Quality of Life in the Game Industry: Challenges and Best Practices

About the IDGA White Paper:

The 90-page "Quality of Life in the Game Industry: Challenges and Best Practices" white paper was prepared by the IGDA's Quality of Life Committee, representing a wide range of game development professions and companies.

The white paper discusses the problems and consequences developers face when trying to maintain a career in the industry and the solutions for establishing a better work/life balance.

The white paper is partly based on the results of the "Quality of Life Survey" commissioned by the IGDA in early 2004, which garnered nearly one thousand responses from developers. The survey examined developers' attitude toward work, their internal pressures (salary, long hours, job instability), external pressures (family and relationships), inadequate staffing and work organization problems. Some of the alarming findings from the survey include:

• 34.3% of developers expect to leave the industry within 5 years, and 51.2% within 10 years.
• Only 3.4% said that their coworkers averaged 10 or more years of experience.
• Crunch time is omnipresent, during which respondents work 65 to 80 hours a week (35.2%). The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours (13%). Overtime is often uncompensated (46.8%).
• 44% of developers claim they could use more people or special skills on their projects.
• Spouses are likely to respond that "You work too much..." (61.5%); "You are always stressed out." (43.5%); "You don't make enough money." (35.6%).
• Contrary to expectations, more people said that games were only one of many career options for them (34%) than said games were their only choice (32%).

The IGDA white paper explains how studios can adopt best practices to help alleviate some of the stress and allow for a more balanced life:

• Family friendly practices
• A conscious effort to minimize overtime
• Better communication between management and developers
• Better contracts between individuals, studios and publishers
• Better planning and budgeting
• Better human resource management

--

The following is the 'Preamble' from the IDGA Quality of Life White Paper - download PDF (90 pages, reg. req.)


Preamble

The workplace is a stressful one everywhere, more so in the game industry than in most others. Long hours are endemic. Most projects fail in the marketplace. High-profile studio closures are announced every month. And while the work we do is stimulating and rewarding in its own right, there is no reason not to make our working conditions a lot better than they are today. For young career-oriented people fresh out of school, our industry’s shortcomings, with its endemic long hours and 95% marketplace failure rate, may not always seem obvious or crippling. But after a few years, all-nighters fuelled by coffee and pizza lose much of their appeal. Most people come to want significant relationships, a more balanced life, and sometimes, children as well. None of this is easy to achieve in the typical game company. As a result, many experienced developers fed up with the crunch cycle decide to leave the industry, taking with them a wealth of talent and experience that we can ill afford to lose. Some within the industry consider long hours, high pressure and generally poor quality of life as normal, or even as signs of strength to be bragged about. We do not. No enlightened company should, either: one of the surprising findings of the IGDA Quality of Life Survey is that the majority of game developers now consider games to be only one of many valid career choices for them, not the be-all and end-all that industry folklore still holds dear. As projects get ever bigger and we have to compete with companies like Qualcomm, HP and Pixar for talent, we just can’t afford to drive our best people away by offering comparatively mediocre quality of life conditions. Contents of the White Paper This white paper, prepared by a group of developers representing all game development professions and all types of companies, discusses the quality of life issues most common in our industry, their causes, and some of the solutions elaborated by enlightened individuals and corporations. Its core contains 6 major sections: • Introduction sets the canvas by looking at the state of the contemporary workplace in general. • The IGDA Quality of Life Survey analyzes the results of the survey we held in early 2004 and to which nearly a thousand developers responded. • The Balancing Act describes the challenges that developers face when trying to balance a quality personal life with a fulfilling game development career. Topics discussed include the industry’s high-risk economics, scheduling, peer pressures, lack of concern and support for the family unit in game companies, community resistance to controversial game content, family tensions and early departures toward rival industries.