Wed 21 Feb 2007
Kudos to Chris Pfeiffer and Max Garber for breaking free from the burn and churn game dev approach of many game studios. Kotaku has a great run down of their story, fleeing to China to set up a new studio.
What’s most distrurbing, beyond the general “game industry quality of life still sucks” aspect, is that they are leaving Insomniac Games (Spyro, Jax, Ratchet, Resitance, etc).
So?
For the past several years, Insomniac has won awards for being one of the best places to work in America! Not sure what the Society for Human Resource Management is measuring/evaluating, exactly, but you’d think that 6-7 day work-weeks of “working around the clock” would factor negatively…
Max and Chris would do well to learn from Relentless’ approach, for example.
February 21st, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Wow, I was just about to apply for a job there, no kidding.
February 23rd, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Cool that they left that kind of environment but … China? Other than the girlfriend being from there, they couldn’t form a place in the US?
Having spent time in Shanghai while checking out outsourcing opportunities (don’t hit me…I decided against it despite my company’s wishes) and have to agree that China, in places, is a really nice place and the people were polite and friendly.
But I don’t see that relative costs of working in China will stay that way. Not if the economy keeps booming and the country becomes a superpower. You really are taking eggs from one basket and dropping them in the other, in the long term.