New Games Suck... Or Is It Just Me?

Unless I'm mixing you up with someone else, I'm pretty sure you've been outspoken on these "harsh unfair abusive employment standards in the gaming industry".

I have never say that. I do have tons of opinions on certain production management practices within a pipeline, but I will never present the opinion in such a superficial way since it is a complicated matter.

I do think paying people 100-150k cad to watch YouTube video and drink beer is a waste of money though.

In this entire thread I've only critized Game Science for putting sex jokes in their HR ad. And I believe most sane person would.

Finally finished Final Fantasy 16 and I enjoyed every moment of it. I'm even going to plow through it again on New Game + and the highest difficulty. I kept drawing comparisons to FF4 while playing it, maybe it's because of the classic castles and magic theme of it. It's been a while since we've had a Final Fantasy without cars and ***in it, it was refreshing.

I feel like Final Fantasy 16 hit a high point on story telling with this one. It is very cinamatic and has true-to-life camera behavior. It made the game feel very real on top of the insane graphics. The acting was pretty good. The english actor for Clive was especially good imo. It may be just an OK game, but it's a really good movie. The fighting on story mode was really easy, but that's kind of the point. I'm interested to see how different it is on the hardest difficulty.

Overall I highly recommend it.

Just to point out, no company pays an employee 100-150k CAD to watch YT.

What tends to happen, and I've been in that situation, is goals keep getting shifted and priorities changed with a lot of "re-organising" within the company and by re-org I mean from one month to the next those employees find themselves in new teams with new priorities and new responsibilities that are themselves not very well defined.

As a result, management has a hard time assigning work given a lack of priorities and clear goal. Leaving employees with a lot of time to "figure out" what they need to work on.

Some employees will self-manage and start doing stuff on their own. This rarely works to their advantage because eventually a manager will pipe up and go "Who asked you to do this".

Not to say employees are blameless. If a company is so mis-managed it cannot give you a goal and priorities to work on, just leave.

But OTOH some employees will see that mis-management then look at their paycheck and go "Nah this is fine".

As an example, Star Citizen. 700M+ in crowd funding. No game(s). Horror stories from every ex-employee about micro-management - eg Change this pixel to green.

I think development hell from the lack of direction is quite common in the gaming industry. For example FF15 was in development hell for like 7 years with no game being made except a bunch of cool concept videos, due to Nomura has no direction. Then SE kicked Nomura out of the team and get Hajime Tabata to save this project and made it into a totally different game. The end result still suffered though.


Unknown 9 likely experienced the same thing.

That being said, employee's action at work is mostly just working attitude sort of thing. If there are no tasks, people could study work related subjects instead of drinking beer. I can probably tolerate people chatting during breaks, MAYBE watch YouTube video as long as it is work skill related videos.

I am probably okay with people playing table tennis or have party after 6pm-7pm too....

Drinking beer in early afternoon is more ridiculous and it does look bad imo. If I am a manager of an office, I would definitely try to stop this kind of culture from spreading in the work environment.

Yup, which is why I said employees aren't blameless. Do something productive with your time.

I've not once had a beer in the office, even at places where it was provided free of charge.

OTOH, I've worked with managers/team leads that would regularly have a beer at every Friday's team lunch then go back to work.

It's common in a lot of industries, creative types tend to need someone to reign them in or they act like a dog on a shock collar. They can't stay on task and are constantly shifting. As much as I jokingly give PMs ***, good PMs will keep projects on task and reign in the desire to constantly chase something new.


I honestly don't care as long as people are getting their work done. If someone just did a 70 hour week trying to finish something critical and drinks a beer in the afternoon at the end of the week, idgaf. It's all about context. The people who get their work done or constantly do well get more leeway than people who never do anything.

Most places I've worked, people who were high producers rarely got docked PTO for taking time off and basically were given leeway to operate on whatever schedule they wanted, no one gave them ***if they had a beer on Friday. It's the people who can't manage themselves that need more structure, overhead, and rules.

IMO drinking alcohol on the job is no different than taking any other drug on the job. It's a bad look no matter how productive you otherwise are and people will judge you for it, fairly or unfairly.

I think theres a stark difference between a (aka one, single, uno) celebratory drink for a milestone achievement vs ordering a case for friday work drinks on a weekly basis.