I mean movie studios don't blow their entire budget on one movie and then have to shut down in waiting until it's released: they have multiple movies being made and can move crews from finished ones to ones that are just starting up. The gaming industry would be healthier if it moved towards that model.
For games to become more like movies, though, a ton of different things would have to change. The movie industry is predicated on the fact that the vast majority of production positions are temporary/project-based, and so their entire financial and legal structure is molded around that. Everyone who doesn't work full-time for the studio, for example, is unionized and carries a whole host of protections and benefits for members to cover them both when they are and aren't working. This extends to overtime pay and various workplace protections, as well as insurance and pension coverage.
Also a lot of daily rates are scaled so that you don't have to work every single day of a calendar year in order to make ends meet - if a mid-level gaffer or camera guy doesn't find work for a month, he's generally not in too much trouble if he's been smart with his wages. Not to mention, there is a natural cycle to the release of TV and film projects so that when one area of the industry lulls, another section generally comes along to pick up the slack, as well as short day or week projects such as commercials or music videos. The TV/film industry has a lot of flexibility in those terms, whereas most games tend to release around the same times throughout the year, and even small games still have to be planned and executed across months or years.
And even in this model, crew members still have to work and hustle to make sure they can line up work for themselves as soon as their current project comes to an end. Lucky crews get a cool/loyal director who will bring them with him/her on the next project, but for a lot of the nuts-and-bolts crew members, they still have to find work on other stuff in between pre-production and principal photography.
So basically, a lot would have to change about the games industry to become like film, and it still wouldn't be any kind of guarantee of work for the grunts on the ground.
I prefer working in games to Film, Film is a completely different environment. And though if i were starving or out of work I'd take a film job (And have before) man, fuck. Doing shot-by-shot work is total butts.
Some studios actually do pay for OT. Not all, but some, so laughing at that isn't necessarily correct. It depends state by state province by province what laws will allow and what studios decide to do.
They still get paid for all that extra work, right? On an hourly basis or salaried?
hahahahahahahahaahahahahaha
I spent all my years at EA paid hourly. If you hired on right after the whole fallout from Probst and the EA-Wife bullshit, damn near everyone was hourly.
Hell, the last 2 or 3 years I made more in OT than I did my base 40 pay. Of course I was working 80-90 hour weeks for months at a stretch.
most sucessful game studios that manage to keep a core group of employees over a long period of time are larger and have 2-4 major projects going at once, plus maybe some minor ones. they can shuffle people around to different projects if there's a lull or delay... I've been on projects that were cancelled and told " go play this other game for a month" until another project was ready to ramp up. yes I did QA *shudder*
film is different, lot more ramp up and down with projects there.
IE guess what the majority of LucasFilm full-time permanent employees are?
fire-fighters
no joke. the Ranch has its own on-site. they have a small group of office type folk, everyone else is contracted for specific film projects.
I spent all my years at EA paid hourly. If you hired on right after the whole fallout from Probst and the EA-Wife bullshit, damn near everyone was hourly.
Hell, the last 2 or 3 years I made more in OT than I did my base 40 pay. Of course I was working 80-90 hour weeks for months at a stretch.
yeah I left EA about a year before "EA spouse", nobody there at that time was hourly, everyone worked 70+ hrs, 6-7 days a week. I hear things there have changed "significantly" .
I fully expect that someone out there right now is going through all of their console games and trying to replicate it.
I was expecting that too, and was personally curious myself. However, with the amount of games it could be, and with the end result being a ruined console, maybe not.
Maybe they DID fix it and the tester didn't know about it. Otherwise, that is undefendable whether it happened to anyone or not. There's no way to know if it did or not, but if it did to even 1 person...geez.
And if it's a fairly unlikely bug, it could still happen to quite a few people and they would most likely just chalk it up to their console fucking up, not the fault of the game.
Wha, is it a KIDS magazine? This completely changes the sense of the strip. I thought it was some idiotic gossip magazine. (too lazy to use google this time ¬.¬)
Suddenly, "it makes me feel smart" is not such a great promise for high I.Q.
yeah it's a shame there isn't some kind of electronic device where you can type in the name of something have it spit out all kinds of information about that thing for you....
to be fair, maybe you just never go to the doctor, because I'm pretty sure I've never seen a Highlights outside of a doctor's waiting room...
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MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
Wha, is it a KIDS magazine? This completely changes the sense of the strip. I thought it was some idiotic gossip magazine. (too lazy to use google this time ¬.¬)
Suddenly, "it makes me feel smart" is not such a great promise for high I.Q.
Maybe she's doing the same thing as him - trying to appear dumber.
yeah it's a shame there isn't some kind of electronic device where you can type in the name of something have it spit out all kinds of information about that thing for you....
to be fair, maybe you just never go to the doctor, because I'm pretty sure I've never seen a Highlights outside of a doctor's waiting room...
I used to have a subscription to it as a child. It was pretty awesome. I only ever read it for the "what is different between these two pictures?" puzzles and the image hunts.
Reading Highlights was always the best part of going to the pediatrician's office. We could have just gotten a subscription, but between my sister and I we went to the doctor's office enough for check-ups and immunizations and what-not that I probably read every issue anyway.
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I honestly can't think of what game this is, but I wonder if someone discovered the ability for Pool of Radiance 2 to format your hard drive when you uninstalled the game. Now believe me, THAT was a fun bug and yeah - I fucking discovered that the hard way.
If the evil boss decided not to delay the launch of the game to fix this bug because they didn't think the bug was a big deal, and no one here has ever heard of the bug and could not bring to mind the game famous for this console shattering bug, wasn't the evil boss right?
We'll change the world be giving indie game makers all our money, until they're big gaming companies!
But what then?
New indie game devs rise up under the new overlords, to topple them, and the cycle continues until the sun explodes.
It's like how the middle class always conspires to become the new upper class, and after succeeding is then eventually toppled by the new middle class. And then the lower class is too busy just trying to survive.
You fuck wit' Die Antwoord, you fuck wit' da army.
I guess the thing I don't understand, and maybe I'm just missing something, is why not contract these extra testers? I mean, that way you're not actually firing them, you're hiring them to test/QA a certain project, and when that project is done, well, their contract is over. People who do a particularly good job (like this guy, imo) get prioritized for future projects, since he obviously found a pretty major bug and, had he found it early enough, he could have actually been a huge benefit to have.
...or is that sort of how it works already?
Nope. See, HR people believe that if you contract people out, they half-ass the work*, so lying to them about job security and then firing them en masse when you no longer need them is better.
*The exact opposite has been proven-temp workers are oddly enthusiastic about their work, there's the dim chance of getting hired on if they like it, and a certificate+references if they don't.
That is, if the HR people do their jobs, which they won't.
Edith Upwards on
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HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
The one thing to learn about working for pretty much any corporation in any industry is the HR people are generally sweet, nice, and pleasant people to your face. It makes it much easier to lie to you about anything and everything. Remember, they're not your buddy and they're not looking out for you. They're doing their job. Don't take it personal though, they know that they're the shock troops of corporate hell and it's just business, and their business is to lie to you to get you to work at peak efficiency for star dust, unicorn dreams, and promises of wealth.
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For games to become more like movies, though, a ton of different things would have to change. The movie industry is predicated on the fact that the vast majority of production positions are temporary/project-based, and so their entire financial and legal structure is molded around that. Everyone who doesn't work full-time for the studio, for example, is unionized and carries a whole host of protections and benefits for members to cover them both when they are and aren't working. This extends to overtime pay and various workplace protections, as well as insurance and pension coverage.
Also a lot of daily rates are scaled so that you don't have to work every single day of a calendar year in order to make ends meet - if a mid-level gaffer or camera guy doesn't find work for a month, he's generally not in too much trouble if he's been smart with his wages. Not to mention, there is a natural cycle to the release of TV and film projects so that when one area of the industry lulls, another section generally comes along to pick up the slack, as well as short day or week projects such as commercials or music videos. The TV/film industry has a lot of flexibility in those terms, whereas most games tend to release around the same times throughout the year, and even small games still have to be planned and executed across months or years.
And even in this model, crew members still have to work and hustle to make sure they can line up work for themselves as soon as their current project comes to an end. Lucky crews get a cool/loyal director who will bring them with him/her on the next project, but for a lot of the nuts-and-bolts crew members, they still have to find work on other stuff in between pre-production and principal photography.
So basically, a lot would have to change about the games industry to become like film, and it still wouldn't be any kind of guarantee of work for the grunts on the ground.
no difference in many states. hahahahahahahahaahahahahaha
I spent all my years at EA paid hourly. If you hired on right after the whole fallout from Probst and the EA-Wife bullshit, damn near everyone was hourly.
Hell, the last 2 or 3 years I made more in OT than I did my base 40 pay. Of course I was working 80-90 hour weeks for months at a stretch.
film is different, lot more ramp up and down with projects there.
IE guess what the majority of LucasFilm full-time permanent employees are?
no joke. the Ranch has its own on-site. they have a small group of office type folk, everyone else is contracted for specific film projects.
yeah I left EA about a year before "EA spouse", nobody there at that time was hourly, everyone worked 70+ hrs, 6-7 days a week. I hear things there have changed "significantly" .
i hate this new forum s/w also
I'm not familiar with Highlights so I don't know if I'm missing something
http://www.powernapcomic.com
Kids magazine with book reviews, word finds, and picture finds which are usually the most attractive bits.
But of course, someone's gotta circle all the fucking items.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
"Idiot game development studio over-wrote our bios." is something that shouldn't even be possible.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Suddenly, "it makes me feel smart" is not such a great promise for high I.Q.
http://www.powernapcomic.com
to be fair, maybe you just never go to the doctor, because I'm pretty sure I've never seen a Highlights outside of a doctor's waiting room...
Maybe she's doing the same thing as him - trying to appear dumber.
Or she thought it was about hair styles.
Besides, I'm in Mexico. We don't have that magazine down here. A shame, it seems just like the thing my kid would enjoy.
http://www.powernapcomic.com
I used to have a subscription to it as a child. It was pretty awesome. I only ever read it for the "what is different between these two pictures?" puzzles and the image hunts.
What did we learn today kids?
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Goofus speaks his mind.
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Ibid. Which I think is used incorrectly here.
True, but he was right by chance.
But what then?
New indie game devs rise up under the new overlords, to topple them, and the cycle continues until the sun explodes.
It's like how the middle class always conspires to become the new upper class, and after succeeding is then eventually toppled by the new middle class. And then the lower class is too busy just trying to survive.
Nope. See, HR people believe that if you contract people out, they half-ass the work*, so lying to them about job security and then firing them en masse when you no longer need them is better.
*The exact opposite has been proven-temp workers are oddly enthusiastic about their work, there's the dim chance of getting hired on if they like it, and a certificate+references if they don't.
That is, if the HR people do their jobs, which they won't.
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