Killzone: Mercenary shoots onto Vita on September 10
Trion Worlds hit with more layoffs, Defiance team impacted
Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault defending Vita next week
Game & Wario was originally going to be pre-installed on Wii U
The Last of Us digital download lets you start playing sooner
Why Ensemble and Pandemic Closed
by Chris Faylor, Mar 15, 2010 10:20am PDTWith both Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires, Halo Wars) and Pandemic Studios (Mercenaries, The Saboteur) having shut down across the past year, veterans of both took the stage at Game Developers Conference 2010 to explain what went wrong.
Ensemble's Halo Wars and Pandemic's The Saboteur
"The reality is that every single game we shipped took twice as long as we said it was going to take, and cost twice as much to make," said Ensemble's Paul Bettner, as relayed by Eurogamer. "We were simply too expensive."
He added that "everyone was a workaholic" at Ensemble, noting "as an employee, and later as a manager, I didn't take a stand. I just kept hoping for that next high."
It's an industry-wide problem, Bettner explained. "This is a horrible vicious cycle. We burn out all our best people. We destroy these precious artists, we wreck their families and we sacrifice their youth. So they leave, and they take all their experience with them."
Former Pandemic employee Carey Chico pointed to similar issues, as the now-defunct studio also had problems hitting milestones on time and within the budget.
"We got our own money," he explained. "That was probably the beginning of the fall...When you have your own money, what happens is that you have to maintain your own accountability internally, and if you don't have that, you just f**k everything up."
Comments
Coders and Artists FTW.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 9 replies.
I had a friend who never worked an hour of overtime. He let his employers know and had full faith in being put under the microscope on a daily basis. He busted his ass every day at work, but never outside his shift. If there was ever overtime to be worked it was due to mismanagement of the employer. It's their mistake to fix, not his. It was an interesting philosophy and I doubt a lot of people have the liberty to pull something like that, but when you put everything in context it makes sense.
It's like the guy at the office who comes to your desk at 4:55 PM on a Friday and because he's slacked he expects you to work your ass off to get something done for Monday. These situations should never become the employees problem to fix.
Family and friends are the most important thing in this world. Not the paycheque you get every two weeks. Just have to find that happy medium. Many of us never will.
You must be logged in to post.