Fri, Apr 24, 2009 | 07:05 BST
Capps clarifies “exploitation of power” comments
Epic president Mike Capps has added some colour to remarks he made earlier in April about working hours at an IGDA-sponsored meeting.
Capps apparently said that working a 40-hour week was “absurd” and that 60-hour weeks at Epic were part of the “corporate culture”.
Following the meeting, designer Greg Costikyan blasted the boss on his blog, claiming he was guilty of “exploitative practices”.
In response, Capps told Joystiq:
Honestly, I’m not sure which of the various things that got everybody so upset. I think the main one was that if someone walks into the door and says, “I refuse to ever work past 5pm, I’ll never work more that 40 hours a week and you can’t make me”, they’re probably not a fit for us. Just the same way they wouldn’t be a fit, I assume for you, if they said, “Well, I’ll do E3 but I’m out at 5 and I’m not writing any articles till the next morning.” Or a lawyer or a doctor saying, “I don’t deliver babies after 5 and I never go out after 40 hours a week.” I mean, our average number of work hours is what, 49, 50 in the US? So to have someone walk in and say they refuse to ever crunch for an E3 demo, it’s kind of silly. It just shows that they’re probably not passionate about what they do. That’s very different from saying that we force people to work hard all the time.
There’s a full interview here.
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Posted in: Development
Tags: epic, mike capps
4 comments
#1
G1GAHURTZ
24/04/09, 9:20 am
If senior staff, especially production, actually did their job properly and scheduled the game properly, identifying and recruiting the correct amount of staff and resources, nobody would need to do overtime.
Seems like because some producers job amounts to pure guess work in terms of planning and deadlines, that other people are expected to suffer for it!
Get real Capps.
#2
Psychotext
24/04/09, 9:26 am
There’s truth to what Ghz says (for once
). With modern software project management techniques this should never be an issue.
Sure, there might be a couple of days where you have to stay late to finish things off / get ready for presentations etc… but it should never become required to hit deadlines.
#3
jeremycafe
24/04/09, 1:30 pm
I can’t say I agree with this. If games didn’t have these crazy hours they would take probably twice as long as they currently do to come out. Adding more bodies to the mix doesn’t necessarily help speed things up. The dev teams are already huge in numbers. Deadlines are formed to meet milestones, and in turn, get paid. Without meeting those milestones, game over. Perhaps its the publishers who have gotten used to the quick turn around and expect the same out of these bigger profile games.
#4
G1GAHURTZ
24/04/09, 2:16 pm
Any project that is planned properly from the start is almost always going to take you as long as you expect it to take.
It’s as simple as that.
If you don’t plan properly, then you will end up with more work than you have the ability to do in the time that you have left.
So if you know that your beta deadline (content complete) is in 6 months and you are behind schedule, then you either get the resources to do the job, or you cut things from the game.
If you don’t do one of these two, then the only reason that people are crunching is either because they’re simpley not doing the work or someone totally messed up the schedule.
There are companies who never ask their staff to do overtime, and that’s because they get things right from the start.