Sounds like a job for a union.

No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray: ‘It was as bad as things can get’

I feel bad about sending them death threats now, but I just really like butterflies.

Actually, it's about ethics in pro-butterfly terrorism.

Luckily, it turns out people who send internet death threats are just as bad at living up to their promises as he is.

I think the most practical answer to this is that we will see more and more specialized production companies (similar to the movie industry).

There are already studios that just do animation, or just do sound design, or do localization and voice recording, etc. Rather than making their own games, they get contracted out to help on AAA titles so that the main studio doesn't have to do everything in house.

There are even a few devs (not AAA) like Mistwalker which literally don't have an internal dev team at all. They develop the concept in house and then hand-pick external studios to do the actual production work.

So what happens going forward? Does some AAA studio realize that being the first to offer full time positions is a long term net-benefir since it allows them to lock up all the premium talent? Or does the free fall continue until the AAA are self defeating and only indie studios can survive?

I don't think that's the situation though.

The true "premium" talent do have full-time positions. Most dev teams have a core group of people who work on the game from the very beginning. Those people are the ones driving the basic design and concept.

The issue is that once those AAA games exit the prototyping phase they need huge amounts of people to create art assets, level design, music, animations, testing, etc. And they have access to a huge pool of people desperate to break into the industry that are willing to take the gig at any cost.

Game development is inherently cyclic in nature. I remember a big studio (maybe Ubisoft?) actually tried out a thing where they kept people employed even when there was no work. In between projects people literally went into a room all day and just wasted time.

As you can imagine, it did not work out well with most people willingly quitting. A real superstar is not going to sit around idle in-between projects just for the sake of stability.

LucasArts did the same thing to me in '07.

I got hired on in between a time when a project finished and others were yet to start. I got paid to sit and do nothing for 3 months before finally being assigned a project. Then i worked on the project for one month before being told no new content would be developed since the game was being closed. 1 more month of sitting around do nothing before i terminated my 6 month a month early

...too much ego, too low salaries, too much extended overtime, and pettiness in general.

So - just like every corporate job everywhere in the world?

That's the gist. It's just a little exagerrated by the traits of arts and software: (self-)explotation and planning insecurity.

Just recently a former Valve employee wrote hundreds of tweets about his working experience and other game companies. One piece of advice he gave was to watch or read The Hunger Games. It's a crazy read.

Reddit Dump

My advice would be to read Lord Of The Flies.

I remember starting a job at a place that was actually in several of the "top 10 best places to work" on several lists. My 1 day of training consisted of shadowing a complete moron who in the first 15 minutes - turned off the wrong server accidentally, got on email, blamed 2 other people for his fuckup (on a 100+ person distribution list), bitched and loudly complained about how "I'm was gonna quit this piece of shit and start my own band," and then sat down fired off more 3 blame emails (to the same 100+ person distribution list) and then stormed out the door into his office and shut the door to take a break.

Next week the boss told me to show him how I was doing things because "I seemed to have a better grasp of stuff than he did."

It's starting to look more and more like working on indie projects on the side is where it's really at.