So bare open world games are bad? The entire S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series would like a word with you
There HAS been a push for unions, repeatedly even, it's just that they get squashed by the bosses at AAA companies before they can even properly start the union, let alone actually do something to improve things. Huge companies have a LOT of push, a single word from them and some twisting of facts is enough to force lower-ranked devs to leave the industry for good, things are absurd nowadays! And yes, we ARE seeing PTSD and a ton of other disorders happening, things are basically just a step away from Japan where people DIE ON THE JOB from overwork working office jobs! No rest and a lot of pressure can cause heart attacks among other things, but of course you'll ignore that because you only want games, not proper working conditions. Let me remind you one thing though, all good games ever made were made with hardly any crunch if any, crunch games just lack the inspiration to make something good and are instead shat out of companies' assholes, how can an original game be made when the people making it are too tired to think straight? Same goes for a lot of recent buggy games, devs are too tired to pay full attention to what they are developing causing oversights which result in bugs.
Have you played the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. without mods lately?
Also they were not bare games, nor particularly open world -- everything funnelled you to new and interesting places and as such rank up there with good designs. Compare it to something like Dungeon Lords instead if you want what I was thinking of there.
Care to link some of these calls? I saw all the stuff for the online journalism set and I would have expected those to cover such things fairly extensively. Instead I have randoms at kotaku writing about it off their own back and not much else, and it is not like all the other places won't whine, bitch, piss and moan at the drop of a hat.
As for never made... I have been reading stories of devs forgoing social life to develop games on a shoestring budget since the Amiga (about when I started paying any attention) and earlier stories of the atari and like that I read after that painted much the same picture.
From where I sit crunch is akin to overtime to get things done, something that most others get thrust upon them from time to time. It is not a great way to run a company, and again one reason I don't develop games.
I don't know if I would put the buggy nature of more recent games at the feet of tired devs. From what I have seen many in gaming world are not so very hot to begin with and don't adopt best best practices (see how slowly version control gets adopted and how testing gets done by testers without version freezes and whatever else), on top of not having great tools (though I am not expecting console makers to have tools on par with whatever MS have spent decades now doing for Windows). Whenever I pick apart games I have seen mistakes I would not expect a tired dev to make (those tending to be typos or "fuck it just use bubble sort").
On forcing devs out then is this going in the west? Japan is an interesting one for that but I was not seeing it elsewhere.
There was a push, a ton of it in fact. Protests are being organized, whistleblowers started appearing, and it's not a coincidence that the issue of overwork culture in gaming industry gradually became a major topic in 2019. And again, if you think the only thing intense gamedev conditions amount to is capral tunnel and getting fat, you probably missed reports on Canadian devs having mental breakdowns mid-work during the crunch, or increasing practice of hiring therapists to control "stress casualties" within development teams (instead of, well, looking after them in the first place), or pretty much every piece of news about working conditions in Konami. If you want to look into it yourself, there are some extensive reports on NetherRealm Studios, which go into details on how its developers worked for 100-hour/week shifts on an ultraviolent game and gained legitimate mental issues (insomnia, phobias, etc.) while higher-ups did jack crap and often left job early.
As for "don't step into the kitchen" mentality, I'll just call BS on that and paraphrase our chunky boi JIm Sterling: "Crunch isn't a triumph of work dedication, but a failure of management". Nobody benefits from crunch periods but big-wigs and executives who most of the time don't participate in crunch in the first place. Just the fact that it's overtime, yet it's still mandatory and expected, is an issue in itself - workers should be entitled to reasonable work hours and adequate work-life balance regardless of industry, and deflecting it via "well, just find another job" is kind of piss-poor excuse for blaming people on not wanting to sacrifice their time with family and long-term health.
What link between " ultraviolent game" and the rest of that is there? Odd to bring up such a thing.
I don't see how the can't stand the heat thing is linked there. I do agree proper time management is a good thing and crunch is no fun at all. If these are all nice programmers though then they can do the same tasks in another field and get paid handsomely (I saw some whine about pay rates in San Francisco a while back, to which I wondered why they would take the job of the rates weren't competitive), probably right next door to where they work now (especially California, Washington state, New York, Texas, Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto which covers most North American locations where game dev, and coincidentally tech and/or finance business, is located). It is not like they are skilled manual labour in a one horse/one factory town or unskilled labour in an even more desolate place. They choose to engage with such conditions and have endless options otherwise. Some of the artists might have a slightly harder time elsewhere as some of those don't have the most robust film/TV industry to slot into in those areas but most still have some considerable stuff.
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