? Not anymore for me but I see plenty of younger employees doing it.

- Getting Lost In The Crowd

Sorry, if you work in a company that employees hundreds of employees on site (like, I don't know, EA) you WILL get lost in the crowd unless you magically make the right people notice you.

- Jobs, Not Careers

Absolutely true. Do you know ANYONE besides some of the "high profile" designers, etc in the industry that are over 40?

How about 37? 35?

The loss of experienced talent to the industry is ON A MASSIVE SCALE! Why do you think they need more noobs? There is 1) a glass ceiling for senior folk when it comes to pay and 2) the work hours are horrendous if you want to raise a family and have life outside of work. They need to replace the older folk who just leave the industry for a better life.

- Old Demographic Paradigms

Sorry, still there. I know/worked with maybe a dozen or so females and African Americans in the industry. It's slowing getting better but glacially.

That's fine for about 95% of the general population out there (especially the Yeats).

It's a "now" genre. It's great to see the archiving but I honestly don't want to try to play Ultima III again and rather play Diablo III.

and the rumor is that The Force Unleashed Dev team all got canned (besides the 100+ that got let go a month ago from the studio).

If true, LucasArts can honestly go walk off a short pier

In the Blizzard main offices in Irvine the receptionist is behind BULLET PROOF GLASS when greeting people in the front lobby.

Yeah, I imagine Blizzard fans can get a little crazy..

or a mid-priced car..that would last 30 years (hahaha!!)

or $60 a month for cable for 30 years ($21,600)

or $10 a day for lunch on the weekdays for 30 years ($36,000)

Putting it into perspective, that's not bad at all...

Keen eyes? That was the most blatant shot I have ever seen. It's lit pretty well and it's a close up for a good couple of seconds. It's there to promote buzz, that's it.

It's not like it was 1/2 sec. long and in the middle of a camera pan.

Pass.

I think he got lazy and did a flat front shot. Do a 3/4 view and it might work.

It used to be called "Sabotage" as in the verb.

Dunno if these guys can though, but good luck to them.

Also, the hardcore are spoiled rotten. You want great visuals, great gameplay, great immersion and 100+ hours of gameplay? That's going to cost you and it's going to be pretty rare.

Art and game assets are almost doubling every other year and taking more and more people to create them with a higher level of skill.

What it all comes down to is profit vs. work.

GTAIV is definitely an exception. I can count on one hand the games that created a profit that were also long single player games (over 50+ hours) in the past year or so.

I can see episodic games filling the gap for length of gameplay but we're still in the infancy of that.

They're independent but heavily slant to Sony.

There's a reason why devs don't really do that. The info is something like 5% of ALL video game players never finish a game.

Why would you want to spend all of your resources on something which will never likely be finished by the majority of gamers (yeah, yeah, some hardcore finish them, but they are in the VERY small minority)?

Plan out the whole game to make it solid, but if there are time and budget contraints, polish the first 2/3 to a shine and get the ending to be acceptable.

Yeah, sounds bad, but I've seen dozens of games being created this way because mostly of $$. You have the money, you'll have your decent ending (I don't see a game like Fallout 3 failing in this..heh)

Let me know when you get into the multi-millions for contributions and lobbying.

Until then, you're not making a bit of difference.

Foundation 9 (which the team used to the The Collective) making it?

well.....

Hopefully they'll recoup their costs from it if it does well. Heard it was a bumpy ride.

That just looks like a stalking lawsuit ready to happen.

Not much into the whole Aliens wedded to Aztec culture thing.

Aliens
Swings through the jungle with monkeys
surviving a nuke by hiding in a fridge

and my fav:

"Where'd they go?"
"They went in the SPACE BETWEEN SPACES".

Indy Franchise: RIP 2008

Sorry that Lucas turned bats&*t insane and Spielberg just wanted the money.

R.I.P Chris.

If Pandemic isn't doing Battlefront 3 then I feel it's going to be a joke..

I honestly believe that is completely true. Pandemic's devs and games based on the IP kicks any LucasArts product that came out in the past decade, and rumor is, since they didn't really get too much a piece of the pie from all the hard work (with LA gets the lion's share of royalties), they stopped working with them.

LA overstaffs, is very inefficient, has red tape you can drown in, and promises the moon with their products. I hope they can turn it around.

My sympathy goes out to the devs that heard the bad news. There are always some great and talented people in the bunch and I wish them luck.

Game looks neat though..

I think I might be the only one old enough to know that commercial quote, unless it's from something else. :)

"No! It's the space between spaces."

What the F is that?!?

And the bit with the monkeys and Shia swinging on a vine?

If Lucas retired 10 years ago and let someone else helm his IP we would have had much better cinema than this garbage.

Can you see if the IP went to Del Toro? Or Chris Nolan for Indy?

Who cares? They could be total knobs and been fired for incompetency for all we know..

On topic: The game looks.....ehh