In convenient throwable form when you inevitably get awped

I don’t work as a developer. However, I have done QA for a major publisher for some time now. A lot of the same stuff still rings true: long hours, months of crunch, poor work/life balance, low pay. We’ve even been told, in an off-handed way, that we are always replaceable. There’s lots of unhired applicants or…

Everyone has those skills! That’s why every KickStarted video game has been successfully released without trouble. Every, single, one of them! Oh wait...

Good lord. Reading some of these replies in defense of this asshole makes me sad that we don’t teach labour history in high school.

This is what Alex St John demands of his “artists”:

These skills aren’t as easily as transferable as you seem to think. So you are a talented texture artist, let’s say. What else are you going to do? Visual effects? That industry faces the exact same problems. Similarly animators, level designers, modellers. Not every game developer is a code-monkey, and even then,…

Guy who burned out of a programming job at Microsoft in 1997 thinks people who burn out of programming jobs are pussies.

They are highly skilled people that actually COULD leave if they wanted to. Most could get jobs not in the game industry and do better than they are now.

This. It is the rich boss saying “suck it up you filthy poors, you’re lucky I even pay you anything at all, you should be making me rich for free.”

To my great shock and disappointment, they never respond to this feedback with any sort of enlightenment or gratitude for my generous attempt at setting them free — usually, I just get rage,

Just because you happen to be proficient in one area, say programming, does not mean you’ll have the creative oversight or vision to Kickstart an entire game.

Which is mostly irrelevant. “You can always leave” is not a defence against poor working conditions.

You work for an industrial company where accidents happen…

You need to get an actual job producing productivity software if you want to be paid ‘fairly’ and go home at 5 pm.

You should really cut them some slack. I can think of many reasons why, for many of those complaining, it just isn’t that simple. I keep telling people this, but creating your own business is not for everyone, it is a skill in itself and not one that everyone possesses, and therefore should not be considered a viable…

No I got his point, it’s just bullshit. When you’re doing a highly skilled job that you had an expensive education for you should get paid accordingly. Especially since this guy, who is a millionaire, is reaping profits. Like I said, it’s the age old tale of rich people saying how the people working for them and…

Okay we need to get out of this bs mentality that if something is an art then the artist doesn’t need money. Where the fuck do you think these games come from? Your ass? No, artists need to fucking eat, pay bills, take care of their families. If games are art then take care of your artists. ffs

His argument is also complete BS cuz sitting at a computer and “pushing a mouse” all day is actually grueling! I’m an environmental scientist, and my typical work year toggles between months of outdoor physical labor and months of desk work (ie. analyzing and interpreting data on a computer). Guess what - the months…

Fortunately, Rami Ismail of Vlambeer wrote a great rebuttal to this trash that is the mic-drop of all mic-drops - amusingly enough, also posted on VentureBeat.

WildTangent is that bullshit I spent years uninstalling off of peoples’ overloaded computers. Nothing artistic about that dreck at all.

Being an artist is a shit job. You either get lucky and find someone willing to pay you up front, or you produce work on your own dime and time, and hope that someone likes it.