Respected video game developer Masahiro Sakurai has talked a little about the games industry and the extremely long hours which are expected of developers these days. Sakurai wrote about his personal experience in his Famitsu column translated by Source Gaming.
“In the game industry, there’s a lot of overtime, all-nighters, and coming in on holidays! It’s a practice that has been occurring for a long time. That suddenly changed in recent years, though.”
“Actually, if you look at other companies and even myself, 10:00 p.m. is when everyone goes home. Or rather, maybe we’re getting shut out? I go to work at 10:00 a.m., so I usually spend about 10 hours working each day. In the past, it wasn’t that uncommon to work until 1 or 2 in the morning so compared to those days, I’m taking it easy.”
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Well at least he works at 10 a.m
Compared to where I live there are some compajy where you have to work at 8 a.m and finish at 8 p.m which is 11 hours with no bonus
Please give us an Adventure Mode and a Smash Run 2.
S t a p h this guy has been under lots of pressure lets at least try to give him a break he needs it
Of course I am not against resting in a healthy way. I just mean that he let others do those modes if he can’t or don’t want because of what happened with Smash Brawl.
Oh that’s understandable
Is this supposed to guilt fans into not having wishes for each new SSB game and DLC content?
It’s probably more to do with the recent talks about how awful the hours are for people who make video games for a living. It’s usually Really Awful, sometimes people can’t even go home because they’re so stressed for time. It’s not even smaller studios either, most major ones are like this. Places like EA and Square Enix are really bad because employees are often so overworked and rushed.
There’s very few exceptions to this really and right now at least it seems like Nintendo is powerful enough to get games out whenever they’re done instead of sticking to strict deadlines and not overwork people which is nice.
Overtime sucks so much. I don’t want to work over night when morning hits. I know people want to get paid more from there extra hours, but I want to get paid less.
Good thing there are laws about this in most developed countries. You shouldn’t have to devote your entire life to your job.
He needs some relaxation. I remeber he had a bad arm or something while working on Smash 4.
But please, please add some better and more intuitive online and single player content.
Shocker. He didn’t complain as much as I was expecting him to like he usually does.
I’ve been working as a game developer for 3 1/2 years now and I’ve very rarely had to work for more than 7:30 hours a day. Shows that it’s totally possible. Employers just have to care about the sanity of their employees. I’m quite aware that this is more of an exception, though. Even here in Germany, regular crunch times are taken for granted and not questioned by most developers. It’s just way cheaper to exploit your employees by making them do all-nighters for just some free pizza or something like that. I honestly wouldn’t work for a developer like that, though.
Isn’t this what the life of a Video Game Developer is about, spending long hours working on a game? I mean if Sakurai were to retire from Game Development he’s more than welcome to pass the legacy of the Smash Bros. onto someone else, it doesn’t take one person to keep stuff like the only time Nintendo Characters can all come together running.