Do we dehumanise developers behind a company name?

  • KnifeLife
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    I watched a really interesting video yesterday which hit on a lot of good points and has left me thinking about a few things and wouldn’t mind hearing some other opinions on the matter.(Video below)

    Disclaimer: Firstly I would just like to state this is a topic about general game development. I’m not thinking about any developers particularly, more of just trying to think of the humans behind the development who often get forgotten and take a lot of c**p from consumers and there respective companies alike.

    So the points that jumped into my mind were firstly:

    We don’t necessarily think of the humans behind the development, there lives, family’s and everyday stresses of life or the job itself we look at the publisher. One example of this is say we have a problem with SoT (This is an example) The majority of us (Including myself) will say Rare needs to do this or that..

    By saying the simple word Rare or EA or whatever are we instantly dehumanising the developers and throwing them all into a catergory/stereotype and not necessarily giving them a fair trial?

    Another point made in the video is the obscene hours and stress it can take to make a game, especially in the Crunch period.

    Are developers really happy with these types of work conditions? Especially when you have things like the recent TellTale fiasco where a couple of hundred developers were let go without severance pay even though they had been crunching games and sometimes not finishing work untill 3am or losing weekends entirely?

    Do we as consumers demand to much from thehumans who are just trying to get by, live there life and try and do something they enjoy.
    Or is it the higher ups who take advantage of developers who don’t have unions or any line of defence for there personal interests?

    I’ll be honest I’m not sure where I’m going with this thread, the video I watched just has got me thinking and made me see a few things differently. So I suppose I was just looking for some other views and opinions on the matter.

    Talkings good and knowledge is power and all that.. What do you all think?

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gXFKnkTr4Rk

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  • IceMan 0007
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    @knifelife at least from the few devs I have known over time. They start out with a love of games and are gamers themselves. Most just want to help create a game that is well received,revered, and embedded in someones memories. Now a days we as consumers/gamers have been spoiled. We demand more and expect more instead of letting the anticipation build for a demo/beta release. We become instantly critical over the release finding flaws or why this wasn't done or that should've been done that way like they did years ago. With new developers looking to land gigs in well recognized studios they leave themselves open to the mercy of the big companys (one example the mess that happend with Zimpella and West with Activision not paying them bonuses, royalties,and overtime owed to them hence Respawn was born when EA brought them on board) Bottom line is devs sacrafice time away from their loved ones and families to do their best to deliver what they under the best intentions feel is a great product. But studios only see the profit margin. How much can they make on a release vs. the years it takes to develop, code, 3D model, voice over acting, and testing. They could set a release three years out and as soon as it gains a large amount of traction during E3 they throw anything else to the side to make profits off of it. Studios need to realize that while the end goal is to make a profit off their investment devs still have a life like the rest of us with responsibilities and bills. Unfortunately its all to common now a days to put money first and people second.

  • KnifeLife
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    @iceman-0007 Great reply, I was just shocked to here that developers don’t actually have any protection with unions or anything.

    It seems that the workers are litrally at the mercy of the higher ups and that just doesn’t sit well for me. It seems like it can be abused.

    I think us as consumers could definitely try and take a step back and re-humanise the workers. I’m definitely guilty of it, but I also think there needs to be abit of a shake up from the corporate level aswell.

    People shouldn’t be treated as expendable, not when they are putting that much work and passion and making so many sacrifices for the company. It’s pretty brutal.

    I’m sure there are plus sides, but game development was always something I was very intrigued about and would have loved to dabble in.

    Not anymore after the things I have been reading. A lot of the industry to me just seems like a dream and passion killer. Or to much risk for very little reward.

  • A Cranky Eskimo
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    I would admit that i rarely think of them as individuals when i post critical feedback or any feedback, but that also means i wouldnt dare blame any individual for anything either. It goes both ways.

    Its definitely up to the higher ups to find the balance between treating your team with respect for their personal lives and working efficiently as a studio, and imo dosnt matter at all whether or not we dehumanise them when we assess a game that was made by hundreds of people, because its almost impossible to give credit where it is due from our perspective anyways. Again its up to the higher ups to convey their studios capability to us in a situation like this, and i would think most game devs dehumanise gamers at times into lists of types of consumers as much as we would do to them.

  • KattTruewalker
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    @knifelife

    I think it is extremely easy to forget that there are human beings behind the company logos.
    Not only that, I wonder if some publishers forget this too - these are the people financing the development, carrying out marketing and setting deadlines in some cases, from how I understand it, answering in most cases to shareholders and balance sheets and sometimes a long way away from the chalk face. But they seem to often wield the power to impose incredible demands on their staff.

    @A-Cranky-Eskimo

    I've been lucky enough to meet the Rare team on a number of occasions. They are actually a very wonderful, enthusiastic, positive and motivated bunch of human beings.
    I would no more dream of criticising them than I would my fellow teaching colleagues.

    There are things I'm not completely happy with about the game of course, things I would change and so on, but there are ways of putting across your opinion or concerns that don't insult, demean or trivialise the hard work of others. Therefore it does matter to me how I phrase my concerns whether on this forum or any other public space.

    @IceMan-0007

    I also think you're right about we, as consumers, being very demanding and I think that's sometimes a product of the marketers perhaps raising expectations above and beyond the reality - I'm thinking very much of the cinematic trailers for Elder Scrolls Online for instance. Yet some studios do deliver masterpieces and we compare every other game with those as a benchmark, so there must be companies where the relationship works well for all parties.

    I'm not sure what the answer is, but I would hope that those who treat their workforce with a bit of respect and encourage a collaborative, supportive relationship will flourish and those who don't.. will not.

  • A Cranky Eskimo
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    @katttruewalker i hear ya and agree with you, and you have seen that i can be polite with feedback, but at some point during development there was a shift where just because we were posting feedback that was just meant to be concise and constructive and only mentioned negative opinions as a means to show how we came to the conclusions we did for the feedback, not intending to trivialize or demean rare in any way, and every other post would be picked apart by people calling us entitled and all manner of other direct insults. I dont think once i ever directly insulted anyone at rare, and at worst i made some assumptions about the company as a whole, which as you said and this thread describes isnt productive. I understand rare has likely given people like me the benefit of the doubt because of this history but i cant help but make the excuse that i stopped caring about feelings because nobody cared about biting their tongue when judging me based on my judgement of the game, which we were asked to judge and give feedback on.

    It was very different for the first year, year and a half, and regardless of whether it was microsoft who put rare in a bad situation, thats still the situation the game is in. Imo of course.

  • KattTruewalker
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    @a-cranky-eskimo I was worried you'd take my reply as directed at you, rather than a reply to the content of your post - I should have written 'there are ways we can express our opinion or concerns' - oh the power of the written word, eh, not even I can get it right all the time ;)

    I know very well you've been here pretty much since the start of things and remember a great many discussions we've all had on these forums, voicing our suggestions, expectations and dreams for the game before release. You've always been a very active and passionate member of the community.

  • A Cranky Eskimo
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    @katttruewalker oh dont worry i didnt take it personally and there wasnt anything but truth in your post i just always over explain myself lol.. it was easier to be positive and give good feedback when people didnt attack you for it like the feedback was meant to attack rare is all i mean.

  • WarOnPants2664
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    @knifelife We say "Rare" because we don't know any specific devs that we should be addressing instead. Almost all game companies sort of keep their devs hidden from the general community. Rare seems to be more open than some since we know devs like joe, but It's nothing like the devs for a game like Warframe for instance.

  • khaleesibot
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    @betsill said in Do we dehumanise developers behind a company name?:

    @knifelife We say "Rare" because we don't know any specific devs that we should be addressing instead. Almost all game companies sort of keep their devs hidden from the general community. Rare seems to be more open than some since we know devs like joe, but It's nothing like the devs for a game like Warframe for instance.

    Totally understandable! The community will never know exactly who worked to make what they're commenting on happen. It's so much easier to say, 'Rare' than 'Game Dev Bob'. But I also totally get the point of the OP, we are all humans at the Studio! We work hard because we are passionate about Sea of Thieves, and creating positive experiences for our community. We want feedback, but we also have rules in place on how we speak to each other because we're all people here. Insults, harassment and threats aren't the way we should be treating each other.

  • WarOnPants2664
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    @khaleesibot If Rare had a more "human" way of addressing the community it would definitely help players to be more understanding. I think a lot of devs are very disconnected from their players point of view. They talk about the game on a daily basis and understand why they are doing certain things. Players don't know any of that. Rare might be thinking intensely about something like voice acting and making better NPC's for instance, but as far as players can tell Rare doesn't care at all. This leads to a lot of frustration for players.

  • Muzackmann
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    @khaleesibot Which is why I love these forums, fights and all. Because here, unlike some other SoT groups I frequent, there are intelligent conversations (of course not all of them), and even if we don't agree its generally more constructive then not.

    I wanted to be a game developer for most of my earlier childhood right into college. That's when I started researching and got a big dose of reality, and really started understanding the hours and stress that come with that profession. While that wasn't the path my life took it left me with more compassion towards developers as people.

  • Muzackmann
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    @personalc0ffee Some of this is due to the effects of anonymity, as our culture is still very much in the mindset of whatever they say online (when anon) will have no consequences for them so they don't have any empathy towards those they are addressing/talking about. And its tragic that we've come to this.

    The other part is probably with new games coming out all the time, there is so much pressure to get your game out there before it's basically forgotten about with the deluge of titles that come out every year. People expect all of these companies to produce the same level of content despite hugely different work forces for each game.

  • A Cranky Eskimo
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    @personalc0ffee said in Do we dehumanise developers behind a company name?:

    @betsill said in Do we dehumanise developers behind a company name?:

    @khaleesibot If Rare had a more "human" way of addressing the community it would definitely help players to be more understanding. I think a lot of devs are very disconnected from their players point of view. They talk about the game on a daily basis and understand why they are doing certain things. Players don't know any of that. Rare might be thinking intensely about something like voice acting and making better NPC's for instance, but as far as players can tell Rare doesn't care at all. This leads to a lot of frustration for players.

    What more human ways do you want?

    They talk to us directly, they provide us tons of updates across various platforms, they regularly talk with and engage people in the Discord, they regularly make posts on the forum. They'll also talk to you on Twitter.

    Don't take this as an attack on you or anything, as I am actually genuinely curious because Rare has been one of the most open, honest, and transparent game companies I have ever seen.

    They have done so much for the community to ensure we are updated and notified, that's more than you'd get from EA or Ubisoft as examples.

    So, can you please tell me what more human ways you have in mind?

    Not having some people around to speak for them and letting them do it themselves would be a great start, i wont name them for the sake of trying to pretend im witty and clever yet really ill be a total hypocrite who hides behind the sugar coating added to my posts combined with a “rare can do no wrong” attitude.

    The game is what needs to be fixed, not consumers dehumanizing a non human entity like a game company. Yes it is comprised of people, does anyone ever shame them or attack them? No they ask for a better product, and then themselves get attacked. Not thinking of them as people first is a perfectly reasonable thing to do especially when you have been asked by them to give unbiased feedback on their product. That they made millions of dollars off of. Its not being entitled to ask for better design when this game has some of the simplest we have seen in recent years for a lot of its components.

    [Mod edited]

  • Muzackmann
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    @a-cranky-eskimo I think the OP was more about the game industry as a whole and less about specifically Rare though because we are on a SoT forum obviously thats the easiest example to make.

    Sadly yes people on this very forum have attacked them before. It's not wrong of you to give feedback even if its negative, but assuming game A is like game B without considering the people manning them is a bit unfair.

    It also seems like your attacking someone for no reason in this post. So if you don't have the respect to agree to disagree, then why should anyone listen to you?

  • WarOnPants2664
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    @personalc0ffee They talk to us directly, but only in very sterile formats like their dev updates. Even in their streams they never address any hard questions. The guest this week when asked if he had any questions said "I have questions, but I know you can't answer them" which is a very damning thing to say. They phrase everything a in very safe PR style such as the "new and interesting ways" meme that just screams corporate PR nonsense. In the last update joe talked about forsaken shores, but he was just so vague about everything other people not getting experience(which is a big deal to be sure, but I've just never heard them be specific about things they are looking into/listening to). If you wanna know what a truly open dev team looks like then go watch a Warframe dev stream. Digital extremes does not shy from tough questions, and is very genuine with players. Compared to Rare who hire's super expensive actors like Sean Astin and Matt berry to talk about their game(instead of using them IN the game for some ungodly reason) makes Rare look insincere. Sorry if I was all over the place, its hard to talk about something like this because of how nuanced it is.

  • ENF0RCER
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    @knifelife I just like to say that i try very hard to make clear that I totally support all the devs at Rare and I both acknowledge and appreciate there hard work and this goes to most studios,but when I call out a company by name I'm uselly refering to mangement as most coderes and artist don't make the disicions so main crutiques are directed to ghe leadership. Jim is right that most game companies treat there staff like garbage but this goes to most companies in general and is more a critique of our capitalist system. I wish all the devs the best of luck and I hope thet find any of my constructive feedback useful to them in making this game great. I like many others want SOT to be best and full reach the potential we relize is there.

    P.S. I also agree with some of the other replies in this post as i do often feel there is a bit of disconnect between the players and the devs and ther often shows in some apparent miscommunication which i often adress.

  • SurveyorPete
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    How is saying "Rare needs to do this... or do that" any different from referring to any large company or organisation? For example:

    • Apple should make the iPhone X cheaper
    • The Government should reduce taxes
    • The Catholic Church should allow priests to marry
    • NASA needs to colonize Mars

    In law, companies have assumed some of the privileges and rights of a person so, in some sense, we are entitled to speak about Rare as a person with responsibilities to its customer/player base.

    On the other hand, Rare do show a very human face. Joe, and Mike, and Shelly, and Jon are mates of ours. We hear a lot from them and many of us appreciate the work they - and the whole Rare team - put in. As a software developer myself, I also understand the pressures and difficulties they face.

  • A Cranky Eskimo
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    @muzackmann said in Do we dehumanise developers behind a company name?:

    @a-cranky-eskimo I think the OP was more about the game industry as a whole and less about specifically Rare though because we are on a SoT forum obviously thats the easiest example to make.

    Sadly yes people on this very forum have attacked them before. It's not wrong of you to give feedback even if its negative, but assuming game A is like game B without considering the people manning them is a bit unfair.

    It also seems like your attacking someone for no reason in this post. So if you don't have the respect to agree to disagree, then why should anyone listen to you?

    Yes his post was clearly in response to mine, and he has gotten at least one person banned for literally having someone do the same to him, and has been one of those people calling people, myself included entitled. Im not asking for them to go “what would cranky eskimo want we should listen to him specifically” and thinking we as consumers should put individuals who design a product in the front of our mind rather than judging the product on its own merits is just as entitled as expecting that quote to be reality would be, except im not actually expecting that.

    Rare as a development team earn our respect through our opinion of their product, and bringing this seperate issue into it and casting stones is a big reason for the negativity around feedback. You can respect rare and their human flaws and still have a negative opinion on their product.

    I wasnt attacking anyone any more than they were attacking me, but again this person has gotten people banned for this exact scenario in reverse.

    Ever heard the phrase if you live in a glass house dont throw stones? seems to apply here.

  • A Cranky Eskimo
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    @personalc0ffee said in Do we dehumanise developers behind a company name?:

    @a-cranky-eskimo said in Do we dehumanise developers behind a company name?:

    You can respect rare and their human flaws and still have a negative opinion on their product.

    I agree.

    Well thats all ive ever intended to do with feedback, give my opinion so that their companys product can improve, not because i have some entitlement issue, and thats true for most of the negative feedback on here, it stems from honesty of what we want in a game, because we were asked what we wanted in a game. Nobody said “if you have high hopes make sure you constantly simplify your feedback because we cant accomplish more than fetch quests and a few ships” the store said 1-99 people for 2 years right up until launch, there are many things we were told would be expanded in ways that either werent completely added or at all (ship customization and captaincy, mermaids, the ferry, cosmetic pricing having meaning)

    Anything that might seem like extra unneeded spite in a lot of peoples posts wasnt there for those first two years and only
    Started becoming more common after everybody started getting called things like entitled etc for not constantly seeing the game through rose tinted glasses.

    Two wrongs dont make a right but the facts are that it takes
    two to tango and im not the only one who needs to bite their tongue more often. You could have easily given your opinion on this topic without wording it to bait me based on my comment above and our past encounters.

  • DrunkPunk138
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    @personalc0ffee said in Do we dehumanise developers behind a company name?:

    That video, yes. Love Jimquisition and unfortunately he is being buried by Youtube.

    What he spoke about and those conditions is shocking to a lot of people, but not me unfortunately. As I've said I have friends in the industry and I've heard about some of this.. Game design has the highest turn over rates. Workers are treated horribly. That is why so many went indie.

    They are treated as expendable and replaceable.

    It is not just this industry, either.

    It's sad, so very sad.

    Money coming over the health and happiness of others.

    Yes, I would absolutely say they are de-humanized behind a company name, same for publishers. When we say EA, we think a big, evil, greedy corporation but not everyone in that company of thousands is like that. It's just easier to direct our anger towards the things they do, at a nameless entity.

    It's hard to direct ire towards someone when you see them as human. When you see them having feelings, emotions, etc.

    As to the second point brought up in the discussion;

    Yes absolutely consumers have grown too entitled, I mean you can see examples of it everywhere, even in this forum. For the sake of brevity I won't be pointing them out. But I feel the two problems go hand in hand. When we dehumanize someone, it makes it easier to not see how our demands of more and more are affecting them.

    I think the first step in fixing it, has been done already. Acknowledgement. There is a problem and this is what it is.

    So, how do we fix it?

    I agree with quite a bit of what you said. I used to work in the industry, and the nail in the coffin for me what precisely how dehumanized I was. It didn't help that I was the community guy for a AAA game, working directly for a publisher people absolutely hate. The thing is, I was dehumanized more by the player-base than the company, by a long shot. It's the kind of behavior that takes a toll on ones mental health after a while, I mean how could you not take it to heart when all you see every day is blatant and toxic hatred spewed at you for the most mundane and insignificant things? The internet allows people to act in very strange and inhuman ways with zero repercussion.

    I guess I was lucky that I worked for two great companies over 10 years that treated its employees right. We hit crunch times, but they never extended to unhealthy degrees. Fast forward to my job in a government software company, and I really do understand what crazy crunch time is like. It's not something exclusive to the gaming industry, but it seems it's the only industry that actually gets scrutiny for the practice. I find myself working 13 hour days way more frequently here, and it's often far more unexpected than when I worked in the video game industry.

    The only thing I do feel the need to point out is that I find it absolutely hilarious Jim Sterling is the one bringing up this topic, when he's made an entire career out of dehumanizing people who make video games. He's usually the one leading the mobs with pitchforks, and while I haven't paid attention to him for a couple of years, I really hope he takes his own message to heart and spends more time gaining an understanding of how the industry works from a more neutral perspective. Maybe he has, and I hope so, because he has quite some reach for some reason, and he can certainly influence some of the worst offenders to take a more responsible approach to how they treat the creators of the games they love.

    There are a lot of intricacies behind video game production that impact a lot of things people would normally expect, such as how legal teams influence something as simple as communication. I can't tell you how often I couldn't say something very simple in that community role that seemingly had little impact but our legal teams said "nope, no can do, this could make us liable for X, Y, or Z". There is also often a marketing strategy that must be adhered to, which also gates further communication, and it can be like this for a variety of reasons (such as a desire to not inflate expectations on when they will receive particular functionality). People really don't understand these things, and if they do they may not understand the importance of it, which is fair enough.

    I think the best way to fix it, or at least the part we CAN fix, is by expressing ourselves without getting personal. A lot of what drives the sentiment of entitlement and dehumanizing the people behind the scenes is often a result of people taking things to personal levels, such as providing feedback that is basically a personal attack on the people who are on the receiving end of the feedback. That goes for both people giving game feedback and people responding to feedback. It's very easy to take things personal and go to that personal level, but it devalues the feedback regardless of who it's directed at. I'm guilty of it, too, and this is despite my own personal experience with it and ability to acknowledge it. It's a result of being human, but working towards improving that provides such a constructive framework for improvement and understanding. Removing the personal element prevents people from feeling like they're attacked, as well as appearing entitled, and the result is much more workable and constructive feedback.

    I'm not really sure how we can fix the industry demanding too much from its employees, though. The best thing I can suggest is people within the industry need to stick to companies that treat them well, but that isn't always possible, and it's an industry where you'll inevitably move from company to company unless you get a senior position (and even then, the life of a studio is often times completely dependent upon it's current success and relevance in the industry, and very few manage to last for any significant period of time). We could also as consumers stop expecting such speedy releases and responses, which would give developers more time to flesh out their products, but so long as many of these publishers have shareholders to please, I don't see that being very possible.

    Anyway, this is a pretty great discussion to see, even if I don't agree that the source (Jim Sterling) has much integrity in the discussion. Also, I hope I'm not making anyone feel like I'm talking specifically about anyone here, because I'm not. If anything I refer more to my experiences managing a specific community, but some of the behavior I mention is pretty consistent across all communities.

  • Lady Aijou
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    @A-Cranky-Eskimo and @PersonalC0ffee Please refrain from engaging in personal arguments on the forums, as it is a violation of the forum rules. Your posts have been removed accordingly.

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