CAGcast #585: The GCU Cycle

CheapyD

CheapyD

Head Cheap Ass
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The gang discuss How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong, Operencia: The Stolen Sun, Borderlands 3, and of course, Assassin’s Creed III Remastered.

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Show Linkage/Notes:
Intro - Slushii - Never Let You Go (feat. Sofia Reyes) [MOTi & Terry McLove Remix]
Outro - 1987 Oscar Mayer Ham TV Commercial
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There was a spider-man Homecoming VR experience released last summer.. indifference from all.  Now an Iron Man VR game is coming up - lots of excitement!

Interesting...

 
Why is Shipwreck such a corporate shill?

From being unsympathetic to mass layoffs and defending bobby Kotick levels of greedy shenanigans and ineptitude, its hard to understand Shipwreck's exact point of view.

The worn and tired adage of "its just business" to excuse corporate greed and avarice wears thin, especially in a medium where its so difficult to tread the line between the art we love so much and the existential workplace misery of the people who create that art.

Is it so hard to create a efficient yet amicable workplace for game developers? Is it so unreasonable that if you hire someone (non-contract) they can expect not to get laid off in 8 months?

To quote Dickens, "mankind was my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business."

btw team shipwreck 4 ever

 
I don't believe Shipwreck was unsympathetic towards the layoffs. He was, but at the same time, it's just the nature of business.

If you are hired to work on a game, I don't think it should be expected that you keep your job when the development ends. It's like working on a film set. Once that movie completes filming, should you expect to be used on the next studio's movie? It would be nice, but not always the case.

 
Shipwreck's performative both-side-ism is getting really tiresome. How do you judge a decision or policy if not by the results they entail? If the execs came out and said they meant well, is that a wash? By the way, we know their response; before even reading the article, they issued an amazingly tone-deaf response attacking the games press, but moving on.

"It's just business" is Shipwreck's line EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. a conversation like this happens on the cagcast. "Sure tons of people had mental breakdowns, but they signed a contract to work at EA and were getting paid, so, *shoulder shrug*". This is a chilling and inhumane take no matter how you slice it. $ rules all in Shipwreck's world. Sad.

 
I was surprised to hear the cast's response to news of mental health breakdowns for a few staff members working at EA on Anthem. 

Back in 2004 I worked at Maxis post-EA acquisition, but pre-relocation to Redwood Shores (HQ) as part of a 40+ person QA staff. During our crunch on a console Sims title we worked 14 hour days on average, 7 days a week for over six weeks straight.  In the final days of certification testing pre-gold master we didn't leave the office except maybe for a pair of 30-60 minute lunch breaks over the course of 48 hours.  Dinners were provided, as were snacks, but the combined pressure of the hours and the repetition of our work tasks was very stressful for a few members of our team, two of whom had major breakdowns.

One of our team members was picked up by BART police (light train public transit) 35 miles away in San Francisco during a work day. He was incoherent and unable to communicate with them and they found the QA Manager's business card in his wallet. His family had to pick him up and get him help. Another team member also had to seek professional care during this "crunch" and was fired for taking time off of his job. When these two appalling incidents were reported to the QA director at the studio she told the staff that she wasn't willing to change our schedules and if any of us had a problem with it we would be quickly replaced as "testers are a dime a dozen."

I think I would have been skeptical about extreme workplace stress in the video game industry until I had experienced a small sample of it first hand. Some of the people I worked with back then never left their jobs at EA and while they've worked up to more senior positions inside of the company, this kind of atmosphere didn't deter them from the company or the industry as a whole.

EA Spouse was published right around the time we were going through the worst of our crunch days and reading the post a few of us had hopes that there would be major institutional changes made as a result. I stayed there for two more title releases, both of which were post-relocation and while the hours were somewhat more reasonable 12 hour days and adjusted schedules so no one had to work a 7 day week, there were still 48-72 hour workdays during cert. I left the video game industry and never looked back. No other job I've had since has been so dismissive of mental health or workplace safety as it relates to reasonable work hours, time off and reasonable and clearly communicated team goals.

I was glad to hear you guys turn the corner a bit and try to empathise for the team members who experienced the breakdowns on Anthem as the conversation continued. Thanks for the entertainment and the laughs on a weekly basis. Love the show.

 
So did I understand Cheapy correctly, he sent a picture of his drivers license and himself holding his licence for what exactly? Free or cheap movie tickets? Like, no worries how that very personal data might be used if it falls into the wrong hands? Or even resold by Cinemia when they eventually go under? Sheesh Cheapy...
 
Is it normal for Shipwreck to deep throat the c suite of billion dollar companies?

I also hate how hand wavy he was about the employee mental health breakdowns. Like wtf, as long as the game makes money the company is justified to treat the employees however it wants?

Heaven forbid you want to be treated decently in your job.
 
With regards to collectibles at GameStop, I've actually gone out of my way to go to GameStop for game-related collectibles. I buy all my games digitally so naturally I don't care about the used games.... in my opinion, digital games are the way of the future. Much more so than as a kid, I feel confident if I'm going to GameStop that I'll walk out with something gaming related that I want (not so much a game anymore). It sucks GameStop is doing bad with sales/finances, because I love what they're doing with their ThinkGeek brand (gaming collectible arm of GameStop).

On the subject of digital games, if I buy one I don't have to worry about the disc skipping/not playing and I'm also not spending money on the gas I use to get there, oh and Xbox Live has really good weekly and seasonal deals on digital games. I've been a gamer since I was a kid (I'm 27) and used games aren't even on my radar anymore. In my opinion, the used game prices at GameStop usually aren't competitive with digital sales, and they usually only offer $5 off with physical used games... just not good enough of a value whne you factor in the things I mentioned earlier.

As Wombat accurately stated, the clearance bin for collectibles is awesome and I've gotten so many great deals on things which people didn't buy/want. They also have pretty good regular deals on the vinyl figures (IE: B2G1F).

Great show as always. I've been listening for years but I finally really got the courage to type something out... I'm pretty shy when it comes to writing into shows I listen to.

 
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While I agree $40 is too much for the Switch Assassins Creed 3 remake, one of the most fun I have had in years was Assassins Creed on Vita. Considering my enjoyment I will pay it and forget the cost soon after. For so many hours of fun the mobile AC is one of the few games I pay full price for. I agree it will go down but I will still purchase day one.

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@shanafan-cag Do you know what you're forgetting about Hollywood something they have that the game industry lacks? They have unions to protect their workers from "just business" the game industry can just treat their employees however they want because there is no one to push back like there is in Hollywood.
 
That Anthem talk... Just going to second what was said above and maybe suggest, with game industry labor conditions and unionization becoming a growing topic of conversation, mayyyybe don't put stories relating to said topic on the outline if the take on people clearly in distress and having breakdowns is "Oh well. Business".

With regard to Frostbite, it was originally created with the intent to just make Battlefield games. So it is strong at doing very large spaces and first-person shooting and has been iterated over the years to strengthen its ability to do that. I'm guessing Dice did not anticipate it having broader use and so things that would be handy making an RPG etc. were not baked in at the basic level. You mentioned Call of Duty and its engine at its core is a quake engine which was designed to do first person shooting at a high frame rate and responsiveness, and has been iterated as such over the years. If Activision were to decide that all of their games needed to use that engine to build games like Dragon Age or Madden then those studios would have quite the problem getting it to work.

I was hoping someone else in the comments would provide better insight about game engines because I'm certainly not an expert. I tried.
 
echo65 said:
That Anthem talk... Just going to second what was said above and maybe suggest, with game industry labor conditions and unionization becoming a growing topic of conversation, mayyyybe don't put stories relating to said topic on the outline if the take on people clearly in distress and having breakdowns is "Oh well. Business".

With regard to Frostbite, it was originally created with the intent to just make Battlefield games. So it is strong at doing very large spaces and first-person shooting and has been iterated over the years to strengthen its ability to do that. I'm guessing Dice did not anticipate it having broader use and so things that would be handy making an RPG etc. were not baked in at the basic level. You mentioned Call of Duty and its engine at its core is a quake engine which was designed to do first person shooting at a high frame rate and responsiveness, and has been iterated as such over the years. If Activision were to decide that all of their games needed to use that engine to build games like Dragon Age or Madden then those studios would have quite the problem getting it to work.

I was hoping someone else in the comments would provide better insight about game engines because I'm certainly not an expert. I tried.
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You did a pretty good job at it. Also when it comes to game engines a lot of it also has to do with the software tools the developers use. As you wrote DICE made Frostbye with the aspect of doing Battlefield games on it, so i would imagine at that point in time their tool sets and assets where designed for first person gameplay.

So adopting that aspect plus physic to FIFA, Dragon Age and Need for Speed must have been quite a re-write of software as they would have to design every thing from scratch to match those type of scenarios.

It seems that DICE have a nice grasp on the enginge, but they also made it, but the rest of the EA teams seem to struggle a whole lot.

Seems like EA would have enough money to pay for a Unreal Engine license, make the rest of the teams build on that while DICE does magic on the Frostbyte engine.

 
Most of my thoughts have already been mentioned, but one real head scratcher was the idea that the Frostbite decision was the automatically the best decision at the time. “You can’t go back and say that was a bad choice when they did it”. If there is one thing that is true about human nature, it’s that we consistently make bad decisions. It’s entirely possible that it was a bad decision at the time. People (and companies) make short sighted decisions all the time. It may have been good at the time, but it also may have been a bad decision at the time.

In addition, we actually know they made further bad decisions. The decision to ignore input from the Old Republic devs who had experience with persistent multiplayer worlds. The repeated decision to hit the snooze button on defining the project. In any project, lack of clarity is a killer. And not defining it is a decision. I’m a developer on a much smaller scale, but even there, lack of clarity increases time and costs to all parties involved.
 
I too worked for a company that made a 10 figure bet on a computer system that had a decade of negative ripple effects. It was difficult for the employees to understand in hindsight, but it probably was the best decision at the time, and it was financially impossible to "undo" until many years later. 

Something to understand is that the high stakes entertainment industry magnifies the impact of these decisons, and I doubt the average employee sees the benefit of a successful release nearly as much as they as the feel the pain of a nightmare project. 

I don't think we should mistake Shipwreck's assessment as a lack of sensitivity as much as it is an understanding of how strategic decisions can go awry at large companies.

I really enjoyed the back and forth between Cheapy and Shipwreck on this issue. It is a tough one to discuss on a light-hearted show, and I appreciate the discussion not getting derailed prematurely. 

 
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Cheapy,

      You posted a screenshot of Tai's post-tournament USATT ranking on Twitter (618), but not one of your own ranking? Do you mind sharing what your new USATT ranking is for those of us curious about stuff like that?

Keep up the good work,

~Tony

 
Just a reminder to anyone defending shipreck or anyone else on the show they are grown adults and can do that themselves if they want to.😉 Given what I know of shipwreck from listening to the show he doesn't care what we think about his opinions. About the only time he seems to hear feed back on the show is during the show feedback segment so I highly doubt he is reading these comments. Imo he is the type of person where whatever he thinks is correct and nothing anyone else says to the contrary will convince him he might be wrong so why bother.*shrug*
 
Thankfully the big corporations have a defender in Shipwreck. If only the reports could be balanced with the executives' side of the story, then we'd all understand!

Maybe when the defense industry goes belly up and Shippy has to live outside the enclave that is Ohio he'll gain some compassion and empathy.

We're one episode away from hearing him talk about bootstraps and Hilary's emails.

 
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