Those are usually locked away behind command lines and they don’t test with random chance or such. You trigger the things directly. Realistically what probably happened is some engineer wrote the system slightly wrong and no one caught it. Possibly maybe a designer requested the romance to be more prominent and the solution on engineering side was to tweak a value. It’s be surprised if anyone changes hard coded values for QA. It’s not the 90s anymore where qa is the engineering team.
I’m 10 years into my games career and one of the main reasons I’m still in it is that I’ve worked for indie studios for most of my career.
I’ve worked rarely for AAA studios and they are soulless and long hours. It’s not fun, it’s not creative, it’s not about creating personal art. It’s about creating a product to make profits. They’re really fun games a lot of the time but they get there by limiting who can contribute to what.
An engineer trying to give feedback on design gets shut down. A lot of smaller studios are the opposite and people wear multiple hats daily. I love wearing multiple hats and it helps me understand my own art creation process.
Some folks in the industry as well only see this like a job not an expression of themselves through art. That’s fine but limits them to studios who only want workers not artists.
That said, the average has came up. About 10 years ago that average time in the industry was 5 years. Now it’s 7. People are finding the industry more and more stable but the industry does have a problem keeping juniors. I almost left the industry several times but as I got over 5 years I started to see a change in job offers. Lots more recruiters contacting me. At 10 years I’ve started to see a lot more people wanting to pay me for an hour talk. It becomes easier to stay in the industry as you gain experience but those first 5 years are really rough.
Absolutely agree. But I think if we are going to start doing that we’ll have to start with the designers, engineers, and artists. Not the voice actors that spend weeks on the project and never think about it again.
Someone else made an interesting point how a lot of people don’t get residuals. That residuals don’t make sense for some jobs. For a VA in the background of a small indie games, do you think it’s okay for them to require residuals for their work? This lawsuit focuses on large AAA studios but it will set a dangerous precedent. There any many actors who have to find loop holes to build smaller movie projects. “We technically paid ourselves then invested it into the movie” sort of thing.
That said giving everyone residuals is better than giving no one residuals.
… Humble monthly? Game pass? EA play? Even PS Plus has subscriptions for streaming to a PC. People buy these things a lot. You can try to excuse Humble monthly but there are far more game pass players than Humble monthly ones. Either way, you can pretend that PC doesn’t tolerate this nonsense but many people are playing Starfield on Game Pass this month. PC players already tolerate this and in some cases, welcome it.
Everyone in the games industry is vastly underpaid because of the glory of working on games. Game Execs are ruthless to gamble and exploit where they can. Crunch exists mainly in the games industry for a reason. You don’t hear of any other industry where office workers are getting early on-set PTSD symptoms from their job.
On top of that, if you are a woman, you will get a lot of people trying to either sleep with you or talk down to you like you are a child.
Creation does not mean benefit in perpetuity. It means you created something. You should be paid properly for it, yes, but it doesn’t mean every time someone mentions your book you get a penny from them lol.
Frankly, this is what people in this thread are missing. I’d argue profits are reserved for those who dedicated themselves to making the game. Putting heart and soul into it. Sometimes that can be a VA but most of the time those VAs are like “Listen, we got a week to do this within budget and I AM NOT doing any more than that!”
It’s absolutely fine to draw that line but it’s not fine to then expect profits for doing just the minimum to get the job done. You’ll see a lot of studios just go get non-unionized VAs. People trying to break into the games industry as VAs are a dime a dozen and so any attempt at getting profits as a whole is going to fail.
It all depends on where you work and what lines you personally draw in the sand. Some novice game developers will not draw a line in the sand near release and management will work them to death. Stress causality is the term for when people don’t quit, don’t say anything, and just stop showing up for work. If you work at a studio where crunch is normalized then usually there is a stress causality normalization too.
🤷♂️I’ve made multiple million-dollar titles and haven’t gotten more than a paycheck from them. I really don’t think VAs should get much if any in the way of residuals. Engineers, artists, and designers should get a huge portion of the profits. Giving VAs even a 1% residual is a slap in the face of the rest of the team who build those games. Not to mention the whole team of LA Noire was laid off later that year.