Rockstar San Diego

[Generalvivi]

Daves doing fine. perhaps overworked like the rest of us but hes fine. Sometimes it sucks to get overworked but if you are passionate about your project sometimes it balances out. Other times it.... well... doesn't heh. That's why you find people like to leave after a project has been finished. They go to find another company that will hopefully be better and then sadly it turns out the same ...

[Dionysos]

You make a valid point, however I feel there's a whole aspect of this you are missing. Many of these men probably have wives, children, and other family that they have to stay and work FOR. Relocating just because you don't like the working habits just isn't responsible at a certain age of your life where you should be willing to sacrifice and have commitment toward a family. Your ideas work well if you are a single and young person, but come age and growth of a family, relocating is a big task. Especially when your wife is also working, it can cause a lot of dilemma and could lead to separation / divorce.

Of course I never said it would be easy, but I did consider families as well. Relocate the family! Of course getting yourself into a situation like this is bad in itself, but moving the whole family is a possibility. My family did it and I know many others who have done it too. Of course it will be an advantage if the children are relatively small, but it's not impossible and might be the best course of action. Moving could actually be the only viable step if you want to commit to your family. Of course some times it might be outright impossible because the situation has already deteriorated that much, but... well there are always individual issues.

And no, the point isn't that there's NO jobs, it's that it really isn't a secure field to just drop and get another job instantaneously. Many of these people were probably only planning to work at rockstar in those conditions until they found a job that was achievable and better in terms of conditions.

As for founding your own studio, it has worked in the past but it may not work for much longer in the way this industry is shaping. Part of my major distaste in this industry is that they are working on a very hollywood format, in which millions of dollars are poured into investments such as advertisements, so much so that independent companies have absolutely no way to compete. I mean, how many of you bought Noby Noby Boy? Or How many of you even downloaded games such as Run Man or buy Bit.Trip on the wii? Without the proper loans and investments, it could be near impossible to "start your own PROFITABLE development studio". (Profitable is key there) And yet again, all of you are drooling over Mass Effect 2 and probably everyone on this forum owns Modern Warfare 2. That isn't a bad thing, not at all, it's important to have a competitive field. However, to say that forming your own company is a SECURE job option is naive at the least.

Of course you can't found a triple A studio from the get-go, and probably not alone. But you might find like-minded souls and be able to start one together. Maybe not even one that produces games in the beginning, but software that people need. There has been an explosion (70% if I remember correctly) in the open-source sector in parts of europe for instance. Founding a company that does exactly what you did in your old job might be impossible, but for me personally almost anything would be preferable than letting myself get exploited like that.

And I don't see what importance you are stressing on leaving America. As I was saying earlier, Japan has some AWFUL treatment of video game developers, and America right now is by far ahead of many other countries in terms of the rights of video game developers under the publishers / development studio headmen. That's just my opinion from observation / articles on kotaku. Also, the economy is stressed in every part of the world, it isn't just America, if that was what you were implying. America has it the worst right now, but only because of how economic our government and society is here.

The economy is less stressed in other countries though, for instance scandinavia or other parts of europe. In those countries you also tend to have a lot more rights as a worker in general, and I don't see why you working as a game developer should be any different. America has lately been far behind many countries in regards to employee rights and liberties in general. The american dream is something that's alot easier to achieve in countries other than the US nowadays.

/sarcasm: but maybe I'm just jaded by the healthy dose of socialism and consumer/employee rights I have been enjoying most of my life